17 Facts About Gesta Hungarorum

The Gesta Hungarorum exists in a sole manuscript from the second part of the 13th century, which was for centuries held in Vienna.

Principal subject of the Gesta Hungarorum is the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin at the turn of the 9th and 10th centuries, and it writes of the origin of the Hungarians, identifying the Hungarians' ancestors with the ancient Scythians.

Gesta Hungarorum knew a version of the late 11th-century "Hungarian Chronicle" the text of which has partially been preserved in his work and in later chronicles, but his narration of the Hungarian Conquest differs from the version provided by the other chronicles.

Author of the Gesta Hungarorum has been known as Anonymus ever since the publication of the first Hungarian translation of his work in 1790.

Study of place names mentioned in the Gesta Hungarorum suggests that Anonymus had a detailed knowledge both of the wider region of Obuda and Csepel Island and of the lands along the upper courses of the river Tisza.

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Gesta Hungarorum did not write of the southern and eastern parts of Transylvania.

Gesta Hungarorum 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" even to his time.

Gesta Hungarorum 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 Laszlo Veszpremy.

Gesta Hungarorum accepted Regino of Prum's view when identifying the Scythians as the Hungarians' ancestors.

For instance, the Gesta Hungarorum wrote of a battle between the Greeks and the Hungarians at a ford by the River Tisza which was named after this event as "Ford of the Greeks", according to Anonymus, although it received this name after its revenues were granted to the Greek Orthodox monastery of Sremska Mitrovica in the 12th century.

The ninth chapter of the Gesta Hungarorum describes the submission of the Rus' and "Cuman" princes to Almos.

Later chronicles did not use the Gesta Hungarorum, suggesting that Anonymus's contemporaries knew that he had invented most details of his account of the Hungarian Conquest, according to Gyula Kristo.

Gesta Hungarorum was first published as the first volume of the series Scriptures rerum Hungaricarum in 1746 by Johann Georg von Schwandtner.

Professors of the Universities of Halle and Gottingen soon raised their doubts about the reliability of the Gesta Hungarorum, emphasizing, for instance, the anachronistic description of the Rus' principalities.

Romanian historians have presented them as Romanian rulers whose presence in the Gesta Hungarorum proves the existence of Romanian polities in the territory of present-day Romania at the time of the Hungarian Conquest.

View of modern historians on the Gesta Hungarorum is mixed: some consider it a reliable source; others consider its information doubtful.

Alexandru Madgearu, who wrote a monography of the Gesta Hungarorum, concluded that the "analysis of several fragments of" the Gesta Hungarorum "has demonstrated that this work is generally credible, even if it ignores important events and characters and even if it makes some chronological mistakes".