Gesta Hungarorum - Reliability

Reliability

According to Carlile Aylmer Macartney, the work is the most famous, the most obscure, the most exasperating and most misleading of all the early Hungarian texts.

Though this is a historical manuscript written under the aegis of the Hungarian king, some Hungarian historians have considered it to consist of inventions by the author or his predecessors. Some of the work is recognizably based directly on earlier sources that narrate the history of the Magyar peoples that invaded the Carpathian basin. Paul Robert Magocsi from the University of Toronto described the Gesta Hungarorum as an unreliable work. In a more recent work of professor Magocsi and Ivan Pop it is stated that the view of modern historians on the Gesta Hungarorum is mixed: some consider it a reliable source; others (among them historian Aleksei L. Petrov) consider its information doubtful. Magocsi quoted authors referring to the Gesta Hungarorum as a source in one of his recent works also mentioning authors critical of its reliability.

The Gesta does not discuss the 200 years of history between the era of Hunnish king Attila and Hungarian prince Árpád. The Gesta also states that Árpád is a direct descendant of Attila.

According to Martyn Rady, Anonymus's "account pretends to give a historically-grounded account of early Hungarian history... but does in fact nothing of the sort. Anonymus's account is essentially a ‘toponymic romance’ that seeks to explain place-names by reference to imagined events and persons. Although he gets the names of the earliest Hungarian rulers right, as well as some of the early tribal chieftains, he has the Hungarians beating Slavonic and Romanian leaders whose names are not attested to anywhere else, as well as fighting the Cumans (who appeared in Europe only in the late 11th century) and even the Romans". Clearly, there is a bit of correct history in Anonymus's work, and at least a few of his heroes can be 'cross-checked' against information given by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, Liudprand of Cremona and the Annals of St Gall. Gesta Hungarorum's main subject of controversy concerns the mentioning of the existence of the local rulers Gelou, Glad and Menumorut in Transylvania at the arrival of the Magyars in the 10th century. The very existence of these three dukedoms mainly inhabited by Vlachs and Slavs is disputed.