TRANSYLVANIA IN THE MEDIAEVAL HUNGARIAN KINGDOM
1. The Hungarian Conquest
Today, any historian or archaeologist'writing on the Hungarians' conquest of the Carpathian Basin, especially that of Transylvania and the lands lying east of the Tisza River, has to make a decision on whether or not to use the most extensive and detailed "source", the Gesta Hungarorum (The Deeds of the Hungarians), written by an author calling himself M agister P. (P. dictus magister), or to use the name by which he is better known, Anonymus. If he does, the historian will find himself entangled in the contradiction which has been troubling historiography — both in Hungary and abroad — for over 200 years. The Gesta was originally written in the early thirteenth cen
tury. The sole surviving copy, a fourteenth-century codex, was discovered in the mid-eighteenth century, and was taken as gospel practically from the m om ent of its first publication in 1746. Today, however, in the light of other extant written sources as well as of archaeological finds and observations, there is not doubt that the historical and geographical "facts" recorded in the Gesta m ust be treated with a great many reservations. The first step to a more critical approach was taken at the end of the nineteenth century, when the new scientific m ethod of textual criticism w as applied to historical sources. Since then it has been repeatedly pointed out that the content of the Gesta reflects the geographic and ethnographic character of Hungary of around 1200, as well as the political organization and aspirations of that time. For this period, the Gesta is an excellent source — but it is this early thirteenth-century world that it projected three hundred years back into the ancient past. The genre of the Gesta is the epic tale, a kind of narrative his
tory which flourished after 1200. As such, the Gesta may, perhaps, serve as
an authentic source for historians of literature, but not for historians.
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Historical textual criticism of the Gesta, however, has not been consist
ent. It has often been the case that, for the sake of supporting a new theory, persons and events mentioned in the Gesta are singled out and declared to reflect authentic clan traditions of the tribes conquering the country. For this reason, in present-day Hungarian historiography there are two, largely irreconcilable, Anonymus interpretations. According to one view, it is pos
sible that in respect of folk names, of personal names and of place-names having to do with occupations, the author of the Gesta conveys something of the tribe traditions dating from the age of the Hungarian Conquest. H is
torians holding the opposite view, while they subscribe to what Anonymus says on the origin of place-names is applicable from the tenth century on
wards, doubt very much that what he wrote reflected authentic late ninth- and early tenth-century historical and clan traditions. On m atter of clan traditions, they consider what is said in the Gesta as applicable at best to conditions from the early eleventh century on.
Anonymus deliberately emphasizes that the property rights of the "con quering" nobility (it is here that the expression "de genere fam ilies" first ap
pears) are just as secure and permanent as those of the House of Arpdd.
According to Anonymus, these noble warriors fought relentlessly for ten years (!) shedding their blood for every square foot of land and all their privileges were granted by Arpad himself.
The truth is, however, that apart from Arp&d and some other com m and
ers who lived and were active in diverse periods of the tenth century, the author of the Gesta has not the foggiest notion of the true events or charac
ters of the time of the Conquest, nor of the contemporary sources, save for some misinterpreted statements by the early tenth-century chronicler Regino.
H e knew none of the names of the actual opponents of the Hungarians (such as Svatopluk I and II, Moimir II, the Frankish emperor A m ulf of Carinthia, the count of Pannonia Braslav, the Bulgar khan, Simeon and the Bavarian duke, Liutpold). He is ignorant of the decisive battle at Pozsony, and has no idea of the possible or actual foci of local defence, that is of Cemigrad/
Csongrdd, Mosaburg, Belgrade by the Danube as well as Belgrad in Transyl
vania. W ith the exception of the Bulgarians, he is not familiar with any of the peoples who opposed the Hungarians (such as the Moravians, Slovenes, Carinthians, Franks and Bavarians). On the other hand, Anonymus creates two peoples (the Bisseni and the Picenati) out of the one eastern enemy, the Pechenegs. He is left with no alternative but to invent enemies and oppo
nents, so that his no less fictitious Hungarian heroes might have the oppor
tunity to triumph over them. Without much hesitation he devises the names of warriors and chiefs such as the Bulgar Laborcy, the Cuman Turzol, the Bohemian Zobur, the Vlach Gelou and the Bulgar Glad from the nam es of rivers (Laborc), hills (Tarcal and Zobor — the latter comes from the Sla
vonic Sobor = "church mountain", after which the early eleventh-century Benedictine m onastery of Zobor was named), and villages (Glad, Gyalu and Marot). The main antagonists, the Bulgar Salan and the Khazar Men- m ar6t, are his own inventions. The supposed enemies — the Bohemians w ho in fact were still living in the Bohemian Basin at the time of the Con
quest, the Cumans (Kipcaq or Polovci), who only appeared in Europe in the second half of the eleventh century (1055), and the Vlachs, who cam e to the
Carpathian Basin even later, in the thirteenth century — all reflect the cir
cum stances of Hungary during the early thirteenth century. The majority of his conquering heroes are none other than the ancestors of wealthy early thirteenth-century landowners, whose lineage could be traced to the privi
leged class of the new state apparatuses of the eleventh century.
Until this time, Anonymus's view has prevailed in all historical accounts of the Hungarian Conquest of Transylvania, irrespective of the nationality of the author. Coming through the "Verecke Pass", the conquerors came to the Tisza Valley and attempted the invasion of Transylvania along the Sza
mos and Maros rivers. They immediately encountered a dangerous enemy in the person of the "Bulgar-hearted" Khazar Menmarot, lord of the for
tresses of Szatm ar and Bihar. Unable to defeat him, the Hungarians forged an alliance with him. From his fortress by the Szamos River "som e Vlach"
(quidam Blacus) "leader" (dux) called Gelou organized the resistance of the local inhabitants (Blasii and Sclaui). In any case, no one has ever spoken more contemptuously of these two peoples throughout their history than Anonymus, the very same Anonymus who is extolled to the skies by m od
ern Romanian researchers. They usually fail, however, to quote this half of his sentence: "uiliores homines essent tocius mundi” (they are the biggest ras
cals in the whole world).
Neither Slavic nor Romanian scholars, as representatives of the nations living with the Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin today, have applied the methods of textual criticism to the writings of Anonymus. If anything, they have even regressed a step in this century. W hen Anonymus pronounces in the Gesta on late ninth and early tenth-century matters, he is credited with the authenticity of a war reporter or war diarist. His "objectivity" being the royal notary of Hungary is never questioned. Today's Romanian and Saxon historiographers regard the persons and exploits of "G elu" (Gyalu), Men- m ar6t (Mar6t), and Glad (Galad), fictitious characters whose names were derived from village names distorted both by Anonymus and his transcriber, as evidences of the "patriotic" war of the Romanian people and describe their supposed dominions as "feudal Romanian voivodates". There is no hope of bridging the gap between these views and reaching a compromise, as long as state and national interests dominate historiography.
The real history of the Hungarians during the ninth to the eleventh cen
turies has been reliably recorded by Near Eastern and Spanish Arab, Per
sian, Italian-, Germ an-, and Franco-Latin, and Byzantine-G reek sources.
N one of these sources m ention the persons and even ts described by Anonymus, or, if they do, they date them to a period other than the time of the H ungarian Conquest. The history of the Conquest, as presented by Anonymus, is also at variance with the relevant section of the Gesta Hungaro- rum of the age of St. Ladislas. This chronicle, the oldest one known from H ungary, based its account on the lost Old Gesta set down in the 1060s.
Contemporary sources provide only a sketchy picture of the Hungarian Conquest. At present, there is no proof of that the Hungarians (and their allies, the Kabars) once in ally with the Carolingians, once with the Moravians were operating from within the Carpathian Basin during their early cam paigns against M oravia and Pannonia (862, 881, 892, 894). The situation
changed dramatically in the course of the last in the series of campaigns
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against Pannonia (894), which coincided with the death of Svatopluk I in late autumn of the same year, and with an other campaign that the H ungar
ians, allied with Byzantium, had launched against Sim eon I and Bulgaria.
For this reason the Pechenegs, who had allied with the Bulgars, launched an all-out attack on the eastern territories of the Hungarians at the end of 894 and by early 895, and the Bulgars, who had quickly made a truce with Byzantium, routed the Hungarian forces under Levente's command, which w ere plundering Bulgarian territory south of the Low er D anube. The P ech en egs' attack against their hom e territories effectively prevented Levente's forces from retreating to their former homeland. The Hungarian army was therefore obliged to retreat to Transylvania through the Southern Carpathians. There, it met up with the bulk of the Hungarian tribes who were fleeing the Pechenegs, and were pouring through every accessible pass in the Eastern Carpathians. The part of the Hungarian army that had at
tacked Pannonia at the end of 894 likewise found itself prevented from re
turning to the eastern steppes. By the end of 895, thus, all the Hungarian forces of any account had moved into the Carpathian Basin, and had taken over the lands up to the Danube and Garam rivers, and had put an end to Bulgarian dom ination in the southern zone.
There was no further military action in the Carpathian Basin in the fol
lowing few years (896 to the summer of 900). This, in effect, marked the first phase of the Hungarian Conquest and settlement. Until the turn of the cen
tury, the government of Carolingian Pannonia was firmly in the hands of the appointed Slavic count, Braslav. The Hungarians enjoyed am icable re
lations with the Moravians, who lived on the other side of the Garam River.
The second phase of the Conquest began with the military alliance be
tween the emperor Arnulf of Carinthia, and the Hungarians. By early 898, after having passed through Pannonia with Arnulf's permission, a smaller Hungarian army carried out an aggressive reconnaissance m ission against the cities of Friaul and Marche, both hostile to the emperor. In the summer of 899 the H ungarians launched a massive campaign into northern Italy against Arnulf's adversary, King Berengar I. With their splendid victory at the Brenta River, on 24 September, 899 they burst onto the stage of Euro
pean history and in the next thirty-three years did not loose a single major battle. Concurrently with the Hungarians' Italian campaign, civil war erupted in M oravia between the sons of Svatopluk (898-899); and Arnulf intervened on the side of Svatopluk II. Very likely, the Hungarians helped him in this venture as well. Arnulf's unexpected death on 8 December, 899 sparked off the next major turn of events. The Hungarians felt that the treaties they had m ade with both Arnulf and his ally, Svatopluk II, no longer bound them.
Since neither the Carolingians (the government of Louis IV, the Child) nor the Moimirides renewed their alliances with the Hungarians, the latter took advantage of M oravia's near exhaustion from the ongoing civil war. In 900, in a single offensive launched against the country, they seized those of its territories lying between the Garam and Morva rivers. Sim ultaneously, the Hungarian army returning from Italy occupied Pannonia without encoun
tering any significant resistance. By the summer of 900, therefore, the sec
ond phase of the Hungarian Conquest was completed; and by autumn of 1 1 3 the same year, the Bavarians had completed building Ernsburg in
anticipa-tion of H ungarian attacks. According to entries in the Annals o f Fulda, when the Hungarians, after advancing as far as the Enns River on both sides of the Danube, turned back, they returned to Pannonia as to their "ow n " (ad sua) land.
The Hungarian destruction of the military strength of Moimir II's Moravia in 902 was meant to secure the outward defences of the newly-occupied Carpathian Basin. Then came the decisive victory over the attacking Bavar
ian forces at the form er stronghold of Count Braslav (Brezalauspurc = Press- burg) on 4 -5 July, 907. After this, there could be no doubt as to who were the masters of the new country.
The Hungarian raids on the west of between 862 and 955 have also been studied by German, French and Italian historians. Irrespective of how they evaluate their net effects, none of these accounts deny the military organi
zation and success of the campaigns; any more than one can help but ac
knowledge the mastery of the no less bloody and devastating raids of the Viking-Normans. The light cavalry of the Hungarians scored victories over the armies of Italy, Bavaria, Thuringia, Franconia, Saxony and Burgundy.
They took, looted and sent up in flames one Italian and western European town after the other. All the way to Denmark, to Bremen, to the English Channel, to the Atlantic Ocean at Aquitaine, to Andalusia in Spain and to Otranto in Italy the population rued the Hungarian visitations, and by the late 960s, so did Constantinople and Thessaloniki. Against the background of their real-life battles and cam paigns, they are reduced to b atrach - myomachian fightings in the fantasy world of Anonymus against such fic
titious characters as Laborcy, Zobur, Gelou and Glad. The warriors who, in real life, had sacked Beneventum, Narbonne and Bremen — to mention but a few cities — according to Anonymus's Gesta has stand utterly at a loss at the sight of the fancy-bred Bihar castle of "M enum orout" (spelled thus, as if the name would lose its Hungarian origin when the Old Hungarian spell
ing is used: M enm ar6t = Moravian stallion). It is likely that the same army which for fifty years terrorized the nations of Europe across the Alps and the Pyrenees, the Rhine and the Seine, the Danube and the Ebro, would — as the historians following Anonymus would have it — shrink from the M eszes Gate, from crossing the Maros and the V&g, or from the local strong m en of county-sized territories?