Download PDF | István Zimonyi - Muslim Sources on the Magyars in the Second Half of the 9th Century_ The Magyar Chapter of the Jayhānī Tradition-Brill, 2015.
447 Pages
Preface
The Hungarian version of the present work was completed in late 2003 and published under the title Muszlim forrdsok a honfoglalds elétti magyarokrol A Gayhant-hagyomdny magyar fejezete (Muslim sources on the Magyars before the Conquest. The Magyar chapter of the Jayhani tradition).! It was then translated into German and published in Herne in 2006. During the preparation of the English translation, I took into consideration the critical notes of the reviews published in the meantime.”
I also drew inspiration from the publication of Mihaly Kmosko’s studies on the medieval nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppe, in which the relevant texts of the Muslim geographical and historical literature had been collected and translated. I had planned to publish his manuscripts with a commentary reflecting the state of research in the early 1990s, but eventually decided to separate the two projects. Meanwhile, Kmosk0’s studies on the Muslim geographical literature have been published in three volumes.?
Among Kmosk6’s manuscripts, there was a monograph in German on the chapters in Gardizi dealing with the Turkic-speaking peoples with parallel sections from other authors. That manuscript has been completely revised; together with Hansgerd Goéckenjan, I published it twelve years ago, and added the relevant chapters from the parallel authors, as well as a philological and historical commentary (but left out Kmosko’s initial notes, which had meanwhile fallen out of date).4 Kmosk6 won fame in the field of Syriac studies as the first to compile the Syriac sources pertaining to the peoples of the Eurasian steppe. That study was published in Hungarian by Szabolcs Felf6ldi.5
In addition to the study of medieval Muslim and Syriac sources on the history of the steppe lands, a new research project was initiated at the Department of Medieval History of the University of Szeged, which focused on the collection and translation with commentary of the sources pertaining to the medieval nomads. Within this project, Samu Szadeczky-Kardoss published his source book on the Avars,® with another manuscript in waiting concerning the sources for the early history of the Bulgars, up to the migration of Asparuch to the Balkans, ca. 680. Teréz Olajos published the Greek sources on the gth-century Avars and the Hungarian translation of Theophylactus Simocattes, with notes.” Samu Szadeczky-Kardoss’s disciple, Csaba Farkas, wrote a dissertation on the Greek and Latin sources pertaining to the Tiirk Empire.
The late Arpad Berta, the former head of the Department of Altaic Studies at University of Szeged, prepared a critical edition of the runic inscriptions dated to the times of the Tiirk and Uygur Khaganates, accompanied by a Hungarian translation with philological commentary.® This is so far the only “native” source for the social and political life of the early medieval steppe nomads. Finally, Istvan Ferincz translated the Russian Primary Chronicle into Hungarian, to which the historical notes are under preparation.
In the meantime, a number of doctoral dissertations on the history of the medieval nomads have been defended in Szeged. Mihaly Dobrovits wrote the first history of the Tiirk Khaganates, Szabolcs Polgar collected all sources concerning the development of trade in East Europe from the gth to the 1oth centuries, Szilvia Kovacs wrote the history of the Cumans/Kipchaks before the Mongol invasion,? and Katalin Nagy has focused on the weapons of the East European nomads in the Middle Ages.!° In addition, conferences on the medieval nomads have been organized annually since 1997. Hungarian scholars took part in the first three conferences organized in Szeged. The fourth was an international conference whose proceedings were published in Acta Orientalia in 2005.
Three other conferences took place in Jaszberény, the capital of the Yassi, a people speaking an Indo-Iranian language who settled in Hungary in the 13th century; in Miskolc; and in Cairo. Most of the papers presented at these conferences have been or are going to be published."
The Hungarian ethnogenesis is a part of the history of the early medieval steppe lands. The beginnings of the Magyar tribal union have been placed between the 4th and gth centuries. As early as the 1970s, Péter Hajdu, Gyula Kristd, and Andras Rona-Tas had initiated a complex research project on the early history of the Magyars. They have published five volumes on the “protohistory” of the Magyars.!? Gyula Kristé as the editor-in-chief published the Lexicon of Ancient Hungarian History (gth-14th centuries) in 1994.!3 In 1990 Andras Rona-Tas founded a research group for early Hungarian studies at the Department of Altaic Studies at the University of Szeged specializing on Turkic loanwords in Hungarian, as well as in the medieval history of the Eurasian steppe.
Within this framework and later in coordination with the Department of Medieval Studies, I have started special courses on the early history of the Hungarians. As editor-in-chief of the series “Magyar Ostérténeti Konyvtar’” (Hungarian Prehistoric Library), I have supervised the publication of 27 volumes, including the Hungarian version of this book.
In writing the present volume the results of studies in three separate disciplines have been taken into consideration:
1. The characteristics of the cultural milieu in which Muslim authors wrote their accounts are of great significance for the interpretation of their testimony. It is therefore important to understand the basic ideas of Islamic civilization. If trustworthy data are expected, then the interpretatio Islamica must be taken into consideration. For example, when Arabic authors described a people as “nomadic”, they had in mind Bedouin nomadism, which was familiar to them, but very different from nomadism in the Eurasian steppe.
2. The civilization of the Eurasian steppe zone played an important role in the history of the medieval world. As the Magyars lived in its western part during the 5th-gth centuries, the study of the economic, social and cultural life of the medieval nomads of Eurasian steppe is of the utmost importance for understanding early Hungarian history.
3. Early Hungarian history has been intensely studied, and the results, which have been published primarily in Hungarian, are of crucial importance when assessing the trustworthiness of the testimony of the written sources written in Arabic.
This work has been partly sponsored by the Hungarian Research Fund (OTKA) and the National Research and Development Programme (NKFP 5/021).
I owe a great deal of gratitude to my students, Szabolcs Polgar, Laszlé Balogh, Szilvia Kovacs and Balazs Sinkovits, who read the chapters several times and offered corrections and useful advices on the Hungarian version of this volume. I thank Laszlé Balogh for the completion of the maps, Richard Szanté for the preparation of the maps for this volume, and Szilvia Kovacs for technical assistance.
Professor Florin Curta kindly offered to include my book in the series “East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450”. His advice and encouragement facilitated the completion of the work. I thank to him and Mikael Thompson to read my text and polishing my English version.
I express my thanks to the editors, particularly to Julian Deahl, the senior acquisition editor at Brill, for his cooperation and understanding.
University of Szeged Szeged, Hungary June, 2013
Introduction
The study of al-Jayhani’s Hungarian chapter, which contains the most important body of information from Muslim sources on early Hungarian history, has long been an urgent task of Hungarian historians from a philological and historical point of view. Byzantine sources, including the outstanding work of Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, have been studied and published by Gyula Moravcsik.! The western sources pertaining to the history of the early Hungarians have been edited and commented in detail, whereas the reconstruction of the Jayhani tradition and its historical evaluation remains incomplete, despite significant progress in this field in the last few years.
The interest in the study of the Jayhani tradition can be traced back to the igth century. Reinaud first drew attention to the passage concerning the Magyars in the work of Abw’l-Fida’.? Later, Hvol’son published the chapters on Eastern Europe to be found in the work of Ibn Rusta, together with a Russian translation and a commentary. Kunik and Rozen published the relevant accounts of al-Bakri in 1878. De Goeje’s series, “On Muslim geographical literature” (Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum) brought about a new phase, eight volumes being published between 1870 and 1894. In Hungary, the founder of Hungarian Turcology, Armin Vambéry, was the first to use the Jayhani tradition.?
The “Millennium,” ie., the anniversary in 1896 of 1,000 years since the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin gave much impetus to the publication of sources on early Hungarian history. A turning point in the history of research on this topic is the publication in 1900 of “The sources of the Hungarian Conquest” (A magyar honfoglalds kutfot). Within this outstanding project, Géza Kuun published the “Oriental sources” (Keleti kuitfok), including four groups of sources concerning the early medieval history of Eastern Europe, both in the original language and in Hungarian translation.*
The leading Hungarian Orientalist of the time, Ignac Goldziher, indirectly participated in the project, as Kuun consulted him, and Goldziher checked the translations. The Jayhani tradition was represented in this edition by Ibn Rusta, Gardizi and alBakri. Géza Kuun made use of De Goeje’s edition of Ibn Rusta, which is still authoritative.> The work of al-Bakri was published on the basis of fragments from Kunik and Rozen’s edition.® Gardizi was available to Kuun from a later copy represented by the Oxford manuscript.”
Balint H6man, Hungary’s leading medievalist in the interwar period, played an important role in promoting the study of Oriental sources, including alJayhani. He reviewed the state of research in a short study® and asked Mihaly Kmosk6 to review and supplement Kuun’s edition and commentary. Kmosk6 first discovered that the Oxford manuscript of Gardizi, which Kuun had used, was in fact a copy of the Cambridge manuscript. He obtained facsimiles of both manuscripts and established a critical text of the chapter on the Turks, translated it into German, and provided a thorough historical commentary.
He also took into consideration Barthold’s edition,? which was based on the Oxford manuscript, as well as Marquart’s comments.!° Furthermore, Kmoské collected the parallels to Gardizi’s chapter on the Turks from the other Muslim authors. He included the relevant parts of Ibn Rusta and al-Bakni’s works, as well as the then partially published chapters from the Hudiud al-‘alam and Mujmal altawarikh" He wrote a long and detailed preface about al-Jayhani and his work, but died in 1931 before seeing its publication.
The manuscript, entitled Gardizi’s Abhandlung tiber die Sttimme der Tiirken, was kept in the Manuscript Division of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Karoly Czeglédy described its contents in detail.’ During my Humboldt scholarship in Giessen, I decided to publish this valuable study together with Hansgerd Géckenjan. We revised Kmosko’s translations and translated the substantial parallel texts, which had been published after Kmosko’s death. We completely revised and added new historical comments to the texts. As only negligible parts of the original manuscripts remained intact, we dedicated the book to Kmosk6.8
His German manuscript was only a small fragment of Kmoské’s scholarly output. He recognized relatively early that even the collection of sources on the Eastern European steppe did not offer a comprehensive picture of the Hungarians. He therefore intended to expand his research to identify the general characteristics of nomadic peoples throughout the entire Eurasian steppe, in order to provide a firm basis for the study of the early Hungarians. Thus, he worked simultaneously on three major projects: the Syriac sources, Muslim geographical works, and Muslim historical literature.
Since he was an expert in Syriac studies, Kmoské first collected the Syriac sources in a manuscript entitled “Syriac Sources on the Peoples of Gog and Magog” (Szir forrdsok Gog és Magog népeirél), with four chapters: 1. the Syriac legend of Alexander; 2. The relevant fragment of the Syriac church history of Zacharias Rhetor;!* 3. extracts from the Syriac chronicles; 4. excerpts from Syrian hagiographic works. The manuscript was published in 2004.!6 The Muslim geographical and historical sources were collected in a five-volume manuscript later entitled “Muslim Writers on the Peoples of the Steppe” (Mohammedan irk a steppe népeirél). The first three volumes, covering the geographical sources, were published in 1997, 2000, and 2007, respectively.”
Mihaly Kmoské published two papers in German and another two in Hungarian on the medieval history of the Eurasian steppe.!® Following his death, his extraordinary scholarly output remained largely unknown, as only brief descriptions were known.!° After the publication of the most important part of his work, it appears that the study of Muslim sources concerning early Hungarian history was finally placed on the same firm footing on which it stood in the 1920s with such leading scholars as Joseph Marquart and Vasiliy Barthold.
After Kmosk6’s death, Istvan Janicsek published a few articles on the Jayhant tradition.2° During the interwar period, it was Vladimir Minorsky who brought the most important contribution to the study of the Muslim geographical literature. He opened new vistas with the publication of the Persian geographical compendium, Hudid al-‘Glam, and the geographic chapter of al-Marwazi’s work, both accompanied by an English translation and philological and historical comments.”!
In Hungary, the expert on the Muslim sources since the 1940s was Karoly Czeglédy. He thoroughly studied Kmosko’s manuscripts, which he reviewed in his article, but could not take responsibility for their publication for political reasons. He published several papers on the Syriac and Muslim sources pertaining to the history of the nomadic peoples. His articles in Hungarian were later collected in a separate book.?? Czeglédy also published a new Hungarian translation of the main Muslim accounts in a source-book on the early history of the Hungarians edited by Gyérgy Gyorffy.?3
There is no historical commentary in that book, which only gives the reader basic direction, while the accounts of various authors subscribing to the Jayhani tradition have been put together and translated as a continuous text, thereby obscuring the differences between authors and opening the way to misinterpretations. Czeglédy further planned a new edition of the Muslim sources, after which the Greek, Latin and Slavic sources were to be taken into account as well.24 Among the Muslim sources Czeglédy had in mind, “The Journey of Abu Hamid al-Gharnati in Eastern and Central Europe, 1131-1153” (Abu-Hamid al-Garnati utazdsa Keletés Kézép Eurépdban 31-53) was published, with a Hungarian translation and the historical comments of the Russian edition added in Hungarian as explanations.”5 The publication of later copies of the Jayhani tradition, i.e. the two manuscripts of Shukrallah from Sofia by Gyérgy Hazai, was an important contribution to the reconstruction of the text.?6
The relevant chapters of the five-volume work “Introduction to the study of the sources for Hungarian prehistory” (Bevezetés a magyar éstérténet kutatasdnak forrdsaiba) may be regarded as marking significant progress in the study of early Hungarian history. Tamas Ivanyi wrote an excellent summary of the Muslim geographical and historical literature based on Kmoské, Czeglédy, and then-recent textbooks published abroad.?’ Katalin Oldal published a monograph on the Persian sources pertaining to the history of the Eurasian steppe from the gth to the 15th centuries, including the Persian authors subscribing to the Jayhani tradition.?® The “Lexicon of ancient Hungarian history (gth-15th centuries)” was completed under the direction of Gyula Krist6, Ferenc Makk and Pal Engel in 1994, and the entries on the Muslim themes were written by the author of this book.?9
On the occasion of the uooth anniversary of the Hungarian Conquest, Gyorgy GyGrffy, as the head of a special committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, organized a series of conferences, the proceedings of which were published in a four-volume work entitled “On the Conquest from different aspects” (A honfoglaldsrél sok szemmel). In the section concerning the written sources, the Jayhani tradition was treated by Istvan Nyitrai, who discussed the details of the transmission by Persian authors, while I wrote a paper on the the Arabic texts of the tradition.?° Istvan Elter examined the names referring to Magyars in Arabic sources and Istvan Nyitrai explored the description of the Magyars in the works of Persian authors.3! Meanwhile, Gyula Kristé published a new sourcebook, “The written sources of the conquest period” (A honfoglalds kordnak trott forrdsai), which included a chapter on the Muslim sources of which I was the editor.32
In the meantime, more comprehensive studies appeared on Muslim geographical literature. The German edition of the Enzyklopddie des Islam was published between 1913 and 1934, with a second, revised English version between 1960 and 2004. The entry on Hungary consists of two parts: 1. Hungarians and Hungary before the Ottoman period and Muslims in Hungary, 9th—14th centuries; 2. the Ottoman period in Hungary. The first part was written by the excellent Polish scholar, Tadeusz Lewicki.?3
The Muslim geographical literature was a favourite field of research for the Russian Arabist Krachkovskiy, who published a monograph on the Muslim geographers in chronological order.3+ Brockelmann treated the geographical literature in several chapters of his handbook, Geschichte der arabischen Literatur.3> André Miquel wrote about the works of classical Arabic geographical literature in four volumes.?® The new synthesis on the Islamic geography is in the Geschichte des arabischen Schriftums of Fuat Sezgin.3”
The last decades have seen significant progress in the collection of information from the Muslim literature about Eastern Europe. Zahoder surveyed the Muslim geographical literature on medieval Eastern Europe in the 1960s.3° Kalinina and Kolovanova published several works in this field.3? Lewicki has initiated the project of editing the Muslim sources about the early Slavic speaking peoples, and five volumes have so far been published.*° Hannick surveyed the Muslim literature on the Slavs.*! The medieval trade routes through Eastern Europe became a new focus of studies, Muslim sources drawing particular attention in this respect.”
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