King Stephen seconded the zeal of the good bishop so long as he lived, but on his death in 1038 the realm was plunged into anarchy by competing claimants to the crown, and a revolt against Christianity began. Things went from bad to worse, and eventually, when celebrating Mass at a little place on the Danube called Giod, Gerard had prevision that he would on that day receive the crown of martyrdom. His party arrived at Buda and were going to cross the river, when they were set upon by some soldiers under the command of an obstinate upholder of idolatry and enemy of the memory of King St Stephen. They attacked St Gerard with a shower of stones, overturned his conveyance, and dragged him to the ground. Whilst in their hands the saint raised himself on his knees and prayed with St Stephen, "Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. They know not what they do." He had scarcely spoken these words when he was run through the body with a lance; the insurgents then hauled him to the edge of the cliff called the Blocksberg, on which they were, and dashed his body headlong into the Danube below. It was September 24, 1046. The heroic death of St Gerard had a profound effect, he was revered as a martyr, and his relics were enshrined in 1083 at the same time as those of St Stephen and his pupil Bd Emeric. In 1333 the republic of Venice obtained the greater part of his relics from the king of Hungary, and with great solemnity translated them to the church of our Lady of Murano, wherein St Gerard is venerated as the protomartyr of Venice, the place of his birth.
The most reliable source for the history of St Gerard is, it appears, the short biography printed in the Acta Sanctorum, September, vol. vi (pp. 722-724). Contrary to the opinion previously entertained, it is not an epitome of the longer life which is found in Endlicher, Monumenta Arpadiana (pp. 205-234), but dates from the twelfth, or even the end of the eleventh, century. This, at least, is the conclusion of R. F. Kaindl in the Archiv f. Oesterreichische Geschichte, vol. xci (1902), pp. 1-58. The other biographies are later expansions of the first named, and not so trustworthy. St Gerard's story and episcopate have also been discussed by C. Juhász in Studien und Mittheilungen O.S.B., 1929, pp. 139-145, and 1930, pp. 1-35; and see C. A. Macartney, in Archivum Europae centro-orientalis, vol. iv (1938), pp. 456-490, on the Lives of St Gerard, and his Medieval Hungarian Historians (1953)
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