Gesta Hungarorum

Background

Although the Hungarians, or Magyars, seem to have used their own alphabet before adopting Christianity in the 11th century, most information of their early history was recorded by Muslim, Byzantine and Western European authors. For instance, the Annals of Fulda, Regino of Prüm's Chronicon, and Emperor Constantine VII's De administrando imperio contain contemporaneous or nearly contemporaneous reports of their conquest of the Carpathian Basin at the turn of the 9th and 10th centuries. Among the Hungarians, oral tradition—songs and ballads—preserved the memory of the most important historical events. The Illuminated Chronicle explicitly stated that the "seven captains" who led the Hungarians during the Conquest "composed lays about themselves and sang them among themselves in order to win worldly renown and to publish their names abroad, so that their posterity might be able to boast and brag to neighbours and friends when these songs were heard".

The Gesta Hungarorum, or The Deeds of the Hungarians, is the first extant Hungarian chronicle. Its principal subject is the conquest of the Carpathian Basin, but it also narrates the background and the immediate aftermath of the conquest. Many historians—including Carlile Aylmer Macartney and András Róna-Tas—agree that Simon of Kéza's chronicle, the Illuminated Chronicle and other works composed in the 13th–15th centuries preserved texts which had been written before the completion of the Gesta. They say that the first "Hungarian Chronicle" was completed in the second half of the 11th century or in the early 12th century. The existence of this ancient chronicle is proven by later sources. One Ricardus's report of a journey of a group of Dominican friars in the early 1230s refers to a chronicle, The Deeds of the Christian Hungarians, which contained information of an eastern Magna Hungaria. The Illuminated Chronicle from 1358 refers to "the ancient books about the deeds of the Hungarians" in connection with the pagan uprisings of the 11th century. The earliest "Hungarian Chronicle" was expanded and rewritten several times in the 12th–14th centuries, but its content can only be reconstructed based on 14th-century works.

Manuscript

The work exists in a sole manuscript. The codex is 17 by 24 centimetres (0.56 ft × 0.79 ft) in size and contains 24 folios, including two blank pages. The first page of the codex originally contained the beginning of the Gesta. It was blanked because the scribe had made mistakes when writing the text. The work was written in a Gothic minuscule. The style of the letters and decorations, including the elaborate initial on its first page, shows that the manuscript was completed in the middle or in the second part of the 13th century. Scribal errors suggest that the extant manuscript is a copy of the original work. For instance, the scribe wrote Cleopatram instead of Neopatram in the text narrating a Hungarian raid in the Byzantine Empire although the context clearly shows that the author of the Gesta referred to Neopatras (now Ypati in Greece).

The history of the manuscript up until the early 17th century is unknown. It became part of the collection of the Imperial Library in Vienna between 1601 and 1636. In this period, the court librarian Sebastian Tengnagel registered it under the title Historia Hungarica de VII primis ducibus Hungariae auctore Belae regis notario ("Hungarian History of the First Seven Princes of Hungary Written by King Béla's Notary"). Tengnagel also added numbers to both the folios and the chapters. The codex was bound with a leather book cover, impressed with a double-headed eagle, in the late 18th century. The manuscript, which was transferred to Hungary in 1933 or 1934, is held in the Széchényi National Library in Budapest.

The author

The author of the Gesta Hungarorum has been known as Anonymus ever since the publication of the first Hungarian translation of his work in 1790. The author described himself as "P who is called magister, and sometime notary of the most glorious Béla, king of Hungary of fond memory" in the opening sentence of the Gesta. The identification of this King Béla is subject to scholarly debate, because four Hungarian monarchs bore this name. Most historians identify the king with Béla III of Hungary who died in 1196.

Anonymus dedicated his work to "the most venerable man N" who had been his schoolmate in an unspecified school. Anonymus mentioned that they both had found pleasure in reading the Trojan History, a work attributed to Dares Phrygius, which enjoyed popularity in the Middle Ages. He also referred to a work of the Trojan War that he himself had "brought most lovingly together into one volume" upon his masters' instructions. Anonymus stated that he had decided to write of "the genealogy of the kings of Hungary and of their noblemen" because he had no knowledge of any decent account of the Hungarian Conquest. According to scholars who identify Anonymus as King Béla III's notary, he wrote his Gesta around 1200 or in the first decades of the 13th century.

The study of place names mentioned in the Gesta suggests that Anonymus had a detailed knowledge both of the wider region of Óbuda and Csepel Island (in and to the south of present-day Budapest) and of the lands along the upper courses of the river Tisza. For instance, he mentioned a dozen places—settlements, ferries and streams—in the former region, including "a small river that flows through a stone culvert" to Óbuda. On the other hand, he did not write of the southern and eastern parts of Transylvania.

Structure

The Gesta contains a prologue and 57 chapters. In the prologue, Anonymus introduced himself and declared that he decided to write his work in order to put in writing the early history of the Hungarians and their conquest of the Carpathian Basin. In addition, he stated that he also wanted to write of the genealogy of the royal Árpád dynasty and of the noble families of the Kingdom of Hungary.

The first seven chapters describe the Hungarians' legendary homeland—mentioned as Scythia or Dentumoger—and their departure from there. According to Macartney, the first chapter was based on the late 11th-century "Hungarian Chronicle", but it also contains interpolations from the Exordia Scythica and Regino of Prüm's chronicle. The second chapter explains that the Hungarians were named after "Hunguar" (present-day Uzhhorod in Ukraine). The third chapter preserved the totemistic pre-Christian tradition of the origin of the Árpád dynasty, narrating Emese's dream of the falcon impregnating her before the birth of her son, Álmos. The next section describes Álmos, mentioning that he was "more powerful and wiser than all the princes of Scythia", which may have derived from oral tradition or from the common wording of contemporaneous legal documents. The fifth chapter writes of the election of Álmos as "the leader and master" of the Hungarians, mentioning a blood-mingling ceremony. In this section, Anonymus states that the Hungarians "chose to seek for themselves the land of Pannonia that they had heard from rumor had been the land of King Attila" whom Anonymus describes as Álmos's forefather. The next chapter narrates the oath that the leaders of the Hungarians took after Álmos's election, including the confirmation of the hereditary right of Álmos's descendants to rule and the right of his electors and his electors' offspring to hold the highest offices in the realm. In the seventh chapter, Anonymus writes of the Hungarians' departure from Scythia and their route across the river "Etil" and "Russia which is called Suzdal" to Kiev.

The next four sections of the Gesta describe the fights of the Hungarians with the Rus' people and the "Cumans". Anonymus's report of the Hungarians' passing by Kiev was based on the ancient "Hungarian Chronicle", according to Macartney. References to the Hungarians' march by Kiev towards the Carpathian Basin can also be found in the Russian Primary Chronicle, and in Simon of Kéza's and Henry of Mügeln's chronicles. In an attempt to make his work more entertaining, Anonymus supplemented this information with vivid battle-scenes borrowed from the Trojan History and the romances about Alexander the Great, according to Macartney. Anonymus also mentions an alliance between the Rus' people and the "Cumans" against the Hungarians. Macartney, Györffy, Spinei and many other historians agree that he misinterpreted the Hungarian word kun, which originally designated all nomadic Turkic peoples, and wrongly identified the Kuns mentioned in one of his sources with the Cumans of his age. The latter had at least two times supported the Rus' princes against the Hungarian monarchs in the 12th century, which explains Anonymus's mistake. The ninth chapter of the Gesta describes the submission of the Rus' and "Cuman" princes to Álmos. Anonymus also writes how seven Cuman chieftains joined the Hungarians, which may have preserved the memory of the integration of the Kabars in the Hungarian tribal alliance based on oral tradition of the noble families of Kabar origin, according to Györffy.

Reception and editions

The existence of a sole manuscript of the Gesta Hungarorum shows that the chronicle "was not very popular during either its author's lifetime or the subsequent centuries", according to historian Florin Curta. Later chronicles did not use the Gesta, suggesting that Anonymus's contemporaries knew that he had invented most details of his account of the Hungarian Conquest, according to Gyula Kristó. For instance, Friar Julian and his Dominican brethren studied The Deeds of the Christian Hungarians instead of Anonymus's work before departing for the ancient homeland of the Magyars in the early 1230s.

The Gesta was first published as the first volume of the series Scriptures rerum Hungaricarum in 1746 by Johann Georg von Schwandtner. Matthias Bél wrote a preface to this first edition. Professors of the Universities of Halle and Göttingen soon raised their doubts about the reliability of the Gesta, emphasizing, for instance, the anachronistic description of the Rus' principalities. The Slovak scholar Juraj Sklenár also dismissed Anonymus's work in the 1780s, pointing out that Anonymus failed to mention Great Moravia.‹See TfD›.

On the other hand, when demanding the emancipation of the Romanians of Transylvania in the late 18th century, the authors of the Supplex Libellus Valachorum referred to Anonymus's work. Anonymus's three heroes—Gelou, Glad and Menumorut—play a preeminent role in Romanian historiography. Romanian historians have always presented them as Romanian rulers whose presence in the Gesta proves the existence of Romanian polities in the territory of present-day Romania at the time of the Hungarian Conquest. The Romanian government even published a full-page advertisement about the reliability of Anonymus's reference to the Romanians in the New York Times in 1987.

The view of modern historians on the Gesta Hungarorum is mixed: some consider it a reliable source; others consider its information doubtful. Alexandru Madgearu, who wrote a monography of the Gesta Hungarorum, concluded that the "analysis of several fragments of" the Gesta Hungarorum "has demonstrated that this work is generally credible, even if it ignores important events and characters and even if it makes some chronological mistakes". According to Neagu Djuvara, the factual accuracy of Anonymus's work is likely high, because it is the earliest preserved Hungarian chronicle and is based on even older Hungarian chronicles. On the other hand, Carlile Aylmer Macartney described Anonymus's work as "the most famous, the most obscure, the most exasperating and most misleading of all the early Hungarian texts" in his book of medieval Hungarian historians. Paul Robert Magocsi also regarded the Gesta as an unreliable work.