Gesta Hungarorum

Many of its sources—including the Bible, Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, the 7th-century Exordia Scythica, the late 9th-century Regino of Prüm's Chronicon, and early medieval romances of Alexander the Great—have been identified by scholars.

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.

[7][8] 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".

[17] 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.

[1][2] 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).

[25] 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").

[26] The author described himself as "P who is called magister, and sometime notary of the most glorious Béla, king of Hungary of fond memory"[27] in the opening sentence of the Gesta.

[35][36] Anonymus mentioned that they had found pleasure in reading the Trojan History, a work attributed to Dares Phrygius, which enjoyed popularity in the Middle Ages.

[12][33][39][40] 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.

[38] He explicitly referred to "the gabbling rhymes of minstrels and the spurious tales of peasants who have not forgotten the brave deeds and wars of the Hungarians"[45] even to his time.

[38] However, he did not conceal his scorn for oral tradition, stating that it "would be most unworthy and completely unfitting for the so most noble people of Hungary to hear as if in sleep of the beginning of their kind and of their bravery and deeds from the false stories of peasants and the gabbling song of minstrels".

[47] He borrowed texts from the latter work and adopted its "overall structure of short but informative accounts naming important protagonists and main events", according to historians Martyn Rady and László Veszprémy.

[52] According to Kristó, Györffy and Thoroczkay, Anonymus obviously read the so-called Exordia Scythica ("Scythian Genesis"), a 7th-century abridgement of a work of the 2nd-century historian, Justin.

[56] Direct borrowings from Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, Hugh of Bologna's Rationes dictani prosaice, and medieval romances about Alexander the Great prove that Anonymus also used these works.

[60][66] Sources from the turn of the 9th and 10th centuries mentioned more than a dozen persons who played an important role in the history of the Carpathian Basin at the time of the Hungarian Conquest.

[65][12][68] Martyn Rady and László Veszprémy explicitly describe the Gesta Hungarorum as a " 'toponymic romance' that seeks to explain place-names by reference to imagined events or persons, and vice versa.

[24][74] Anonymus did not mention the Avars, the Bavarians, the Gepids and the Moravians, but he listed the Czechs, the Greeks, the Khazars, the "Romans" and their shepherds, the Székelys, and the Vlachs besides the Bulgarians and the Slavs.

[75] According to Györffy and Madgearu, Anonymus may have based his list of the peoples inhabiting the Carpathian Basin on the local Slavs' oral tradition which was preserved in the early 12th-century Russian Primary Chronicle.

[81] Györffy says that the Vlachs, Cumans, Czechs and other peoples whose presence in the late-9th-century Carpathian Basin cannot be proven based on sources from the same period reflects the situation of the late 13th century.

[62] 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.

[89][90] The next section describes Álmos, mentioning that he was "more powerful and wiser than all the princes of Scythia",[91] which may have derived from oral tradition or from the common wording of contemporaneous legal documents.

[94] [95] 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"[55] to Kiev.

[97] 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.

[104] 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.

[26] 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.

[2] Carlile Aylmer Macartney writes in his critical and analytical guide of Anonymus "this is not evidence that he introduced the whole person of Gelou or the presence of Vlachs in Transylvania".