Monomachus Crown

The Monomachus Crown (Hungarian: Monomakhosz-korona) is a piece of engraved Byzantine goldwork, decorated with cloisonné enamel, in the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest, Hungary. It consists of seven gold plates depicting Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX Monomachus, his wife Zoe, her sister Theodora, two dancers and two allegorical figures. The piece has puzzling aspects that have long made it the subject of scholarly debate; it was probably made in Constantinople in 1042.

It was unearthed in 1860 by a farmer in what is now called Ivanka pri Nitre in Slovakia, then Nyitraivánka in Hungary. If it is a crown, it is, with the Holy Crown of Hungary of a few decades later (also in Budapest), one of the only two Byzantine crowns to survive.

In 1860 a farmer near Nyitraivánka discovered the treasure while plowing. The objects passed to a member of the local landowning nobility, who sold them in four transactions to the Hungarian National Museum between 1861 and 1870, the last sale posthumously via a dealer named Markovits. Also sold were the two smaller cloisonee medallions found with the crown plaques, with busts of the apostles Peter and Andrew. These medallions lack holes for nails, unlike the gold plates. In the view of Magda von Bárány-Oberschall and most scholars they almost certainly do not belong to the Monomachus Crown.

The general assumption was for long that the crown "seems almost certainly to be a female crown and was presumably a gift to the wife of a Hungarian king", or to the king himself. In 1045 the Hungarian King Andrew I married Anastasia of Kiev, a daughter of Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise, whose brother Vsevolod I had been married to Irene (Maria), a daughter of Constantantine IX since 1046.

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