Gesta Hungarorum and De Administrando Imperio, translated and set together in one volume: two of the earliest written accounts of the Hungarians, one from inside the tradition and one from outside it. A work in progress, and not a scholarly edition.
The title comes from what each text is actually about. The Gesta turns on an oath — the pact the seven chieftains swore before they moved west. Constantine's book is the administration of an empire, and the Hungarians appear in it because an empire had to know what they were going to do next. One book is a promise between men on a steppe; the other is a filing system. They describe the same people.
Gesta Hungarorum
The Deeds of the Hungarians, written around 1200 by a notary at the court of King Béla — most likely Béla III — who names himself only as “P., called Master” and is known to posterity as Anonymus. It is the oldest surviving account of the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin, tracing the Magyar tribes from the Scythian steppe through the migration west under Álmos and his son Árpád: the oath of the seven chieftains, the fall of the local rulers, and the founding of what would become the Kingdom of Hungary.
It survives in exactly one manuscript, Codex Vindobonensis Latinus 514, which sat in Vienna for centuries before passing to the National Széchényi Library in Budapest. Anonymus wrote with an openly dynastic purpose, and modern historians read him with caution — his geography often reflects the political map of his own era rather than the ninth century he describes, and his etymologies are more poetic than linguistic. He remains the oldest surviving voice of the Hungarian nation speaking about its own beginnings.
De Administrando Imperio
Written around 950 by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus as a private handbook for his son — an account of the peoples on the empire's borders, what they wanted, and how to manage them. It was never meant to be published.
Its chapters on the people Constantine calls the Turks are the earliest external description of the Hungarians: the tribal names, the Kabar alliance, the westward migration, the election of Árpád. Where Anonymus writes two and a half centuries after the events with a dynasty to justify, Constantine writes within living memory of men who had actually met Hungarians, with nothing at stake but administrative accuracy.
One sentence of his — that the Magyars made Árpád their prince by raising him on a shield — became one of the most painted, cast and printed images in Hungarian art. There is a bronze of it in the collection.
That is the reason for binding them together. Read side by side, the two accounts agree in places, flatly contradict each other in others, and the disagreements are the most interesting part of either.
What this is, and what it is not
Not a scholarly edition
If you need these texts for research, this is not the book to cite. Peer-reviewed translations with full critical apparatus already exist, made by people with credentials I do not have. For the Gesta, the edition to use is Martyn Rady and László Veszprémy's, published with the Latin text as Anonymus and Master Roger (Central European University Press, 2010).
This volume is for the person who simply wants to read the thing itself — who has heard of the blood oath and the seven tribes and would like to see what the sources actually say, without a university library card.
The translation is made from the public-domain original with the assistance of Claude, Anthropic's AI model. My own part is to direct the project, source and verify the underlying text, review the translation for accuracy and consistency, standardise the proper names against Hungarian scholarship, and compile and typeset the volume. I would rather state that plainly than leave a reader to guess at it.
It is a personal project, undertaken for love of the subject and of the family history bound up in it.
State of the work
- GestaAll fifty-seven chapters translated from the Latin, with a concordance of Latin, Hungarian, and English name forms
- ConstantineThe Hungarian chapters in progress
- ApparatusA note on sources and uncertainty; a who's who; a reading list for anyone who wants to go further
- ShapeUndecided — what else belongs in the volume is still an open question
This one is genuinely unfinished, and the contents may yet change substantially. When there is a volume worth holding, it will be said here.