Gyula László
The Magyars of Conquest-Period Hungary
Written Sources
It lay in Byzantium's interest to obtain accurate intelligence about the peoples who threatened the northern borders of the empire so that it could prepare to deal with them in full knowledge of their idiosyncracies. In his Taktika, Emperor Leo VI the Wise (886-912) provides copious details on the arts of war employed by the "Turks", his name for the Magyars. "They have a liking more for fighting at a distance, setting ambushes, encirclement of their enemy, simulated retreat and about-turning, and for the scattering of fighting formations," he writes, among other things, these being the same as the tactics employed by the historical Turkic peoples. Leo's son, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (913-959) describes the Magyars with the freshness of recent experience, for he tells us that he gained his information directly from Árpád's great-grandson, Tormás, and the army commander, Bulcsú, who had happened "just lately to be with us." He lists the names of seven Magyar tribes: after the Kabars, tribes who had split off from the Khazars and were placed at the head of the Magyar battle order, was the tribe of Neke (Nyék), second that of Megere, third Kourtugermatos (Kürtgyarmat), fourth Tarianos (Tarján), fifth Genach (Jenõ), sixth Kare (Kér) and last that of Kase (Keszi). These tribal names, in the form of the parenthesized equivalents of the Greek transliterations, survive in Hungary to the present day.
Alongside the Byzantine reports, the other significant sources are Arabic. These too needed to be authentic, for it was on their strength that trading caravans and Islamic missionaries journeyed to the East and armies set off in search of conquests. The Arabic geographers in turn gathered new information from the leaders of these ventures. The most important of these sources for our purposes are Ibn Rusta (c. 930) and Gardizi (c. 1050). The former records:
Between the country of the Bajanakiyya (Pechenegs) and the country of the Askal, who belong to the Balkariyya (Volga Bulgars), is the first (i.e. outermost) of the Magyar boundaries. The Magyars are a race of Turks and their king rides out with horsemen to the number of 10,000 and this king is called Kanda (Künde or Kende)... They possess leather tents (covered yurts or wagons) and they travel in search of herbage and abundant pasturage... The country of the Magyars contains many trees and much water and their ground is moist and they have many fields... The Magyars worship the sun and the moon. (Trans. M. Smith.)
Gardizi's remarks on their marriage customs have the directness of an ethnographer's report:
It is a custom when marrying that when a woman is sought in marriage, a dowry is appointed in accordance with the wealth in cattle, less or more, belonging to that man. When they sit down to appoint that dowry, the father of the maiden brings the father of the son-in-law to his own house and whatever he has in the way of sable and ermine and grey squirrel and stoat and the belly of the fox (...) and brocade, he collects all of these skins together to the quantity of ten fur garments and folds them inside a carpet and fastens them on the horse of his son-in-law's father and speeds him to his house. Then whatever is necessary for the maiden's dowry which they have agreed upon such as animals and money and goods is all sent to him (i.e. the maiden's father), and at that time they bring the woman to the house. (Trans. M. Smith.)
This splendid description might well have served Arabic traders as a guide to the kind of goods that they should take with them to the land of the Magyars, and what they could obtain in exchange.
The Primary Russian Chronicle, attributed by some to Nestor, recalls that the Magyars undertook two Conquests of Hungary, first under the name of "White Ugrians", during the time when the Avars occupied the country, and then a second during the reign of the Grand Duke Oleg.1
The Legend of St Methodius, from the early 880s, contains some fine lines about a "king of the Ugrians" (i.e. Magyars):
But when the king of the Ugrians arrived in the region of the Danube, he wished to see him (i.e. Methodius). And although some said that he would not live through this without the ordeals of torture, he went to him. But the king received him respectfully as befits a high priest, with due ceremony and rejoicing. And speaking with him in a manner as was proper for men of such rank to speak, embracing and kissing him and bestowing valuable gifts upon him, he dismissed him with these words: "Reverend father, do not fail to remember me in your holy prayers."
This Magyar "king" was evidently familiar not only with diplomatic proprieties but must also have had a good knowledge of Christianity.2
Western sources saw the Magyars as hostile and so tended to write down even hearsay as authentic fact; nevertheless, they do provide us with precious documentation. This is particularly true of the vivid and sympathetic account of the deeds of a band of "marauding" Magyars in Switzerland as written down by Ekkehardt the Younger, the eccentric friar of the monastery of St Gallen, around 1060. The "hero" of the tale is a simple-minded monk, Heribald, who, instead of taking flight with his brother monks on the approach of the Magyar Army, calmly awaited its arrival.3 He had a fine time amongst the formidable warriors and they in turn evidently took a liking to him:
Now there were in the monks' common cellar two barrels of wine, which were filled to the brim... One of them (i.e. the Magyars), brandishing his axe, would have cut the hoops, but Heribald, who by now moved about amongst them with great familiarity, spoke out: "Desist, my good fellow; for what shall we drink once you have departed?" Hearing these words from the interpreter, the Magyar laughed and asked his companions: "Touch not my fool's casks." In this manner, they were preserved... Their captains feasted copiously in the cloister-garth; and Heribald, too, ate and drank his fill along with them, as he was wont to tell in later years, as he had never eaten and drunken before... The Magyars tore and devoured with their bare teeth the half-raw shoulder-blades and other joints of the cattle which they had slain, after which each would cast the gnawed bones in sport at one another. The wine was placed in the midst, in brimming goblets, and each drank as much as he desired... Giving release to their high spirits, they danced and wrestled with one another before their captains; some contended in arms to demonstrate their skill in the art of war. (after G.G. Coulton.)
Heribald said to those who interrogated him later about his experiences:
I do not recall that I ever saw happier people within our monastery than at that time. For they provided food and drink in the greatest abundance. Whereas before then I had scarcely been able to prevail on our dour cellarer even once to give me drink when I was thirsty, they gave me plentifully at my bidding.
The unparallelled immediacy of this memoir is amply complemented by other western sources which deal more with military campaigns than with daily life. Among these, the chronicle of Widukind (925-1004), which concerns the history of the Saxons, is of great interest as it refers to the Magyars in a rather unusual set of circumstances. Widukind relates that they had settled down in Hungary before the campaigns of Charlemagne; their people was one and the same as the Huns and Avars, who were now called Magyars. Regino, abbot of Prüm in Carolingian Lotharingia (Lorraine) is generally regarded as the most important of the western sources, for under the entry for the year 889 in his Chronicon he reports on the emergence of the Magyars, who had earlier lived in the Scythian plains. He speaks of a Pecheneg attack on them and of their horn-tipped arrows against which "it is scarcely possible to find protection." Regino also gives credence to certain malicious rumours when he opines that the Magyars "are not men but live in the manner of wild beasts."4 Other contemporary sources deal mainly with the battles of the Magyar "marauders" and we can therefore omit reference to them here.
[...]
[...] Anonymus describes how the Conquest steadily proceeded under Árpád's command; how he broke the resistance offered by the indigenous population, whether militarily or by dynastic pacts (his own son, Zoltán, married the daughter of Mén-Marót); and then how he began to play various sides against one another in the struggles between the western powers (his "raids"). The questions that are of greater interest here, however, are: Who exactly did the Árpádian Magyars find living in Hungary when they took it over? And what were their relationships with these populations?
In the ninth century the territory of Hungary fell within the spheres of influence of three powers. In the north, up to the line of the Garam river, the Kingdom of Great Moravia held sway, whilst the south, between the Drava and Sava rivers and into the Bácska region, was controlled by southern Moravians. The Carolingian Empire had driven a wedge between these into Pannonia (i.e. into Transdanubia), with the Danube acting as the border with the Bulgarian Khanate, which had suzerainty over the lands of the east (the Great Plain and Transylvania). These spheres of influence were not, however, reflected in the distribution of the respective peoples. The Bavarian colonizers introduced by the Carolingian occupation vanished without trace after the Magyar Conquest and the true mass of the native population were the Onogur-Hungarians who had arrived around A.D. 670, in the late Avar period. The Onogurs spread essentially throughout the Middle and Upper Danube basins and formed a series of alliances with the Carolingians and Byzantium in succession, around the years 811, 832 and 860 (formerly historians used to believe that Onogur armies attacking from bases in southern Russia were involved but they were actually Onogurs dwelling in Hungary). It is from these Onogur-Hungarians that we get most of the early Hungarian place-names in the Carpathian basin, i.e. those featuring in the earliest extant documents from the Árpádian era.
Anonymus reveals that he too must have had some knowledge of these antecedents because he writes that Árpád's people were called Hungari after the fortress of Ung. In other words, he knew that this was the name that had attached to the "Turks" once they were on Hungarian soil. Furthermore, he reports that Álmos took with him a number of peoples when he set off from the old Magyar homeland in Atelkuzu to occupy Hungary. This might explain the hitherto unsolved problem of why Árpád's people were known under a variety of names in the sources: Magyars, Onogurs, Bashkirs, Turks and Savartoi or Savards. At one time all these names were taken as referring to a single ethnic entity, the Magyars, but it is highly likely that the Magyars emerged from a meld of peoples which formerly had had separate identities.
Anonymus describes the routes taken by Árpád's armies and the way they fanned out across Hungary. Directly after the Conquest a number of different "countries" were established within the occupied territory, and this is what lies behind the tradition of the sealing of a blood pact between tribes. The chiefs of these "countries" tried to preserve their autonomy against the central authority, the eventual upshot of which was a series of campaigns conducted against them by Prince Géza and especially by King Stephen I (e.g. those against Koppány, Ajtony, Gyula, and later on, Aba and Vata). Árpád's successors organized Hungary's border-defences, deploying certain auxiliary peoples (the Székely, Pechenegs, Kavars) as frontier guards and constructing a fortified line which is now beginning to be uncovered in the form of "burned" earthworks (these extend the length of entire country districts in Transylvania and also elsewhere).6 It used to be the view that the policing of these marches was limited to roads and passes but today we can see that the whole settlement territory, the new Magyar "homeland", was girdled by a series of fortified places.
Studies of the social and administrative structure of Árpádian Hungary have provided some rewarding insights.7 An important detail, and one which is observed only in the early Árpádian era, is the existence of what are called "service" problems, that is, settlements differentiated by their obligations to specialize in certain crafts or services. Mention should first be made, however, of the use of a "decimal" system as the administrative unit not only of King Stephen (e.g. his decree that one church was to be built by every ten villages, the establishment of ten bishoprics, etc.) but equally of the late Avar-Onogur state. Analysis of the plans of late Avar-Onogur cemeteries has shown that, in general, each arrow find symbolized ten freemen. This kind of decimal organization is not found amongst the Árpádian Magyars, suggesting that King Stephen simply adapted to his own purposes a system that predated the Magyar conquest. As Hans Gückenjan has pointed out8, it was also a common principle of military organization amongst eastern peoples.
The Árpádian state and the rule of the Árpád dynasty thus slowly took shape. Its administration rested on the army, on decimal organization, and eventually, under Géza and Stephen, on Christianization. In dealing with the adoption and propagation of Christianity in Hungary it is necessary first of all to dispel the notion that the Christian states of the West, and above all the monastic orders, can take all the credit for spreading a more civilized culture in the country. Undoubtedly there is much truth in this, but it is simply misleading to suggest that all was pagan and barbarian before Stephen's reign, whilst after it everything became Christianized and civilized in the western mould. The pre-Christian Hungarian vocabulary was already adequate to translate the entire Bible, and the process of conversion drew mainly on this extant "pagan" word-stock for its exegesis of the new faith. This alone must be taken as indicating that the Hungarian language was already rich in expressions for religious concepts prior to the conversion and that these concepts in turn did not fundamentally differ from those of the new creed.
In reality, the Magyars had been living in a veritable sea of monotheistic peoples for several centuries prior to the Conquest - amongst them, Christians of the Caucasus and Maeotis, Judaicised Khazars, as well as many converts to Islam. These same peoples also accompanied the Árpádian Magyars in the occupation of Hungary. We know this because Ibrahim ibn-Yakub, a Jewish merchant, recorded that, when he visited the fair at Prague, on his journey back to Spain from Kiev, he had met Turkish, Jewish and Mohammedan traders who had travelled there from the land of the "Turks"9.
It is appropriate also to touch briefly on a similar misconception that the Árpádian Magyars were a race of nomadic herdsmen and that some crisis led them to abandon this way of life for sedentary farming once they had entered the Middle Danube basin. This theory, which held sway as a virtually obligatory doctrine in the early 1950s, cannot be substantiated and, moreover, is falsely grounded. The occupations of farmer and animal breeder both call for their own separate skills, expertise and experience that take centuries to develop, and neither is given up or acquired so lightly, overnight, least of all on orders. The Árpádian Magyars had their own farmers from the beginning and others already inhabited Hungary when they arrived; the animal-breeding, horse-riding segments of their society was needed to provide warriors for the army, not serfs. György Györffy has proposed that high-ranking Magyar leaders used to move between winter and summer camps along the river valleys, in much the same way as the Mongol khan and nobles of the Golden Horde did in a later century. Györffy cites as evidence the use of the same clan and personal names for sites on the upper and lower reaches of rivers.10 The difficulty with this suggestion is that it is hard to imagine how such pastoralism could have been carried out in the flood plains of some rivers, whilst in other areas the density of settlements was such that little grazing ground can have been left for horse and cattle herds that were merely in transit.
Magyar villages of the Conquest era
We can now turn to the archaeological data. The subtitle is slightly mis- leading inasmuch as there is just one Conquest-period Magyar village, Felgyõ, for which we have detailed information, and even this is incomplete; as it has been possible to excavate only small areas of the site.
The conventional school of thought used to assume that no Árpádian village could have existed. It was supposed that the Magyars, being nomadic herdsmen, could not have had permanent settlements or villages being constantly on the move in search of new grazing. Once the "myth" that the Magyars were no more than nomadic horsemen had been challenged, however, it became necessary to locate the settlement sites of the Árpádian Magyars - a task that was originally entrusted to me by the Archaeological Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, perhaps on the tacit understanding that something that had not come to light in 150 years of excavations in the country would be a fitting object for my attention. The support for excavations was meagre, to say the least (over twenty years it amounted perhaps to as much as excavations at Roman-era sites received annually). We could only look enviously at the seemingly limitless funds available to Slovak colleagues, on the opposite bank of the Danube, for their work on early Slav settlements and the high-culture Kingdom of Great Moravia. Romanian archaeology likewise was attracting large sums for diggings at the fortifications and villages of the Dacians. Meanwhile, we had to patch and mend as best we could and failed even to gain a protection order for a thousand-year-old site because a new "socialist village" was under construction there. For all the restrictions these circumstances imposed, they had compensatory spin-offs - for example, in the kilometres of ditches for water-mains that were dug up, like so many "exploratory trenches", which greatly helped us to fix the boundaries of the old settlement.
The old ideas about the nomadic Magyars suffering some kind of crisis in their pastoral life-style continued to exert a baleful influence on the picture of the early Magyar village that began to emerge. For some time it had been fashionable to say that by the time of the Conquest, Magyar dwellings had advanced no more than "from yurt to hut". This assertion is laughable enough nowadays but it was sustained for a while by the over-hasty conclusions of some linguists who had tried to trace the history of Hungarian building terms back into the Finno-Ugrian past and ended up envisaging some amazingly primitive shelter. Clearly, the concept may have had some validity for conditions that prevailed five or six thousand years before the Conquest, but to project this into the Conquest period itself was methodologically unsound11. Ethnologists were closer to the truth with their opinion, briefly put, that Conquest-period Magyar dwellings must have been more like nineteenth-century Hungarian villages than the clusters of rudimentary tents in which the Magyars' kinsfolk, the Voguls and Ostyaks, dwelt until recently. Sadly, the time-scales of linguistics are extroardinarily precarious: correct as many of the etymologies undoubtedly are, they are not anchored to a firm chronology and thus have led to historical deductions which are as uncertain as those in the sphere of prehistory.
As the material from our excavations at Felgyõ has not yet been published in full12, I shall report here some of the main findings.
The inhabitants of Felgyõ cultivated wheat, rye, millet and grapes and kept poultry, swine, horses, cattle, sheep, goats and guard- or sheep-dogs. In this respect, they do indeed seem to have been the thousand-year-old conterparts of early twentieth-century Hungarian peasants - an impression that is strenghened by what we have learned of their abodes. They had yurts, but these were surrounded by wide defensive ditches and so could not have been intended for use as mobile quarters; more likely they were comfortable permanent dwellings. The village also had habitations made from logs, wattle-and-daub, and bricks. Alas, we were unable to uncover the full ground plan of the village, so we can only suspect that these differences in house-type point to social stratification. We believe that the yurts, which would have belonged to the high-ranking, formed a single row with the various other types of dwellings arranged alongside or around them. The majority of the dwellings did not have an inside hearth; the fire-place was located outside, in front. It was highly instructive to find that the Christian-era cemetery was virtually a mirror-image of the village itself, containing brick-lined graves, pits with wooden coffins, bodies wrapped in felt cloths (these may have been meant to evoke the yurts), and finally - though this is still only a tentative interpretation - graves with mud-packed walls. This suggests that an individual's abode in life was supposed to be perpetuated in death.
None of the dwellings had foundations; they were constructed on levelled ground. The small church, on the other hand, had immaculate clay foundations. The hill on which it stood, which we believe may have been a prehistoric barrow, had been banked up twice over to raise the house of God higher above the cluster of moated dwellings. Unmistakeable signs of earth-moving activity were found around the hill in the form of 8-10 gullies, now partially eroded, where the topsoil had been removed down to the yellow hardpan layer. Similar traces of "collective work" were found in the ditches around the yurts.
Burial grounds dating from four different periods - late Bronze Age (Vatya culture), Sarmatian, early-late Avar, the Conquest era - were found within the village area. The last of these yielded a two-edged sword, which makes it more likely to date from the latter half of the tenth century; a spur with a terminal cone points to the same period. For all practical purposes, then, Felgyõ seems to have been continuously inhabited since village settlement started in Hungary. It had two attributes to thank for this. First was ready access to water, for the village was situated alongside a stream called the Vidre and was also within the flood-plain of the Tisza river, whilst a series of hillocks provided high ground for settlement. Second, Felgyõ stands at the point where the main East-West route through Hungary, from prehistoric times onward, crossed the Tisza. To this day, the towns of Csongrád and Szentes, on either side of the river, are connected by the ferry at Bód. The sword and spur indicate that its owner was a fighting man, possibly a guard at the ferry.
As to the village itself, each dwelling was surrounded by a fairly large ditch system enclosing 700-1,000 square metres. These had been carefully dug as double-lipped ditches but they followed the lie of the land rather than having a run-off. In older times, at least when the water-table was high, the ditches would obviously have been filled with water so that the dwellings had individual moats. We may guess that dense thickets of reeds, sedges and bulrushes fringed the ditches and even that a stockade or hedgerow was set on top of the inner mound. Each enclosed compound was a self-sufficient unit, with a dwelling in one corner and the remaining space given over as a sort of garden to the cultivation of crops and vegetables. It may be supposed, though we have come across no traces of such a structure, that there would have been a bridge to pass over the ditch, at least at one point. As no middens were found, we assume that most animals were not kept inside the enclosures, in which case they must have been held outside the village, on the surrounding lands. At most one or two saddle-horses may have been kept next to the dwelling (a curry-comb was found buried in the mud at the bottom of one of the ditches).
These findings lead us to imagine that the old village consisted of a central core of enclosed compounds with some system of outlying camps for open-range herding of horses and cattle. The Legend of St Gerhardus (Gellért) speaks, as does Bertrandon de la Brocquiére's account, of huge herds of horses that belonged to Ajtony.[...]
[...]
One aspect that we have yet to touch on is where Árpád's host and the Magyar people crossed the Carpathians to enter the country. Hungarian chroniclers record three routes: one via the Vereckei Pass, a second through Transylvania, and a third via what in Hungarian is called the Lower Danube. It is more than likely that the various peoples flooded into the Carpathian basin by all three routes, "country" by "country", in the same groups as they and their ancestors had occupied Atelkuzu beside the Black Sea. There is even some documentary evidence for this inasmuch as, in the late 13th-century Gesta Hungarorum, Simon Kézai records that the headquarter sites occupied by the Magyar "chieftains" were well separated from one another (this may be how we should interpret the seven earthwork castles constructed in Transylvania). Settlers may then have fanned out from these centres, with the final share-out of territories only occurring after the whole country had been colonized. We have no way of tracing how these expanding ripples of settlement took place - for instance, whether newcomers prodded those who had reached Hungary before them into moving on, or whether they leapfrogged them to claim the next zone of land for themselves.
In view of the need for wood to make everyday implements, it seems quite possible that the paired settlement names referred to earlier do not represent winter and summer quarters but recall a time when each population had one settlement in a wooded area. The small, "classical" Conquest-era burial sites of Árpádian Magyars could be memorials to a re-settlement process. But then where have the human remains of the clans that participated in this process disappeared? The population of Hungary must have been in a state of upheaval for a good half-century after the Conquest; all we can be sure of is that the generations which succeeded the small groups buried in the "classical" cemeteries moved on to other areas. Only future research will be able to tell us if cemeteries discovered at a distance from the "classical" sites contain the remains of another, earlier Magyar population. An alternative approach might be to try and date cemeteries and their graves by decennials and thus determine whether given sites were burial grounds for two, or even three, similar peoples that successively settled an area further and further away from the "ancestors".
These are not just academic questions as they have a bearing, for instance, on the religious beliefs of the Magyars, including their concept of an afterlife. The indications are that clan members would have wished to join up with their earlier generations for life in the next world - or, to use a Székely expression for eternity, "whilst the world and two suns exist."
[...]
Gyula László,
a historian, has argued that the Magyars arrived in two separate waves, centuries apart, a notion which is still controversial. He is a historian, archeologist and painter, a retired professor of Eötvös University, and author of some twenty books and more than six hundred articles on the history and life of ancient Hungarians. The excerpts printed here are from a book to be published in English by Corvina later this year.
