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GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE
In general, the Central European Medieval Texts (CEMT) series—which attempts to present in good editions original Latin narratives of the region together with up-to-date, annotated English translations—may no longer need special justification, now that this fifth volume has reached the “half-way mark” of the planned ten. However, the organization of the present one may.
In this volume we print the text and translation of two narratives, the subjects of which lie some three hundred years (and more) apart. The Gesta Hungarorum of the anonymous notary is a literary composition about the mythical origins of the Hungarians and their conquest of the Carpathian Basin. His narrative ends with the first grand princes of the tenth century. The Epistola in miserabile carmen super destructione regni Hungarie of Master Roger is an epistle which includes an eyewitness account of the Mongol invasion in 1241-2, beginning with an analysis of the political conditions under King Béla IV and ending with the king’s return to the devastated country. However, the two authors are by no means so far from each other as the setting of their narratives might suggest.
Roger may have been born just about the time when the notary wrote his Gesta, and would thus have been merely one generation younger. Moreover, one may argue that the Mongol destruction of great parts of the country gave King Béla a chance for a “new foundation” of the kingdom that had been established at the time when the story of the Gesta ends. Thus, our decision to present these two short narratives together is not as inapposite as it may look at first sight. We hope our readers will not find it inappropriate either.
CEMT was born out of renewed interest in Central (or East Central) Europe on the one hand and the difficulty to access the medieval narratives of the region, especially for those less fluent in Latin than older generations were, on the other. So far, we have been able to present texts from Bohemia, Croatia (Dalmatia), Hungary and Poland, and we hope to continue on this road. Our principles remain the same: we print the best available critical edition of the original version, usually without full philological apparatus but with extensive annotations to the translation for readers less familiar with the history and geography of the region. Financial restraints, well known to our readers everywhere in the academic world, have hindered us from keeping to our original plan of publishing a volume a year, but we still hope to complete at least the first round of major narrative sources within the next five to six years.
We are still open to suggestions for texts to be considered and eager to hear from volunteers who would care to join our team of editors and translators. We hardly need to add that we welcome financial support of any kind from granting agencies so as not to have to rely exclusively on the goodwill and enthusiasm of our colleagues in preparing the editions and translations.
The General Editors are grateful to the editors of The Slavonic and East European Review (UCL, SEES) for allowing us to utilize for this volume the earlier English version of the Gesta, translated by Martyn Rady (published in their journal in 2009). The Central European University Press gave, in spite of its tight budget, the usual careful attention to the publication of this book; we are indebted to its management and production team.
Spring, 2010.
INTRODUCTION
The Gesta Hungarorum of the anonymous notary of King Béla is the oldest extant chronicle of the history of the Hungarians.! In his seminal study of the narrative sources of medieval Hungary, C. A. Macartney described it as “the most famous, the most obscure, the most exasperating and most misleading of all the early Hungarian texts.”? Purporting to be an account of the background, circumstances and immediate aftermath of the Hungarian settlement in the Carpathian Basin in the late ninth century, the chronicle was probably composed in the early years of the thirteenth century and reflects the literary tastes and political concerns of its own age.
MANUSCRIPT AND EDITIONS
The Gesta survives in a sole MS of 24 folios (48 pages of which two are blank), 17 by 24 cm in size, written in a Gothic minuscule that on the basis of its hand and decoration may be dated to the midthirteenth century. The writing and the elaborate initial P of the incipit (see fig. 1, p. XVI), are characteristic of that time. It is clearly not an autograph. There are many scribal errors, especially in the manner of abbreviation and in respect of proper names. So, for ex-
" Tt is, however, more than likely that the early parts of the so-called “Hungarian Chronicle”, known only from later copies, were written earlier, but whether the author of the Gesta knew them cannot be established with any certainty. The scholarship on this issue up to his own times is summarized in C. A. Macartney, Studies in the Earliest Hungarian Historical Sources, 7 vols in 8 parts (Budapest and Oxford, 1938-51); republished in C. A. Macartney, Studies on Early Hungarian and Pontic History, ed. Lorant Czigany and Laszlé Péter (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 65-560.
> C. A. Macartney, The Medieval Hungarian Historians: A Critical and Analytical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), p. 59.
ample, the word civitatem (‘city’), abbreviated as civitém, was rendered in the extant manuscript as civitem, which makes no sense. Most tellingly, in ch. 45, where the author wrote about Neopatras (present-day Ypatri in Greece), which fits the story of a Hungarian raid into Byzantine territory, the copyist misread the capital N and made out of it a better known name: “Cleopatra.”? It is not clear whether the extant text is complete, and not much should be made of the author’s failure to discuss a subject promised earlier in his text.*
The fate of the copy through the centuries is not known. Catalogue evidence suggests that it had reached the Imperial Library (Hofbibliothek) in Vienna some time between 1601 and 1636, when Sebastian Tengnagel, court librarian and later director, registered it as Historia Hungarica de VII primis ducibus Hungariae auctore Belae regis notario, pasted this into the MS, and added numbers both to the chapters and to the folios. The Gesta was later mentioned in the catalogue of the court librarian Mattheus Mauchter in 1652 as De gestis Hungarorum liber, and by Peter Lambeck in 1666. Their successor, Daniel Nessel suggested in 1692 that it should be edited. In 1711, David Czvittinger wrote a detailed report of the Gesta in his encyclopaedic Specimen Hungariae Literatae. Some time before 1780, Adam Kollar, director of the Hofbibliothek, had a manuscript from the collection of Schloss Ambras near Innsbruck bound with it, but they were later (in the first part of the nineteenth century) separated. It was then that the Gesta received its present leather binding, impressed with a gilt two-headed imperial eagle.* The manuscript came to Hunga-ry in 1934 under the terms of the 1932 Treaty of Venice (in which the treasures of the Hapsburg Empire were distributed among the successor states) and is now held in the Széchényi National Library as Clmae 403.
The text was first published in 1746 by Johann Georg von Schwandtner in his Scriptores rerum Hungaricarum, with a preface by the learned polyhistor, Matthias Bél‘; four reprints followed in the subsequent twenty years. Janos Letenyei translated the Gesta into Hungarian in 1790 and gave the author the name “Anonymus,’ which has remained ever since. Between then and the end of the nineteenth century, the MS was re-published more than a dozen times. A scholarly edition, with critical annotation, was first published by Gyula Pauler and Laszlé Fejérpataky in 1900, and a revised edition by Emil (Aemilius) Jakubovich and Dezsé (Desiderius) Pais in the first volume of Imre (Emericus) Szentpétery’s Scriptores Rerum Hungaricarum. A full-tone facsimile edition was published more recently. The Latin text has been translated several times into Hungarian, as well as into Romanian, German, Slovak, and Polish. The present English-language version, based on one published in The Slavonic and East European Review,’ is the first parallel edition, with critical apparatus, of the Latin text and an English translation.
AUTHOR AND DATE
Despite two hundred years of scholarly effort, the identity of the author has not been established. He describes himself in the first line of the text as “P who is called master, and former notary of the late King Béla of good memory,” but virtually every word in this sentence poses problems. The initial P, together with dictus, was read by some (thus by Schwandtner in the editio princeps) asan abbreviation for praedictus, that is “aforementioned,” on the assumption, from the empty page preceding the text, that in the extant copy a “title page” had been erased which originally gave the full name of the author (even though this would be unusual for medieval MSS). This hypothesis was rejected even before it was established with modern technology that the empty page contains merely an erased faulty beginning of the Gesta and no indication of any name of an author. Then, the P was understood as the initial of the author (although no dot follows it, as might be expected were it the abbreviation of a name). Accordingly, scholars hunted for an author called Peter, Paul or such like, but although some were suggested, none could be unequivocally connected to the Gesta.
That the author called himself “dictus” magister has caused needless headache to scholars. The humility formula, implying something like “although unworthy” (and typical for ecclesiastics) was widely used; indeed, there is even a similar wording in a charter from 1226 by Abbot Uros of Pannonhalma.* Speculation about the author not having in fact obtained a degree and other similar constructions are irrelevant.’ Nor is the term zotarius (which the author previously, perhaps in his younger years, had been) problematic. Although there were no notaries (public) in medieval Hungary, the staff of the gradually emerging chancellery, small in number, had ever since the late twelfth century been described as notaries.
A further problem arises with the identity of King Béla, the deceased former sovereign of the author. There were four kings of Hungary called Béla. Béla I, one of the exiled sons of the blinded Vazul, a relative of St Stephen, reigned briefly between 1060 and 1063. Béla II “the Blind,’ blinded as a child together with his father, Prince Almos, by King Coloman, reigned from 1131 to 1141. Béla III, who returned from Byzantium where he had been for a while heir presumptive to Emperor Manuel, was king between 1172 and 1196. Finally, there is Béla IV, Hungary’s ruler during the Mongol invasion and acclaimed “restorer” of the kingdom, who reigned longer than all his namesakes, from 1235 to 1270. The basic difficulty of identifying the author and dating his writing is compounded by the fact that very few charters were issued before the 1220s (and even less survived). Accordingly, the names and properties (estates, castles, etc.) mentioned in the Gesta cannot be cross-checked with the evidence preserved elsewhere in order to establish more exactly the time of the chronicle’s composition."
From the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century the central issue was the “reliability” of the author: that is, how well informed he was of the events he related, and, thus, how much reliance may be put on his pieces of “information.” In respect of his reliability, it was assumed that the earlier he could be shown to have composed his account, the better; for if he wrote in the eleventh century—or at least in the early twelfth—he might be supposed to have “known” more precisely what happened in the ninth. On the other hand, it had to be conceded that many expressions or references in the Gesta pointed to a later composition, maybe even as late as the end of the thirteenth century. The debate over the four Bélas could fill a library and elicited some very acute and valuable philological and historical insights, which it is hardly necessary to rehearse here. For some time now, the scholarly consensus—though not without some scholars holding out for a dif ferent dating—is that Anonymus was formerly employed by Béla III and thus wrote his Gesta some time after 1192.
Even accepting this date as a terminus post quem, the exact date of the Gesta’s composition is still debated. Presently, most historians (disregarding the minority who still doubt the connection to Béla III) suggest a date later than the traditional “ca. 1200.” The concern to justify Hungarian claims to the territory of the kingdom vis-a-vis Byzantium or to explain the involvement of the royal house in the affairs of Halich, relevant in the years immediately following Béla’s death,"’ speaks for an early thirteenth-century date. How much later it could have been written is an open question, depending on the weight given to linguistic and historical (charters &c.) evidence. However, considering the probable age of the author and the fact that it is unlikely that the Mongol invasion of 1241 would not have left traces in the Gesta, the terminus ante quem could be as late as the 1230s.
While the name of the author remains an enigma (and in our times the need to find names for anonymous authors, a matter central to scholarly enquiry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,’ is of less importance), some features of his career can be culled from the text. It has been assumed—partly based on his formulaic reference to “schoolmate N.’—that he studied at a French or (more likely) Italian university or cathedral school, but his rather simple Latin and limited familiarity with the Classics speaks against that. It would have been, for example, obvious to borrow from Vergil when telling the story of the foundation of a new homeland, but he never did.'* His schooling was more probably that of a notary and his style is closer to the rather unsophisticated urban chronicles of his time than to that of university-trained authors. Anonymus’s literary models are taken more from “popular readings” than from the Classics or ecclesiastical authors. The occasional word or term from such authorities must have reached him second hand. He may, however, had travelled abroad, as he was familiar with some areas of Western Europe, and it is unlikely that the books he read (as discussed below) would have been available in Hungary
The author’s knowledge of place names, major roads and castles, especially in the north-eastern part of Hungary, and the frequent echo of formulas of charters in the text confirm his closeness to the itinerant royal court.'* His linguistic abilities are unclear: he seems to have known some Magyar, but whether it was his first language is uncertain, since sometimes he uses Hungarian “case endings” in the Latin, as if unaware of Hungarian grammar. (It has also been suggested that he took these forms from some long-lost, heroic songs and retained them unchanged.) Still, many of his etymologies are correct and betray a knowledge of the vernacular. He felt, for example, that an ending -d implied a Hungarian diminutive (e.g., Borsod, ch. 18, p. 49 and elsewhere).'> It has been demonstrated that he knew little if any Greek but may have had a grasp of some Turkic language (he was possibly the first European writer to call the Black Sea as such, which suggests some acquaintance with Turkic).'* His occasional etymologies based on Slavic words are correct. But these are only hypotheses. Whether our notary obtained higher ecclesiastical preferment after service in the chancellery cannot be ascertained, although it is supposed by most scholars. That he did not identify himself as such may have been due to the stylistic demands of the humility topos.
GESTA REGUM - GESTA NOBILIUM”
More relevant than the exact identity of the author is his purpose in writing, the causa scribendi. Even if we disregard the witty construction of Szabolcs de Vajay, who played with the idea that the Gesta was but a “game” among intellectuals,'* there are many other possible guesses as to the author’s intentions. Anonymus may indeed have intended to give a historically-grounded account of early Hungarian history that was not based upon the songs of minstrels and the yarns of yokels,’? and that comported with the historical fashion of his times. To present a respectable or even illustrious origo gentis—in this case, the descent of the Hungarians from the undefeated Scythians—was a common endeavor in the Middle Ages.”® Similarly, to establish an elegant genealogy for the ruling dynasty—here by associating it with Japhet, son of Noah, and with the Old Testament Gog and Magog, and even more so, with Attila the Hun, the “scourge of God,’—fits well with the legendary stories of other ruling houses. The notary did even more, assigning to the landowning clans and kindreds of his time heroic ancestors from the “conquest age,’ who received their estates from none less than Arpad, chief of the ninth-century Magyars, and “hold it ever since,’ as the author repeatedly confirms. As a member of the chancellery, he may have had access to donation charters, even if there was hardly any central register of such grants in his time (nor was there any later).
Throughout the Hungarian Middle Ages, the proems (zarrationes) of these documents often referred in detail to past heroic deeds”? as the reason for the grant of an estate in perpetuum. The exploits of the heroes and the suitable prizes obtained for them, as told by the notary, reflect this perception of service and reward. Indeed, it was not long after 1200 that the leading families began to refer to a real or legendary ancestor of their kindred when describing themselves as being de genere ec (‘of the kindred of...).” By lauding the descent of the royal house and of the kingdom’s leading families, the Gesta may thus have been welcome both to the court and to the king’s great men, the author’s lords and contemporaries. Moreover, Anonymus did not tire to underline that Arpad consulted his retinue every time before deciding on a campaign or embassy, while in the so-called “blood contract” the legendary chieftains (the “principal persons” in his usage) were guaranteed that they and their offspring would forever hold the possessions they had obtained and would not be left out of the prince’s council.” The oath additionally contains in rudimentary form what became the oft-discussed “right of resistance” of the no-bility, codified in the famous Golden Bull of Andrew II of 1222.¥ All these notions coincided with the concerns of the ever more powerful aristocracy of the early thirteenth century, one of the possible intended “audiences” of the retired notary.
In contrast to most historians of his age, Anonymus, even though most likely a clerk, did not denigrate the pagan ancestors of the Magyars but rather emphasized that God or the Holy Spirit had led them in their battles and exploits.”* Of course, the conviction that victory is granted by God to the just side, and thus that the victors must have had divine support, was general in the Christian Middle Ages,”® but the notary went further than this. He underlined more than once that the pagan Magyars were granted victory and obtained new land with the express support of God. Only once did he admit that the Hungarians of the tenth century were bent on conquest and the ruthless subjection of peoples—but then right away added that they were compelled so to act, otherwise they could not have bequeathed land and power to succeeding generations.”” The Christianization of the people by St Stephen is noted briefly and one who resisted it, condemned,” but in the Gesta none of the usual “discontinuity” can be detected between the distant heathen past and the Christian age. Thus a divine legitimization of all past deeds of the “ancestors” was interwoven with the “national history.” Subsequently, the “mission” of the Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin became a basic tenet of Magyar national identity, with or without a religious or metaphysical content.
METHOD AND SOURCES
Anonymus’s account is above all else a “toponymic romance” that seeks to explain place-names by reference to imagined events or persons, and vice versa. Not having had any reliable information on the early history of the Magyars, nor of the events surrounding their arrival and settlement in the Carpathian Basin, Anonymus had to invent the past on the basis of what he knew of his own time and assemble it in the narrative form popular in his age.
The notary’s basic “method” was to explain the toponymy of the late twelfth century by reference to events and people living in the ninth and tenth centuries and to invent persons whose names he took from toponyms. He also sensed, correctly, that names of places, waters, and mountains or hills tend to preserve the memory of olden times or of their earliest inhabitants and first known owners. In fact, Hungarian place names are often derived from some ancient owner, without any morphological change. (Therefore, the many place names in the Gesta are valuable clues to the old Hungarian language, at least as it was spoken ca. 1200). It was by conflating persons with places that Anonymus arrived, for example, at the names of the warrior Csepel, of the Vlach lord, Mardt, and of the defeated leader of Slavs, Salan. These personal names were all taken directly from contemporary toponymy, respectively the name of the island on the Danube immediately south of modern Budapest; that of two villages, both called Marétlaka (now: Morlaca), near Cluj”; and that of the ford of Szalankemén/Slankamen on the confluence of the Danube and Tisza rivers.
Although Anonymus got the names of the earliest Hungarian rulers right, as well as some of the early tribal chieftains, he described the Hungarians beating Slavic, Vlach and Bulgarian leaders whose names—as mentioned above—are not attested anywhere else. The Magyars allying themselves with the Cumans (who appeared in Europe only in the late eleventh century) and, more incredibly, defeating “Romans” are particularly impressive items of his phantasy. All in all, his description of power-relations north of the Danube in the late ninth century is not supported by any other account. As he had no knowledge of the peoples encountered by the Magyars of the ninth century, he populated the region with those whom he knew from his own time or whose names appeared among the toponyms of his country. For good measure, he also added some, such as the Romans, derived from his own reading of popular histories.
Nevertheless, there are bits of history also known from other sources in Anonymus’s work, and at least a few of his heroes can be confirmed from information given by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, Liudprand of Cremona, the Annals of St Gall, and the continuator of Regino of Priim.*° For much of the early history he borrowed extensively from Regino. As well, he plainly relied in part on diverse (unknown) written accounts, some of which would later feed into the “Hungarian Chronicle” known from a fourteenth-century compilation, but possibly going back to some centuries before.*! (The Hungarian Chronicle also tells of the shaven Cuman heads being sliced like unripe gourds.*”) The extentto which the author relied upon “oral traditions” —which he dismissed twice, but quoted once!—cannot, however, be tested, but it is not unlikely that the major clans had traditions of their own origins as well as minstrels who recited heroic songs about these. There are many stylistic elements in the Gesta, such as “formulaic” repetitions, that are typical of lays of this type. Alas, little can be said about these possible oral traditions, as the first surviving fragment of a vernacular “heroic song” is from the siege of Sabac, anno 1478—clearly far too distant from our notary’s time to tell us anything about what he might have heard.
Based on his toponymic constructions and on some oral or written traditions, Anonymus decided to write a story of the Hungarians wandering westwards and occupying step by step, partly with victorious battles, the Carpathian Basin using the narrative modes he had learned from the stories of the siege of Troy and the exploits of Alexander the Great.
According to the expectations of his age, when chroniclers were no more satisfied by merely reporting what they read or heard but wished to authenticate their narrative, Anonymus right away mentioned Scripture and Dares Phrygius as his authorities. Indeed, he relied on both. His Biblical references, mainly from the Pentateuch but also from other books of the Old Testament, are not surprising in a clerical author. Dares and his Excidium Troie* came to be Anonymus’s model not only by direct borrowings, but in the overall structure of short but informative accounts naming important protagonists and main events.* For the lively battle scenes, Anonymus’s guide was one of the popular romances about Alexander the Great.*°
Legal expressions abound in the Gesta. Some of them have a good pedigree, such as the word embola for ‘a troop’ that comes from Justinian’s Codex (1.2.10 etc.) and appears in twelfth-century commentaries as well. But it is unlikely that Anonymus read any of these. We may rather assume that he found the word in some model charter or formulary. His pun on exercitatior — exercitatione (ch. 55, p. 118-9) is also hardly his invention, since it appears in Isidore of Seville’s Ezymologies (9.3.58), but was no doubt similarly transmitted to him in some handbook or charter. Most of the legal terms are, however, borrowings from chancellery practice, identifiable from the—however few—Hungarian deeds of his age or earlier.
Among the artes dictandi, Anonymus used, beyond doubt, that of Hugh of Bologna, the Rationes dictandi prosaice (ca. 111930),°” already in the first few lines of his work. (Indeed, this is a strong argument against placing him in the eleventh century.) However, he did not follow it in the rest of his writing as his formulations are quite pedestrian. Excepting a few puns and not very imaginative metaphors, his style is plain, though mostly clearand informative. The few rhymed sentences would not qualify as prosologium (verse inserts into prose) and one cannot find any of the more demanding rhetorical devices usual in twelfth- and thirteenth-century writings.
After all this, it hardly needs to be emphasized that the Gesta is in no ways a source of information for the events it pretends to narrate, but rather for the ideas about them current in the Hungary of the notary’s times and for the literary skills of its author.
RECEPTION
There are very few documents from the Middle Ages that carry such heavy political baggage. Soon after its publication in the eighteenth century, German scholars of the Universities of Halle and Gottingen dismissed it as a baseless tale, and called the author a “Fabelmann’” (fairy-tale teller), particularly on account of his faulty description of the Rus’ principalities. In fact, these chapters of the Gesta offered a striking parallel to the description in the Russian Primary Chronicle (first published in 1767) of the Hungarians’ passage by Kiev on their way to their new homeland. But August Ludwig Schlozer and Johann Salomo Semler argued that the principalities mentioned by Anonymus did not exist in the ninth century. They also pointed to Anonymus’s uncritical and inconsistent use of Regino.** Other German readers also noted the absence of any reference to Germans in the kingdom of Hungary, which is, in fact, a strange omission. While the Gesta’s authenticity in the strict sense of being a narrative composed in the Middle Ages, rather than a later forgery, was rarely doubted, it was nevertheless decried as not being a “true record.”
Within the kingdom, it was a Slovak priest, Georgius Szklenar, who in 1784 and 1788 first registered doubts as to the Gesta’s reliability. His study was a seriously critical assessment, based on good philology, but he, too, dismissed the notary as “a liar” on account of his failure to include the location of Great Moravia.” On the other hand, Anonymus’s account was given full credit when it served nationalist interests. The Romanians of the eighteenthcentury Principality of Transylvania (at that time under Viennese rule) turned to him for support. In the Supplex libellus Valachorum, submitted to the Vienna court, the authors claimed the right to be one of the historic “nations” of Transylvania beside the Hungarians, Székely and Saxons. They argued on the basis of Anonymus’s narrative that, even though Prince Gelou/Gyalu of the “Vlachs” was defeated by the Magyars, his subjects swore an oath of allegiance to the chief Tuhutum/Tétény. Hence their descendants should be accepted as a constituent community of the Principality.”
All such challenges were rejected by patriotic Hungarian (and Saxon) authors, some of whom added serious scholarship to the study of the text. The first major monograph in defense of Anonymus, Daniel Cornides’s Vindiciae anonymi Bele Regis notarii, published posthumously in 1802, addressed virtually all the issues of dating and authenticity that were to be discussed in the subsequent two centuries. While he did not come down unequivocally on the date (hesitating between Bela II and and III), he mustered almost all problematic points which have featured in one way or another in the debates down to our day."!
The description which the author gives of the presence and whereabouts of peoples in Central Europe during the ninth century was extensively used to buttress historical claims to territories until well into the twentieth century. Readings of the Gesta were thus used after 1918 to justify the cession of Transylvania to Romania as well as, after the Second World War, of Oroszvar to Czechoslovakia.” In 1987, the Gesta acquired particular notoriety on account of a full-page advertisement in The Times, paid for by the Romanian government, affirming the validity of the chronicler’s account of a Romanian presence in the Carpathian basin more than a thousand years before.** Modern scholarly readings of the Gesta Hungarorum are less beset by political partisanship in the post-Schengen world of the EU. Only dinosaurs care about who was where first.
On the other side, the story as presented by Anonymus quickly came to form the grande narrative of the Magyars in the age of budding national self-consciousness and beyond. The first major step was its transformation into an epic poem of ten cantos by the young Mihaly Vorésmarty (1800-1855), published in 1825 as “The Flight of Zalan: A Heroic Poem.” In the best Homeric tradition—following the example of the seventeenthcentury Hungarian epic by Nicholas Zrinyi/Zrinski on the siege of the castle of Szigetvar*—V6rdsmarty described in romantic fashion heroic musters, roaring battle scenes, and the tragic fates of the vanquished. His names, partly culled from the notary’s text, partly of his own invention, and the entire image of the victorious horsemen defeating the cowardly Slavs became the common inheritance of the Hungarian public, “folklorized” through calendars and schoolbooks until well into the twentieth century.” For the millennial celebration of the “arrival of the Hungarians” in 1896, the novelist Maurus Jokai (1825-1904) designed a 120-metre panorama, which in its depiction of events closely followed Anonymus’s account.’ In 1995, the restored panorama, after suffering damage in the Second World War, was put on public view at Pusztaszer, where, according to Anonymus’s account, the conquering Hungarians had first drawn up their laws. And Arpad with his six “principal persons,’ mounted on Arab steeds and wearing panther-skin capes, just as Anonymus and V6érésmarty imagined them, still overlooks the grave of the Unknown Soldier at Heroes’ Square in Budapest.
EDITORIAL PRINCIPLES
The Latin text follows, as mentioned above, essentially the one established by its editors in the standard collection of Hungarian narrative sources, edited by Szentpétery, but has been freshly collated with the manuscript in facsimile.” Since that edition is slightly outdated and not easily available, we also note as emendations vis-a-vis the manuscript and register in the notes the corrections proposed by more recent research. The titles of the chapters follow the rubrics of the surviving manuscript, and the numbering of the chapters adheres to conventions set since the eighteenth century. As usual in modern editions, the author's usage regarding u/v has been normalized, but occasionally (in proper names) retained for the sake of authenticity.
The translation follows the principles of the CEMT series. It attempts to reproduce as far as possible the sense and style of the Latin original while offering a readable English narrative. In the case of the Gesta we may have been more rigorous than usual in following the Latin, retaining repetitions and circumlocutory formulations even if the sentence structure thus became awkward. A few exceptions to CEMT practice have been made. Besides “modernizing” all proper names, about which more below, we reduced the number of e¢s and cut up the notary’s often interminably long sentences, frequently containing events or comments not belonging in the same statement. The usual Latin form of beginning titles, De (On...), was omitted for easier readability. We tried to rescue as much as possible of the author’s word-plays, but did not succeed in all cases. The two or three rhyming inserts are translated in such a way as to give an impression of their character. Verbatim quotations taken from diverse sources (reproduced in italics) are identified wherever appropriate,” but the author’s frequent recurrence to his readings (such as the story of Troy or the Alexander the Great romances) was not specified in every case. Our translation has profited much from recent German and Hungarian versions,*! both of which have more annotations than the present volume. In respect of the notes and critical apparatus, we have fol-lowed CEMT practice by referring mainly to titles in languages other than Hungarian (or other local vernaculars), assuming that readers familiar with these will be able to find the references in the national bibliographies and handbooks. Considering the extensive scholarship on innumerable details of the Gesta, we had to be economical. The bibliography (pp. 229-41 below) may help to identify additional literature.
The usual problem of translating technical terms in medieval Central European texts into English—due to the different social and political development from that in the British Isles— emerged with the Gesta as well, and even more so as the notary applied terms of his own time to describe events occurring many hundred years before. Among these are such words as dux, nobilis and jobagio. The first is the most problematic. Anonymus seems to have used the term in its very basic meaning, as ‘leader’ He did not mean by “duke” the ruler or commander of a region or group of people subordinate to a sovereign. His duces, be they leaders of the Hungarians or their opponents, were supreme lords of their respective “polities.” Therefore, we decided to follow the traditional Hungarian custom of calling the heads of peoples or major territorial units “princes” (with the exception of the dukes of the Czechs, who bore this title in the earlier Middle Ages). We did not attempt to be precise in a “constitutional” sense, thus our choice is open to challenge. The author’s reference to nobiles and jobagiones can be decoded on the basis of near-contemporary records (such as the Golden Bull of Andrew II of 1222). There, both terms refer to the major lords or aristocrats, even though the two words changed their meaning in the course of the thirteenth century. Nobiles came to mean a wide stratum of freemen with landed property, and jobagio (from the Hungarian ‘jobbdgy’) a seigneurially dependent peasant. The notary used the two terms in their ancient meaning, thereby adding to the debate over the dating of his text. Another term with specific meaning for the medieval Hungarian society is genus, used by Anonymus for the descendants of the legendary heroes of his story. We translate it as ‘kindred? a term introduced in the translation of Erik Fiigedi’s pioneering study of a noble family-network in northern Hungary.” The kindreds—similar to clans, but differing in the way they reckoned their membership and in some other characteristics—seem to have held land in common. Even after the land had been divided up between branches (and later families), all male members of the kindred had inheritance rights in case of default of issue and thus retained a concurrent legal interest.
Many kindreds had a central castle and a sacral centre (‘kindred monastery’) that served as their common funeral site. As argued above, the Gesta seems to have been written to a great extent for the purpose of giving these twelfth- and thirteenth-century kindreds an archaic pedigree. Much less problematic is that the author calls all waters, from creek to river (even lake!) fluvius (exceptionally: rivulus, stagnum), and all elevations, be they only 20-50 meters high, sons; we keep his usage and translate all of these as ‘river’ and ‘mountain’ (unless otherwise specified by the author). Similarly, Anonymus called every settlement of some importance castrum or Hungarian -vdr (castle), regardless whether in fact it was ever a fortified site. We have occasionally commented on this, but otherwise translated his appellation verbatim. Additional problems of translation are discussed in the relevant notes. Names posed here a greater problem than in several other texts in this series. As mentioned above, only very few personal names are known from other sources; most of them were invented by the author based on place names or borrowed from his own time. Both those in charters and the Gesta are inconsistent in their spelling. In the course of the two hundred years of scholarly study of this text, a certain convention (not without doubts and disagreements among experts) has emerged in Hungarian historiography, and we have followed it. Some of the spellings (mostly based on linguistic study) have been revised in the last decades, and we have taken those suggestions into consideration. Readers havingthe parallel Latin text on the left hand page may decide to accept or reject our constructions. (The variants can be easily compared in the Index of Names, pp. 243-50 below). None the less, it has to be admitted that no one is sure about the “original” form of most of the names, if they ever existed outside the imagination of Anonymus.
As to geographical names—as discussed above, a significant element in the whole work—we have chosen to be pragmatic. Without going into the controversies over the one or the other toponym, we accepted the most convincing reconstruction and have sought to identify it with a name appearing on a modern map. Quite a few of these are, admittedly, uncertain, but Hungarian historians and archaeologists have applied so much attention to this text that we had plenty of suggestions to choose from. CEMT policy is to print geographical names in their present-day official— or usual Anglicized—form. This may sound anachronistic, but considering that in our own time the Carpathian Basin is divided between several states each with its official language, only this procedure allows readers to find the location on any good map. (The different versions of the place names are listed in the Gazetteer, pp. 263-8; and a map on the front endpaper, using Anonymus’s spelling, gives some indication of the approximate location of most of them.)
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