Beside legal texts, the manuscript contains three annals which date back to the time of the Árpádian era, a genealogy of the Hungarian monarchs from Béla III to Ladislaus of Naples, a rhythmic list of kings and a record of events regarding the Ottoman–Habsburg wars in Hungary.
[1] After his retirement, this scholar settled down in Somogyvár Abbey, an important place of authentication in the Kingdom of Hungary, where he copied and compiled his work with his own records from the royal court and his subsequent local legal practice.
[2] It is possible that this scholar is identical with jurist John Izsó de Kékcse, who acted as secular notary and lawyer of the abbey in 1488.
[5] Historian Dániel Bácsatyai considered the Transylvanian Saxon pastor Michael Siegler possibly used the text when wrote his historical work Chronologia rerum Hungaricum in the 1560–1570s, since both authors know John Sigismund Zápolya's date of birth as an hour exactly, beside other similarities regarding the 16th century notes.
[4] Contrary to this, based on two attached copies of charters (issued in 1579 and c. 1592), Bónis argued that Hungarian prelate István Szuhay brought the codex to the Principality of Transylvania, when he was sent as envoy to the court of Stephen Bocskai in the 1590s.
[5] Dániel Bácsatyai published and translated the texts concerning history – annals, genealogy, rhythmic list of kings and the 16th-century records – of the formulary book into Hungarian in 2019.
[9] Based on the dates, György Bónis considered the first original author compiled the vast majority of his work in the years between 1480 and 1486, just before the passing of the so-called Decretum maius, when Matthias Corvinus ordered to replace many previous contradictory decrees with a systematic law-code.
[9] Bónis, after examining the content and form elements, defined the chapters of the formulary book as follows:[10] The author collected the documents to educate students and novice professionals, he also provided the texts with a number of useful remarks, similarly to the 14th-century Ars Notarialis.
For the primary purpose of the case law illustration, the author frequently modified in the texts of the original diploma, the identity of the persons concerned (often deleted or changed).
[14] Short notes of the events of the 11th century – mostly deal with Hungarian saints – are related to the Annales Posonienses in their core material, according to Bácsatyai.
[13] The annales accuse the "Hungarians" of killing Bishop Gerard of Csanád, thus, the original text could have been written in an ecclesial community where foreign priests lived.
It uniquely gives the exact dates of the death of Queen Maria Laskarina (23 July 1270) and Béla, Duke of Slavonia (11 June 1269),[15] while in the case of the king it gives a day's earlier mortality – Friday, 2 May 1270, which was also confirmed by the necrologium of the Oberalteich Abbey.
Bácsatyai claimed the Hungarian chronicles put the date of his death to 3 May (also "Friday", which is, however, wrong) in retrospect, because of the feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross.
Therefore, Bácsatyai argued that this section of the first annales was originally written in the church of the Franciscans in Esztergom, where Béla IV and his family were also buried, so the exact date of their death was known to the local friars.
[20] Bácsatyai accepted this date, despite Hungarian historiography uniformly place the events from late 1264 to early 1265, since the seminal monograph of Gyula Pauler (A magyar nemzet története az Árpádházi királyok alatt, Vol.
Later, Bácsatyai also wrote a study for journal Századok (2020), in which he sought to support the correctness of the year 1267 with foreign chronicles (for instance, the appendix of Jans der Enikel's Weltchronik) and set up a new chronology of the events, practically return to the standpoint of the pre-Pauler historiography.
Bácsatyai accepted the reliability of the text, while the academic standpoint traditionally set the date to 23 July based on references in the Illuminated Chronicle and the Steirische Reimchronik, which, however, are not free from difficulties of interpretation.
Bácsatyai argued that Andrea Dandolo's chronicle confirmed this data, according to which the coronation occurred during the feast of Saint Dominic (4 August).
Bácsatyai also emphasized that the text notes that Andrew was "jointly and unanimously elected king by the Hungarians", which would have been an inconceivable formula in the later 14th-century chronicle composition.
The second annales state that after the death of Ladislaus I in 1095, Coloman returned home "peacefully" from Poland and began to rule jointly with his younger brother Álmos.
Géza I was called as "Magnus" in those parts, when the subsequent monarch was still a duke, in accordance with the inscriptions on the coins issued by Duke Géza, which well reflects the author's awareness (later chronicles, including the Illuminated Chronicle, erroneously claim the king receive the epithet "Great" or "Magnus" because of his monarchical greatness after his death).
One of the events in 13th century history also deserves attention: under the year 1205, there is a truncated, unfinished sentence, according to which the young Ladislaus III "was [...] violently from Esztergom" and subsequently his uncle Andrew II was crowned king.
This text contains an aid for clerks of the chancellery and places of authentication to easily navigate which kings' letters of donation are considered valid or invalid at the time the formulary book is compiled.
[30] He began the chronology on the page 265 recto, in the space left blank by the original author under his own work, the biographical data of the kings of Hungary.
This section lasted from 1438 (the Ottoman occupation of Szászsebes, today Sebeș, Romania) to 1469 (in fact 1467, Matthias' unsuccessful invasion to Moldavia).