HUNGARIAN STUDIES 4. No. 2. Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság. Akadémiai Kiadó Budapest [1988]

Péter Váczy: Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos and the Saga of the Hungarian Conquest

BYZANTINE EMPEROR CONSTANTINE Vu PORPHYROGENITOS AND THE SAGA OF THE HUNGARIAN CONQUEST PÉTER VÁCZY Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos (t959), who inherited the love of literature from his father, Leo the Wise, appears to have delighted in collecting the legendary material of foreign peoples. In his well-known book entitled De Administrando Imperio there are many passages that illustrate his interest in all kinds of popular manifestation. The tone and terminology of chapters on various peoples reveal that Constantine's informers came from the rank and file and that their words were often recorded in a rough and unrefined fashion. These passages of his book differ substantially from those where the author draws upon texts of Byzantine chroniclers which display literary elaboration. If we reak, for instance, the material collected on Dalmatia — divided into two whole chapters (29, 30) - or the narrative on the origin, language, customs etc. of the coastal Croatians (31), the Serbs (32) and other minor Slavic people of the Adria seashore, we would agree with the Emperor that this material deserved to have been recorded, even if uncritically, at such great length. Bearing this in mind, we are bound to see the chapters on the Magyars (13, 37—42, Une 18) from a different angle. For the Hungarians, just as the Croatians and other peoples living in a pristine community, when asked by the Byzantines to speak about their origin and past, did not enumerate the bare historical facts, but transposed these facts into the realm of myth, as they had heard them from their minstrels. As every genre, the heroic song too had its particular rules sustained by the force of a living tradition. Of our heroic songs dated from the age of the Conquest only a few fragments have survived in our Latin chronicle literature, but none has been preserved in its original language form. From these fragments, however, it is possible to establish, that our heroic songs cannot have been much different from the compositions and rendering of the Eurasian Turkic—Mongolian peoples. On the strength of certain traces it may be said that the bulk of our songs from the age of the Conquest was composed not in the Hungarian language, but in accordance with the requirements of the princely courts in Turkish, in plain Turkish or Bulgarian—Turkish. It is precisely through the work of Emperor Constantine cited here that the role of the Pechenegs in the history of the Magyar Conquest has become familiar. Regino, who writes in Latin, also imputes to the Pechenegs — gaining information from elsewhere — that the Magyars had left the Black Sea coastline and migrated to their present homeland (in the year 889). The Pechenegs attacked when the Hungarian warriors were far away in Italy staying there for one year (from August 899 to August 900). When they returned, the Hungarian Studies 4/2 (1988) Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest

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