The Medieval Kingdom of Hungary and its Immigrants

Given recent events and the Hungarian government’s depiction of refugees as dangerous “migrants” to be blocked at all costs from entering the country, it is somewhat ironic that the medieval Kingdom of Hungary was a land of immigration. Indeed, medieval Hungary has been called a “guestland” because of the multiplicity of peoples living in the realm.Footnote ¹⁶ The local population itself was mixed from the moment the polity began to emerge in the tenth and eleventh centuries, with Slavic, Avar, and other groups merging with the “Hungarians,” who had arrived in the late ninth century and were themselves a mixture of groups of different origins rather than an ethnically homogeneous population.Footnote ¹⁷ Between the eleventh and the thirteenth century, a great variety of new settlers arrived, differing in belief systems, language, and customs and including Jews, Muslims, Armenians, a series of steppe peoples (most importantly Pechenegs and Cumans), German-speakers, Rus’, and a variety of Romance-speaking peoples.Footnote ¹⁸ Throughout the Middle Ages (and beyond), the kingdom absorbed a wide spectrum of groups, and the legal structure provided rights for many of them; legal charters of privileges began to be granted during the twelfth century, although not all groups obtained one. Some settled in their own villages, distinct quarters in towns, or specific regions, while others mingled early on with the existing populace. Some retained their language and customs for a long period, while others disappeared quickly, becoming absorbed into the local population without leaving much trace.Footnote ¹⁹

Immigration was not just a lived reality; medieval Hungarian identity was explicitly founded on narratives of migration. These included tales of the migration of the entire Hungarian people and tales about individual families and other groups. Some had no basis in historical reality but were invented for prestige; others had a kernel of historicity but were much elaborated. Although medieval Hungary was a kingdom created by immigrants, the tales of migration and the reality of immigration were often not in sync. While immigration is frequently interpreted in a negative light today, and medieval (especially late medieval) immigrants could encounter difficulties and prejudice, in various medieval contexts migration was linked to more positive ideas and experiences. For example, those arriving to cultivate lands or settle in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Central European towns obtained a privileged legal status, with more economic and legal freedoms than local populations.Footnote ²⁰ Additionally, aristocrats could find it advantageous to have—or even invent—immigrant ancestry to enhance their prestige. One Hungarian noble family thus claimed French descent, while others vied for the same ancestor or claimed that their forebears immigrated earlier than the historical sources attest.Footnote ²¹ Migration was therefore valorized in itself as something positive, although not in all circumstances, as we shall see below.

A positive evaluation of migration was by no means a specifically Hungarian phenomenon in the Middle Ages. Much in medieval culture promoted its valorization. Life was conceptualized as an ephemeral journey, where one’s attention should be focused on the ultimate goal of salvation rather than the acquisition of perishable goods, as exemplified in the late fifteenth-century Middle English Everyman play.Footnote ²² Existence itself was thus a migration towards the final otherworldly destination. Early monasticism specifically fostered the imagery of earthly life as a pilgrimage, and pilgrimage as a penitential and spiritual exercise came to characterize medieval Christianity.Footnote ²³ In addition, intellectual elites—who authored the vast majority of medieval written sources—often moved to study at university and then perhaps to take up ecclesiastical careers abroad; personal stories thus contributed to positive views about mobility. Finally, the migration of peoples from east to west was understood as a basic foundation story of Europe until around 1500: “migrational flows of peoples and nations, as the medieval texts taught, were nothing less than the basic pattern of history.”Footnote ²⁴

Writing the Early History of the People (Gens) as a Story of Migration

Medieval narratives did not merely reflect the reality of migration; they also created mythical stories of migration or elaborated a small historical kernel to the point of mythicizing it. Foremost among these tales is the story of the Hungarians’ migration from the eastern side of the Ural mountains to the Carpathian Basin. This origin story was subsequently incorporated into national history writing, becoming one of the building blocks from which Romantic nationalism and then modern historiography created “Hungarian prehistory,” that is, the history of the “ancient Hungarians” before their arrival in the Carpathian Basin.Footnote ²⁵ This is a tenuous construct that draws on linguistics, folklore analogies, archaeology, and later written evidence. Since none of these can offer certainties, however, hypotheses from one discipline are often joined to those of another to reach supposedly “firm” conclusions. This modern, constructed prehistory is based on the premise that the Hungarians as a people existed for at least a thousand years before they settled in the Carpathian Basin in the late ninth century CE. In contrast, all we can be certain of historically is the emergence of a mixed group called “Hungarians” in contemporary sources from around the middle of the ninth century.Footnote ²⁶

In the nineteenth century, the search for an Urheimat (homeland) was not limited to Hungarians.Footnote ²⁷ Medieval stories were taken to be expressions of historical processes that took place over many centuries, and were coupled to linguistic and archaeological evidence to create a “scientific” origin story in a variety of countries.Footnote ²⁸ While these constructs have been discredited in many places (a good example is the analytic approach to understanding origin stories in FranceFootnote ²⁹), renewed nationalistic discourse in Hungary is once again promoting a literal interpretation of such origins.Footnote ³⁰ It must be stressed, however, that understood in their own context mythical tales are not reflections of historical realities through a dim mirror but rather traces of the mental map of learned communities at the time. The Hungarian tales are anchored in the intellectual culture of medieval Europe, where it was quite common to depict an invented migration of one’s own group. Such population movements were held to have shaped the various peoples of Europe, including the Goths and the Irish. The Trojan origin story of the Franks was particularly successful, with several communities vying to claim such origins or find an equally prestigious alternative.Footnote ³¹ These stories, in turn, were influenced by the biblical story of the Israelites’ migration to the Promised Land. The medieval authors who composed these kinds of tales about the Hungarians were thus drawing on learned sources rather than recording the memory of real events.

Biblical and Learned Sources for the Migration of the Hungarian People (Gens)

Hungarian chronicles present the early history of the Hungarians as one of a long migration. Yet these narratives were written several centuries after their settlement in the region. No sources were produced by Hungarian authors at the time of their arrival in the Carpathian Basin, although some late ninth- and tenth-century western European and Byzantine sources do refer to population movement.Footnote ³² In his early thirteenth-century Gesta Hungarorum, the author known as the Hungarian Anonymous dismisses oral stories and claims to salvage accurate knowledge for future generations.Footnote ³³ His prologue is addressed to an unnamed friend (real or fictional), at whose request he set down the history of “the people of Hungary” “lest it be lost to posterity forever”:

The author positions the lineage of the Hungarians within a biblical framework and describes their original homeland—“Scythia”—based on a textual tradition going back to antiquity.Footnote ³⁵ He describes this Scythia as bordered by the Thanais river, neighbored to the east by the people of Gog and Magog. However, he then confusingly asserts that the first king of Scythia was Magog, son of Japhet. Magog can be both the neighbor of Scythia and its king because two different traditions were merged here, as was already the case in Isidore of Seville’s early seventh-century Etymologies: the first combining the biblical book of Revelation and the story of Alexander the Great enclosing the peoples of Gog and Magog with a wall, the second making Magog the progenitor of the Scythians.Footnote ³⁶ This kind of accumulation of contradictory information is not uncommon in medieval origin myths.Footnote ³⁷ Anonymous also made Magog the ancestor of the Hungarians, deriving the ethnonym “Moger” (Magyar) from “King Magog,”Footnote ³⁸ unlike the fourteenth-century chronicles discussed below, which derive the ethnonym Magyar from an ancestor called Magor.Footnote ³⁹ As Anonymous tells it, it was a descendant of Magog’s line, Attila the Hun, who sallied forth from Scythia, put the Romans to flight, and took the province of Pannonia.Footnote ⁴⁰

In his description of the Scythians as a paradisiacal, sinless people who were eventually worn out by war and became cruel, eating human flesh and drinking human blood, the Hungarian Anonymous reconciled two opposing sources, Justin’s Epitome and the Chronicon of Regino of Prüm (d. 915). Justin was a classical author of probably the third century CE—himself abridging the work of a first-century Gallo-Roman historian—whose description of the Scythians as noble barbarians was taken up by various subsequent works.Footnote ⁴¹ Regino, writing in the late ninth century, depicted the Hungarians as a new people hailing from Scythia. He borrowed heavily from Justin’s account of the Scythians but omitted his praise of their simplicity and added descriptions of the Hungarians’ cruelty, including drinking blood and eating raw meat, an old topos attached to barbarians.Footnote ⁴² Following Regino, Anonymous states that the Scythians were never subjugated, and even defeated Darius, Cyrus, and Alexander. Nonetheless, since the land of Scythia was “insufficient to sustain … the host of peoples begotten there,”Footnote ⁴³ the seven leaders of the Hungarians “chose to seek for themselves the land of Pannonia that they had heard from rumour had been the land of King Attila [the Hun], from whose line Prince [Almus] descended.”Footnote ⁴⁴

This justification builds on the idea that the Hungarians were related to the Huns, picked up by Hungarian clerics—many of whom studied at western universities from the twelfth century on—from western European literary sources.Footnote ⁴⁵ In deciding to set out for Pannonia, they would therefore be returning to a land that rightfully belonged to them. The seven leaders, realizing they needed one chief, chose Almus.

During the journey, they hunted and ate meat. They arrived at Suzdal’, then “reached the city of Kiev without any opposition.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Despite the seeming precision of the date 884, this description does not reflect a ninth-century reality but instead combines aspects of both biblical legend and a political context closer to the author’s own time. Anonymous’s account of the Hungarian migration is redolent of the passage through a desert, evoking biblical models. Yet his descriptions of the populations they encounter correspond to eleventh- and twelfth-century political constellations. The Hungarians decide to conquer the realm of the Rus’, and are victorious despite resistance from the Rus’ and their Cuman allies, seizing tribute and booty. Defeated, the princes of the Rus’ suggest “that after leaving the land of Halich, they should descend westward beyond the Havas woods into the land of Pannonia, that had previously been the land of King Attila,” recommending “the land of Pannonia as being good beyond measure.”Footnote ⁴⁸ (Although the seven leaders set out with the express purpose of conquering Pannonia, they seem to have forgotten that aim by the time they defeat the Rus’.) The Hungarians then make their leisurely way through Rus’, stopping for several weeks in Volodimer (that is, Volhynia and Halich), gathering rich offerings and hostages, and are again told to go to Pannonia. Finally, the Hungarian leader Almus makes peace with the Rus’ and is joined by seven Cuman leaders; with help and victuals from the Rus’ they at last reach their destination.Footnote ⁴⁹

The anonymous author of the Gesta thus traces the route of the Hungarians’ migration from Scythia to the river Etyl (which could be the Don or the Volga), then on to Suzdal, the Dnieper, Galicia, and through Ukraine into what would become the Kingdom of Hungary. They name the first place that they occupy “Muncas” (modern Munkács, today Mukachevo in Western Ukraine), a pun on the Hungarian word munka, meaning “with work,” because they arrived there “after the greatest toil.”Footnote ⁵⁰ They then rest for forty days, a figure with obvious biblical connotations and corresponding to the time spent by the Israelites scouting out Canaan.Footnote ⁵¹ The local Slavs, who have heard that Almus is descended from the line of Attila, take fright and surrender of their own accord. The Hungarians capture the castle of Ung, offer great sacrifices to the immortal gods, and feast in celebration, while Almus appoints his son Árpád as leader. Detailed descriptions of sieges, dealings with local rulers, the seizure of land, and Árpád granting terrains to various prominent men follow, interspersed with many vivid stories.

The Illusion of Tradition in Learned Constructs

Although the Gesta’s more colorful stories are dismissed as inventions, some historians believe that oral traditions of real migration and ninth-century events were transmitted through this source, written down centuries later.Footnote ⁵² National history writing in Hungary, especially during the nineteenth century, can be blamed for constructing and maintaining this belief, as can the continuing lack of comparative analysis when it comes to medieval migration stories.Footnote ⁵³ Anonymous himself explicitly states that he relies on chronicles and the Bible, dismissing orally circulating information as erroneous. He did indeed borrow from many texts, including those that had nothing to do with the Hungarians. His Gesta is imbued throughout with biblical quotations and allusions, and makes explicit comparisons to Moses and the Israelites:

The anonymous author, just as other chroniclers after him, also drew from learned histories, and very significantly from Regino of Prüm’s early tenth-century Chronicon, mentioned above. If his reliance on this contemporary chronicler of western Europe’s first encounters with the Hungarians may seem to lend credence to the stories relayed in the Gesta, we should not be hasty in our conclusions. Regino himself also made extensive use of texts written well before the emergence of the Hungarians, in particular works by the eighth-century author Paul the Deacon and the Roman author Justin. Ultimately, these texts were not about the Hungarians but a range of earlier and often mythicized groups—notably the Scythians, with whom the Hungarians were identified from the moment they began to attract the attention of western ecclesiastical writers such as Regino. They also contained many literary stereotypes.

Regino was faced with the problem of accounting for the advent of a hitherto unknown people on the European scene. The Hungarians were not attested in the sources, and were unknown to the authorities on which medieval writers relied, even though these authorities were held to encompass the totality of knowledge. Regino solved this problem by identifying the Hungarians with the Scythians, who did figure in the texts by ancient authors. After all, the Hungarians arrived from the same general direction (the east), and were identified as “barbarians.” Regino therefore claimed that they came from the vast swamps of the Tanais (the Don estuary) and were uncivilized.Footnote ⁵⁵ These ideas were based on old authorities: the early seventh-century works of Isidore of Seville and ultimately the stereotypes of Greco-Roman ethnography, which depicted the Scythians as the archetypal barbarians. From Isidore’s Etymologies, for example, medieval authors took the notions that the Scythians descended from Magog, the son of Japhet; that the Huns lived in Maeotis between the Tanais and the Massagetes, before expanding outwards; and that Scythia initially extended from India to the Maeotian swamps (the Sea of Azov), the Danube, and the borders of the Germanic lands, but was later reduced, with its western border lying at the Caspian Sea.Footnote ⁵⁶ Isidore also describes Scythia’s inhabitants as barbarians and savages who ate human flesh and drank blood.Footnote ⁵⁷ Western European texts elaborated on this identification and created the link between the Huns and Hungarians.

We should be wary of assuming that despite the many layers of literary composition and transmission, the chronicle accounts of the Hungarians’ emergence from Asian Scythia reflect a knowledge of actual events. Though linguistic evidence of the Hungarian language’s relationship to Mansi, Khanty, Finnish, Estonian, and other so-called Finno-Ugric (Uralic) languages can be used to suggest Asian origins,Footnote ⁵⁸ it is clear that factual knowledge was not a prerequisite for authors to propose Scythian ancestry for a people: at various times during the Middle Ages, and in diverse works, the Gaels, the Turks, the Picts, and the Goths were all said to have emerged from “Scythia.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Though the literary nature of its composition is widely accepted, it is often asserted that Anonymous’s Gesta contains at least some reliable information on certain elements of the Hungarian conquest. Yet there are good reasons to be cautious, as one particular example shows. The episode in which the Hungarians cross the Etyl on what were probably inflated animal skins may seem to be an instance of ethnological verisimilitude. In their critical apparatus, the editors comment that the word tulbou used in the Latin text is unknown but is assumed to derive from a Turkic equivalent of uter (a bag made of skin or hide) that would also be the origin of the Hungarian vernacular tömlő.Footnote ⁶⁰ This explanation dates back to the eighteenth century, and the traditional etymology certainly needs to be reviewed on a linguistic level by a specialist in Turkic languages.Footnote ⁶¹ However, the historical evidence alone is enough to show why we cannot uncritically accept this story as a reflection of real Hungarian migrations. The editors of the Gesta note that “this method of crossing rivers on inflated bags has been recorded for several nomadic peoples, e.g., for the Cumans by Niketas Choniates. … Anonymous may have seen Hungarians still practicing this technique.”Footnote ⁶² Another analysis states that William of Rubruk’s “description of thirteenth-century Tartar customs corroborates the veracity of this description. Perhaps our author [Anonymous] was an eyewitness of such a river crossing, if he travelled widely in Eastern Europe.”Footnote ⁶³ The eighteenth-century Hungarian historian Daniel Cornides (1732–1787) made a more thorough survey of crossing a river on “round leather skins,” gathering accounts relating to a number of peoples from different sources. These include medieval examples, such as the Mongols in the thirteenth-century texts of Giovanni da Plano Carpini and Matthew Paris, and the Cumans and Hungarians according to Andrea Dandolo’s fourteenth-century Venetian chronicle.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, since river crossings using stuffed or inflated animal skins can already be found in ancient historians such as Xenophon, who attributes them to Cyrus, Darius I, and Alexander,Footnote ⁶⁵ the anonymous author may well have drawn this idea from a literary source. Interestingly, the story of crossing a river on animal skins also appears in later Hungarian chronicles but is attributed to the Huns rather than the Hungarians, suggesting it was a literary topos that could be applied to any “barbarian” group.Footnote ⁶⁶

If we compare Anonymous’s Gesta to other Hungarian chroniclers’ accounts of this migration, it becomes obvious that these authors not only borrowed from various textual sources but also conducted polemics against one another. In so doing, they constructed different migration stories, a process that can also be observed in early medieval origin tales.Footnote ⁶⁷ This further undermines the idea that these later medieval sources reflect historical reality. The Illuminated Chronicle, which is one of a family of fourteenth-century chronicle compositions and dates from around 1360, states that Hungarian kings rule because of God’s will and authority, and it is this point that the migration story serves to buttress in the text.Footnote ⁶⁸ Based on the Bible and Saint Jerome, its author derives Scythians (and thus Hungarians) from Japhet via Magog (Magor), and explicitly refutes the idea that Hungarians descended from Nimrod as some claim. The prestige of the Hungarians’ migration is enhanced by asserting that the Trojans also initially settled in Pannonia before moving on to what became France. According to the chronicler, Hunor and Magor (eponymous ancestors of the Huns and Hungarians) lived for many years in the swamps of Maeotis bordering Persia. Then, when their people became too numerous, they moved into Scythia, killing and expelling the local population, “now called Ruthenians,” and still—that is, in the mid-fourteenth century—hold that land. This text locates Scythia in Europe, bordered by the North Sea, to the east by Asia, and to the west by “the river Etel, that is, the Don.” The eastern neighbors of the Scythians are the Pechenegs and “white Cumans,” while to the west impenetrable and uninhabited woods stretch out until Suzdal. The differences in detail between Anonymous’s Gesta and the Illuminated Chronicle make it clear that instead of rendering a written account of the true story of these migrations, the authors were constructing and shaping their stories, even conducting intertextual polemics.

According to the fourteenth-century account—which uses both “Huns” and “Hungarians” but maintains a complete equivalence between them, describing the Huns’ entry into Pannonia as the first arrival of the Hungarians—the Huns emerged from Scythia, crossing the lands of other peoples until they reached the Tisza river and settled there. Referring to a source that he calls the “chronicle of the Romans,” the author states that in 677 the Hungarians came out of Scythia “a second time” and traveled to Pannonia. He has the Hungarians migrate through the lands of the Pechenegs and “white Cumans” (not mentioned by Anonymous) before traversing Suzdal and Kiev (“Kyo”). In this version, however, the Hungarians do not fight the Rus’ but instead move on from Kiev through the mountains to “some region” without a name, inhabited by many eagles. These birds devour the Hungarians’ cattle and horses—God’s way, the chronicle states, of making sure that they move on to Pannonia quickly. They then arrive in Transylvania, where they stay for a while and build seven fortresses. The election of the seven captains takes place at this point; the first is Árpád, whose father Almus was killed in Transylvania before he could reach the promised land of Pannonia (another echo of the biblical story of Moses). Finally, “God gave Pannonia back to the Hungarians, as he had returned the land of Canaan to the sons of Israel.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Thus, while the route of the migration differs from that given in Anonymous’s Gesta, the biblical framing is very much the same. There is some doubt about the chronological sequence of the two chronicles’ composition, and many Hungarian scholars have argued that the fourteenth-century texts derive from a twelfth- or even eleventh-century chronicle that has since been lost, making them earlier than Anonymous’s Gesta.Footnote ⁷⁰ Since there is no real proof for that hypothesis, all we can say with certainty is that the texts we possess are from the fourteenth century.

The curious episode of the eagles is usually explained as some sort of misunderstanding of the name “Bessi,” one of the terms used in Latin texts for the Pechenegs, whose attack is mentioned in historical sources (Regino and Constantine VII Porphyrogenetos), and, according to modern historians, was a direct factor in the Hungarian migration into the Carpathian Basin.Footnote ⁷¹ The story, however, raises the question of intertextual polemic with the Rus’ chronicle Tales of Bygone Years (also known as the Primary Chronicle).Footnote ⁷² Is this episode a distorted account of a historical event (the attack by the Pechenegs in the late ninth century), or is it a response to a story denigrating the Hungarians found in the Rus’ chronicle? In the entry for 1097, the Tales record a war pitting the grand prince of Kiev Svyatopolk (r. 1093–1113) and his ally King Coloman of Hungary (r. 1095–1116) against the Rostislavichi princes of Halich allied to Vladimir II Monomakh (r. 1113–1125) and the Cuman leader Bonyak. According to the Rus’ chronicle, Bonyak’s Cumans attacked the Hungarians, driving them “hither and yon, as a falcon drives magpies” and massacring many of their number.Footnote ⁷³ The coincidence of this simile of falcons with the eagles that attack the Hungarians in the Illuminated Chronicle is suggestive. Did the Hungarian author, aware of the Rus’ account, project it into an earlier past and mitigate the defeat by suggesting that it was supernatural rather than inflicted by the Rus’?

Textual polemic against earlier chronicles, and thus some reshaping of the migration story, continued in the fifteenth century. Another example shows how such decisions could be made based on “authorities” who had no genuine knowledge of the Hungarians’ early history. Printed in 1488, John Thuróczy’s Chronica Hungarorum borrows significantly from the fourteenth-century chronicles but also argues against some of their views.Footnote ⁷⁴ In his prologue, the author mentions debates about the history of the Hungarians, specifically disagreement over “which part of the world brought them forth.” Reading the “old historical works” on the subject, he remarks that many things were omitted, including the glorious deeds of Attila, kept silent “because of the hatred of foreign peoples.” John Thuróczy claims to have corrected the erroneous stories of earlier authors of Hungarian history, stating that he added nothing of his own invention but followed older, and therefore more authentic, historiography. He notes that previous histories diverge in their description of the origin of the Huns, that is, the Hungarians, and even contradict each other; to prove his point, he cites two chronicles written during the reigns of Charles I and Louis I, the Angevin kings of Hungary during the first half of the fourteenth century, that hold differing views.Footnote ⁷⁵

After describing the conflict between his sources, John Thuróczy seeks to resolve the contradictions of these fourteenth-century chroniclers by turning to recognized authorities, including some of his near-contemporaries. He cites Archbishop Antoninus Pierozzi of Florence’s Chronicon of 1457 and the Cosmographia written by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pius II) in 1461, as well as patristic texts such as Saint Jerome’s commentary on Genesis and the works of the first-century historian Josephus Flavius, to ascertain that Scythia was peopled by descendants of Japhet’s second son, Magog. He observes that one of the two books of history names Nimrod as the ancestor of the “Huns, that is, Hungarians” via his sons Hunor and Magor, and supplies a genealogy that extends from Noah through Ham, Nimrod, Attila the Hun, and Almus. However, he discounts this information because his other source derives the Hungarians from Magog, son of Japhet, which according to John Thuróczy is in accordance with the Bible and Church fathers such as Jerome, and so must be the correct version.

The author then quotes a wide range of previous histories on the Huns and the ancient Scythians, as well as descriptions of Scythia based on an older Hungarian chronicle (from the Illuminated Chronicle family) and other earlier writers. He relays that the chronicle locates Scythia in Europe between Asia and the Etul (Don), adjoining the lands of the Pechenegs and white Cumans to the east, with uninhabited woods stretching to Suzdalia to the west. He then disputes this location based on the other Hungarian chronicle and authors such as Paulus Orosius, Ptolemy, Strabo, and Pliny, arguing that Scythia was in Asia, with the Tanais, the river that divides Asia from Europe, flowing through its center. After enumerating the many peoples that originate from Scythia, including the Huns and Hungarians, John Thuróczy explicitly supports the interpretation that the Hungarians come from Scythia located in Asia, citing Paulus Orosius, the second- or third-century philosopher Dionysius Periegetes of Alexandria (“the African”), various histories of the Huns, and Pius II. None of these authorities, of course, knew anything about Hungarian origins. Nevertheless, John Thuróczy uses their prestige to give weight to his account of the foundational migration, with the Huns initially leaving Scythia due to a lack of space, then the Hungarians returning to Pannonia in 744 via the lands of the Pechenegs and the white Cumans, Suzdal, and a town called “Kio” (Kiev, spelled “Ryo” in some early printed versionsFootnote ⁷⁶). He repeats the story about the attack by the eagles, after which he has the Hungarians cross the mountains for three months to arrive in Transylvania. He then proceeds to give the colorful stories of the conquest of Pannonia.Footnote ⁷⁷ Yet it seems that not all of his fifteenth-century contemporaries found the migration narrative to be the most crucial aspect of early Hungarian history. An edition of John Thuróczy’s chronicle printed in 1488 and illustrated with woodcuts features no images of the migration but prioritizes a battle scene, inserted at the point where the narration observes that Pannonia was granted to the Hungarians as Zion had been granted to the Israelites under Moses.Footnote ⁷⁸

These various Hungarian chronicles cannot be understood as in some way reflecting the memory of real migrations. Scholarship on similar medieval migration stories (such as those of the Franks, the Goths, and the Lombards) has highlighted the importance of symbolic geography in these descriptions and the influence of the biblical model.Footnote ⁷⁹ Medieval authors created a link between migration and the formation of a people, who in the process moved from barbarism to civilization. Thus the far-away homeland was inhabited by barbarians, who were humanized and organized in the course of their migration, as in Isidore of Seville’s account of the Goths or the Historia Brittonum’s description of the Trojans’ journey to Britain.Footnote ⁸⁰ These stories were erudite and constructed, based on ideas from classical antiquity and the Bible, with a strong imprint of the biblical story of the Israelites; one cannot suppose a priori that they reflect actual events. Given the relatively late composition of the Hungarian chronicles discussed here, a large array of medieval literary models was already available to their authors, all of which suggested the need for a far-away homeland and a story of migration when constructing the story of one’s own gens. Finally, many of the building blocks of the tale of the Hungarian migrations in fact predate the emergence of the Hungarians themselves, and are borrowed from earlier descriptions of the Scythians.

Once the authors of the Hungarian histories picked up on these early literary sources, the trajectory of their narratives was determined: the Hungarians, assimilated to Scythians and Huns, had to originate from Scythia, and one had to explain how they came to inhabit Pannonia. The only possibility was a long migration. Coupled to the biblical prototype of the formation and political organization of a people, that is, the migration story of the Israelites, this determined the nature of the origin tales that they wrote. These tales are learned myths constructed from written sources, not transcriptions of the oral tradition of historical events.

The Hungarian origin stories have the same characteristics as those of the Goths, Lombards, and others. They claim that an already existing, identifiable people migrated for an extended period, encountering enemies on the way in a series of battles that served to demonstrate their valor and cohesion. The migrating people have an eponymous founder, and are led by chieftains during their exodus. In the course of their migration, they acquire civilization and eventually Christianity, and their installation in their current homeland is proof of their tenacity and bravery. Certain elements vary between the different accounts, such as the location of Scythia, the precise route of the Hungarians’ migration, names, and other details. Yet the medieval narratives about Hungarians should no more be taken as encapsulating folk traditions of real migrations than other learned medieval texts on the migration of peoples. Such origo gentis accounts served the political aims of an elite group. They became foundations for ascribing an identity from above, rather than reflecting an already existing ethnic identification of a whole people.

Moreover, elements were borrowed from classical antiquity and other authors who were not writing about the Hungarians. Notably, the very location of Scythia, the Hungarians’ alleged homeland, in Asia rather than Europe was decided on the authority of Saint Jerome, who lived well before the Hungarians emerged as a recognizable people. That decision, rather than specific historical knowledge, underpinned the Asian origin story of the Hungarians, who were thus assimilated to the Scythians and the Huns. Nevertheless, the ambiguity of an Asian origin should not be forgotten: while it could signal that a people were bloodthirsty barbarians, in the medieval division of the world Jerusalem, the center of salvation, was also located in Asia. Providential salvation (that is, conversion to Christianity) is also embedded in the story.

Noble Families’ Migration Stories

In medieval Hungary, migration tales were linked not only to ethnogenesis but also to the histories of many individual families. Two main versions of the Hungarian narrative, that compiled by Simon of Kéza in his late thirteenth-century chronicle and that given—with some variations—in the fourteenth-century chronicles, include a list of advenae, or immigrant nobles, emphasizing that the standing of these families was equal to the noble families of the “original” Hungarian migrants. In these instances, chroniclers were not writing about their own gens but rather about others, though this does not preclude a sympathetic rendering of their alleged stories, as some of them may have been familiar to the chroniclers, or even their friends at the royal court. Simon of Kéza lists these nobles towards the end of his chronicle.Footnote ⁸¹ Significantly, the fourteenth-century chronicles move the list to a position immediately after the story of the arrival of the Hungarians themselves, an arrangement that serves to further underline their equal status.Footnote ⁸² These texts enumerate nineteen cases of immigrant knights (one case can include several individuals from the same family), of which ten are of German origin and the others from France, Italy, Bohemia, Moravia, and the Iberian Peninsula. Though the two versions contain some variations in the details of the families, they both suggest that they arrived in response to the invitation issued by the ruler Géza (d. 997), father of Hungary’s first Christian king, Stephen I (r. 997–1038), to people from Christian countries to help in the conversion of Hungary.Footnote ⁸³

It is crucial to consider these lists in the context of their creation. From the early thirteenth century, the weakening of royal power in the Kingdom of Hungary benefited the nobility. Aristocratic power surpassed royal power, with the baronial elite filling all the important royal offices and playing a key role in the newly constituted general assembly (the precursor of Parliament).Footnote ⁸⁴ As a consequence, demands were made that new immigrants be excluded from high positions.Footnote ⁸⁵ In 1213, Queen Gertrude was even murdered by a baronial conspiracy for ensuring preference in high offices and influence for her relatives from Andechs-Meran.Footnote ⁸⁶ In a sign of this shift of power, those arriving in the entourages of royal brides after 1204 no longer managed to found new aristocratic lineages.Footnote ⁸⁷ The list of old “newcomers” preserved in the chronicles was thus drawn up to acknowledge the equality of noble families who had already achieved high status. Proving descent from early immigrants was clearly advantageous, while the closer to the (then) present one’s ancestor immigrated, the more dubious the family’s standing would become. Here I will focus on two of the most interesting cases, where we can infer at least some information about how these families’ tales of migration were forged.

The brothers Volphgerus and Hedricus de Vildonia—probably the equivalent of the German names Wolfger and Hedrich—are presented as the ancestors of the Hedrici/Hedrih (Héder) lineage.Footnote ⁸⁸ Modern scholarship has disputed Simon of Kéza’s assertion that the brothers came from Wildon in Styria; according to the fourteenth-century chronicles, they were counts of “Heinburg” (Hainburg).Footnote ⁸⁹ The fourteenth-century chronicles recount that they immigrated to Hungary during the reign of duke Géza, that is, in the second half of the tenth century, while Simon of Kéza also notes that Wolfger founded a monastery. The monastic foundation is a historical fact, but it did not take place in the late tenth century: the foundation charter survives and is dated 1157.Footnote ⁹⁰ We thus have documentary evidence that the brothers immigrated to Hungary during the reign of King Géza II (r. 1141–1162), that is, in the mid-twelfth century. In order to depict the lineage as more illustrious, and to present its originators as responding to the call to Christianize a new kingdom, the moment of their immigration was pushed back by two centuries to the period of the formation of the Christian Kingdom of Hungary.

A similar change in the chronology of immigration is discernible in the case of another family, though the reason for the rewriting is perhaps easier to guess. Simon of Kéza recounts that Pot of Lébény, also known as Ernistus, arrived with many warriors, and names his descendant, count “Conradus of Altumburg.”Footnote ⁹¹ The fourteenth-century chronicles explain that “Poth” is a sobriquet drawn from the German term (Theutonice) Bote—equivalent to the Latin nuncius—because of his service as a messenger between the Hungarian kings Andrew I (r. 1046–1060) and his son Solomon (r. 1063–1074), and “Emperor Conrad”—though in fact the dates of these Hungarian rulers correspond to the reigns of the kings then emperors Henry III (r. 1028–1056) and Henry IV (r. 1054–1105). Conrad of Altenburg is attested in the sources between 1239 and 1299. He was thus a contemporary of the chronicler who recorded his family history. Conrad would have had ample opportunity to meet Simon of Kéza, court cleric of King Ladislas IV (r. 1272–1290), since he was comes (a royal officer in charge of a county, usually rendered as “count” in English, or ispán in Hungarian) of the county of Borsod in 1258 and comes camerae (count of the Treasury, an officer in charge of the mint and certain revenues) from 1260; King Ladislas also rewarded him for defending the borders of the kingdom.Footnote ⁹² It was therefore most likely Conrad himself who provided the material on his family that we find in Simon’s chronicle.

There is also a historically attested Pot. Palatine (comes palatinus) of Hungary between 1209 and 1212 and founder of the monastery of Lebyn (Lébény), he was a member of the Győr family, which according to one modern opinion was not an immigrant family at all, but Hungarian.Footnote ⁹³ According to another view, the true ancestor of Conrad’s lineage was the German immigrant comes Otho, who settled in Hungary in the eleventh century and founded the monastery of Zselicszentjakab in 1061.Footnote ⁹⁴ In either case, Pot could not have been the ancestor of the lineage and did not arrive in Hungary when the chronicle account suggests. Nor was this misrepresentation a mere confusion or later conflation of different members of the family, Otho and Pot(h). Although Simon of Kéza did not explicitly give the date of Pot’s arrival, he implied by the chronological order of his entries that Pot immigrated during the tenth or eleventh century: the family is mentioned before others whose immigration is dated to the eleventh century. His late thirteenth-century chronicle thus already portrayed Pot as the founder of the lineage. It is highly unlikely that Conrad would mistake someone who, given the dates, must have been his own father or grandfather for the family’s ancestor who supposedly arrived in the eleventh century. But charters concerning Conrad’s activities throw light on this strange misdating. After Conrad made an alliance with Othakar of Bohemia and used German warriors to attack the lands of his enemies in Hungary, King Béla IV (r. 1235–1270) punished him for his disloyalty, confiscating his lands, including the monastery of Lébény, until he was pardoned in 1263 and his possessions restored.Footnote ⁹⁵ It seems that in the aftermath of these events, it was part of Conrad’s strategy to affirm his right to his family’s possessions through claims that the founder of that monastery (in fact his own father or grandfather) was the much earlier founder of his lineage.Footnote ⁹⁶

Tales of the migration of noble families’ ancestors were most likely created by the families themselves but recorded by chroniclers who were not members of those lineages. These tales were devised to enhance the prestige of a family and to buttress the claims of older immigrant families as opposed to more recent arrivals. In these tales, we can already trace two opposing views about immigrants: a positive one, explicitly expressed, and a negative one, tarnishing the standing of recent immigrants and forming the backdrop to the novel insistence in the thirteenth century that older immigrant noble families were equal to the immigrant Hungarian gens. The same tension between positive and negative ideas attached to migrants can also be found in tales of mass immigration into the Kingdom of Hungary, but the balance between them was shifting towards more explicit expressions of hostility.

Medieval Discourses of Mass Immigration

Medieval discourses on mass immigration into Hungary after the arrival of the Hungarians themselves crop up in a few narratives. The well-known early eleventh-century Admonitions, written by a cleric but attributed to King Stephen I in the hagiographic tradition, extolled the usefulness of immigrants in one of its chapters:

The text is a king’s mirror, intended to teach the skill of governance to the heir to the throne. Its clerical author (whose identity remains uncertain despite attempts to identify him) was inspired by classical and patristic antecedents and biblical models.Footnote ⁹⁸ The Carolingian and Ottonian tradition of the ancient Roman Empire was also incorporated into this chapter.Footnote ⁹⁹ The presence of immigrants at the royal court was certainly commonplace in this period and Stephen’s new kingdom was heavily shaped by immigrant clerics and nobles.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The continued flow of arrivals is summed up by the fourteenth-century Illuminated Chronicle, which lists “Bohemians, Poles, Greeks, Spaniards, Ishmaelites or Saracens, Pechenegs, Armenians, Saxons, Thuringians, those from Meissen and the Rhine, Cumans, and Latins” among the settlers in the Kingdom of Hungary who stayed and intermarried with the Hungarians, gaining the right to live in the realm and noble status.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The chronicler reports this situation in a matter-of-fact tone, without any particular value judgment.

We can gain futher insight into medieval discourses on immigration by considering more closely one of the groups on this list, the Cumans. Another source offers a much more detailed account of their arrival, which also shows the limits of the positive medieval discourse on immigration. In his mid-thirteenth-century chronicle of the Mongol invasion of Hungary, Master Rogerius recounts that Kuthen, “king of the Cumans,” sent an embassy to King Béla IV, asking permission to move into the realm with his followers; after his defeat by the Mongols, his lands had been ravaged and his subjects massacred.Footnote ¹⁰² The Hungarian king was pleased to accept the subjection of another ruler and welcomed the possibility of converting the Cumans to Christianity when Kuthen promised they would accept baptism. After a further exchange of envoys, the Cumans traveled to Hungary. King Béla “went to meet [Kuthen] at the border of his country … and granted him and his people such exceptional honours as the inhabitants of the land had neither done nor seen since times beyond memory.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The Cuman presence, however, led to conflict as enmity grew between the locals and the newcomers. Significantly, Rogerius describes the confrontation using ethnic labels: Comani and Hungari. The Cumans were accused of roaming around Hungary, destroying crops and raping women.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Hungarian nobles were also resentful of the Cumans for the royal favor shown to them: the king was keen to keep the Cumans on his side because of their military might. In the end, when the Mongols attacked Hungary the Cumans were accused of being their vanguard, and their leader Kuthen was murdered by a mob. As “the people clamored against him: ‘He has to die! He has to die!’” Kuthen and his entourage “were captured, and their heads immediately cut off and thrown out of the windows of the palace into the crowd.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The specific cause of the Cumans’ behavior is attributed by the author to their nature, rather than to their being immigrants per se: they were tough, wild, and not used to subordination.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Indeed, Rogerius writes that, if the king “kept the Cumans in greater honor than the Hungarians, they could and should not have taken that badly. For it is appropriate to the royal dignity to honor guests, particularly as he had promised this to them by oath,” adding that “only the king was their protector in Hungary.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Rogerius therefore invokes the idea, also advocated by the anonymous author of the Admonitions, that it was a royal duty to welcome immigrants. He emphasizes the king’s aim to bring the Cumans into the Christian fold, and praises him for their baptism.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Nonetheless, Rogerius suggests that the charges of destructive behavior were true; implicitly, the Cumans are held responsible as new immigrants whose customs clash with those of the locals.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Tales of migration about foreign groups differed from those concerning the Hungarians’ migrations or noble families’ ancestors. In the case of the Hungarians as a group, their original homeland was a crucial part of the migration story and made it possible to situate the narrative within inherited models of origin myths. For noble lineages, their place of origin contributed to their prestige. When it came to foreign groups, however, less attention was paid to where they came from, and it was merely the motivation for their moving that was recorded. Although medieval observers, like modern ones, were warier of mass migration and its attendant tensions with locals, medieval authors were not necessarily negatively biased when they wrote about a people other than “their own.” Three points are worth emphasizing in regard to Rogerius’s account. First, there is the relative empathy he expresses with a foreign group, recording that the Cumans sought refuge in Hungary because of the fierce Mongol attack they had suffered. This is particularly striking in comparison to current narratives about refugees, and part of the explanation may lie in the common enemy, given that Rogerius’s focus was the Mongol devastation of Hungary. Second, his account of the conflict with local populations does not seek to blame only one side, the newcomers, but also lists local interests that distorted the reaction of the Hungarian nobles. Rogerius sided with the king against the nobles in his narrative, which also meant not laying all the blame on the Cumans. Finally, insofar as he did blame the Cumans, he did not frame the problems in terms of their status as “migrants,” but related them to their nature and way of life, emphasizing their difference.

As with the tales of noble individuals, in these tales of mass migration into the Kingdom of Hungary the treatment of real immigrants was intertwined with the narrative construction—something that was not true for the tales of the migration of the Hungarians. Whether immigrant nobles were accepted in society or how the Cumans were treated was no longer a literary construction, but impacted the lives of actual people. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the constructed tales of the migration of a gens over the longer term also acquired significant power to influence reality.

Medieval and Modern Tales

Migration stories play a crucial and persistent role in medieval Hungarian narratives. Learned authors wrote and rewrote the tales of the migration of the Hungarian people, while also constructing polemics against each other on various points; their sources were authorities such as the Bible and classical authors, often predating the very existence of the Hungarians. Migration, for these authors, was a positive aspect of the history of both peoples and individuals. There was an aura of chosenness, of being a new Israel, associated with migration and modeled on the Bible. Situating one’s own noble family as migrants, drawing a parallel with the “original” Hungarian immigrants, and establishing prestige or security by linking their arrival to the foundation of the Christian Kingdom of Hungary became intertwined with the tale of the migration of the Hungarians. Yet within this positive discourse about migration itself, we can see the emergence of a distinction. Individual immigrants or certain groups were criticized and even demonized, though this was not explicitly tied to them being immigrants as such but rather to their status as “nomads,” “barbarians,” or “newcomers” intent on taking political power. The distinction between old migrants (positive) and new migrants (negative) is latent in the case of the Cumans and explicit in that of the immigrant nobles. Nevertheless, it did not affect the broader medieval discourse on migration itself, which continued to carry a positive value.

Resting on these medieval foundations, tales of migration persist to the present day, but they also gain a sharper distinction: old migration is valorized, while new migration is demonized. The nationalist narrative of Hungarian history, despite being increasingly challenged by scholarship, is making a comeback. While archaeologists debate the interpretation of artifacts, and historical DNA studies show heterogeneity in earlier populations,Footnote ¹¹⁰ Orbán’s government is reasserting the tale of hundreds of years of “Hungarian” migration, invoking a coherent ethnic group that did not in fact exist and even dismissing linguistic evidence of Hungarian’s relationship to Finno-Ugric languages in order to emphasize a mythic Turkic, Hun descent. The new national curriculum for history mandates the teaching of mythic Hungarian “prehistory” and tales of “the taking of the homeland.”Footnote ¹¹¹ While nineteenth-century historians naturally built on medieval stories, today only a willful disregard for scholarship can lead to an acceptance of medieval tales as true. The mythic migration story is celebrated as essential to creating Hungarian identity. In stark contrast, new immigrants are presented as a threat that will destroy the fabric of society. Both modern tales of migration, whether positive or negative, are instrumentalized in the service of power. Those who claim that new migrants are a threat to a homogeneous society forget that migration has always created hybridity, and that no “ethnic purity” can be found no matter how far back in time we go. Hybridity was already the rule in the Middle Ages and even before,Footnote ¹¹² including when it came to “the Hungarians” themselves. Migration as a historical process—both in the past and in the present—can generate tensions, but longer-term integration means that “locals” include descendants of past immigrants. What tales are spun around real and invented migrations has always been linked to authorial agendas in both the medieval and the contemporary world. Tales of migration have long played a role in creating communal identity,Footnote ¹¹³ but their brutally exclusionary instrumentalization is an invention tied to games of power. Nothing demonstrates this better than the outcome of a recent court case. In 2021, Árpád W. Tóta, a writer who ironically subverted government rhetoric by describing the Hungarians defeated at the battle of Augsburg (Lechfeld) in 955 as “smelly migrants,” was condemned by the highest court for “violating the dignity of the community of the Hungarian nation”; the verdict stated that the term “‘migrant’ has a pejorative connotation in today’s public discourse.”Footnote ¹¹⁴