The
Tarih-i Ungurus, written between 1543
and 1566, tells the history of the lands of Hungary from the conquest of the
region by Alexander the Great to the death of King Louis II at the Battle of
Mohács in 1526. The only known copy is held in the Library of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences, where it arrived after its rediscovery and initial
publication by Ármin Vámbéry in 1860.[1] The
210 folios of unillustrated text are composed of a combination of Ottoman
Turkish prose and verse. The title page reads Tarih-i Ungurus with the partially rubbed out subtitle Iskendername, or history of Alexander
the Great. The page also includes the signatures of two previous owners, one Muhammed
Amin Abu l'Is'ad Tusturzade[2]
and the other of the nineteenth century scholar Vámbéry. Hazai, the publisher
of the critical edition, found no evidence to suggest it exists in other forms,
concluding that this was the autograph copy.[3]
The
author reveals his name, clues towards a date range, and claims a specific
purpose in the dedication on folios 2b-3a:
“When Sultan [Suleiman]’s sword
took Hungary, a few people from the fortresses fled to the King of Vienna and
did not listen to the commands of the padisha, that is why he sent a sea of
soldiers against them and with one motion conquered them. At that time, in a
castle known as Ustulni Belgırad [Székesfehérvár], a Latin language book found
its way into our hands. Its contents explored, it was revealed that it
contained the history of Hungary starting from the ancient days. It sought to explain how the land flowered,
why it was named Hungary, how its capitol city, Buda, was given the name Buda,
what was the name of its earlier capitol, what types of kings followed each
other, when, and with whom they fought battles, how long they ruled, and lived.
That is why I, the weak and poor servant, Tercüman Mahmud, decided that I would
translate it. Perhaps the day will
come when the current padisah and those that follow will turn their noble
attention and happen upon this unworthy poor man’s present, and will with
good-nature tolerate and be gracious to this pious submissive servant.[4]
Thus, the text cannot have been
created before the capture of Székesfehérvár in 1543, given the reference to
the event, and its dedication to Sultan Suleiman provides it with a terminus
ante quem of 1566, the year the sultan died on the battlefield in Szigetvár. The self depreciating request for favor from
the “current padisah and those that follow” seems to be a formulaic request for
support. Given the date range and the information contained within, it seems
quite plausible that the work operated in dialogue with the ongoing
consolidation of power in the conquered portions of the fragmented Hungarian
territories.
The
author, Tercüman Mahmud, was a well known dragoman (translator) at the Ottoman
court of Sultan Suleiman. His unusually prolific diplomatic career has been
reconstructed by scholars from archives in Vienna and Istanbul.[5]
Captured during the Battle of Mohács,
he came from a Viennese Jewish family. Before his conversion, his name was
Sebold von Pibrach, the son of a burgher merchant, Jacob von Pibrach. He was
well educated and arrived in the palace schools reading and writing in Latin,
German, and Hungarian. During his tenure he served in diplomatic missions to
Transylvania (1550 and 1554), Poland (1543 and 1554), Paris (1569), Venice and
Cypress (1570), Vienna (1550, 1574) and finally Prague (1575) where he died.[6]
Some scholars question if Tercüman Mahmud composed the Tarih-i Ungurus, based primarily on the fact that tough while only
one dragoman by the name of Mahmud operated at the time, he left no evidence
that he wrote works of history outside of this volume. This led Hazai to
suggest that he commissioned the work, or at the very least worked closely with
a secondary author more well versed in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic.[7]
Hazai’s
critical edition includes a philological study of the quality and character of
the Ottoman Turkish and Arabic quotations used throughout the text. Looking for
traces of the author’s German roots in syntax errors, he concludes that text
suggests multiple authors who wielded Ottoman Turkish and Arabic as native
speakers.[8]
Identifying few mistakes and few loan words, Hazai also suggested that the
deformed names suggested the hand of a non-German speaker. In an earlier publication,
Hazai also suggested that the missing words were probably meant to be written
in a different color, and thus blames errors on a scribe rather than
hypothesizing about a secondary author.[9]
The
sources of the work have been identified as a history of Alexander the Great, from
the popular Ottoman Iskendername genre; a corrupt late medieval version of M. I.
Iustinus's World History; the
Hungarian historical medieval chronicle Chronicon
Pictum compiled by Mark of Kalt;[10] an altered European edition of Johannes de
Thurocz’s Chronica Hungarorum (used
for all information post 1000 information); [11]
and some early scholars took his introduction literally and believed there was
a single mysterious Latin chronicle in Szekesfehervar combining the history of
Alexander the Great with that of medieval Hungary that is no longer extant.
Following
its initial rediscovery, scholarship on the Tarih-i
Ungurus centered largely on identifying this fictitious Latin source it
purported to reproduce which would have provided information on the early
history of the Magyar people and their settlement in the Carpathian Basin not
available elsewhere.[12]
The first person to put forth a serious alternative to the search for the Latin
chronicle was István Borzsák, who showed that much of Alexander the Great
material was derived from Iustinus's 44 volume Historiae Philippicae embellished with motifs borrowed from the
widely popular Iskendername, or
Alexander Romance.[13] The
critical edition appeared in 2009 and led to a major growth in awareness of the
manuscript and interesting new hypotheses about its origins and meanings. Balázs
Sudár included it in his short analysis of the mental occupation of Hungary by
the Ottomans to show how acquiring the territories went hand in hand with
acquiring the past through rewriting it.[14] Specifically,
Sudár argues that the focus on fictitious anecdotes from the life of Alexander
the Great served to show that the Ottomans were heirs to the Alexandrine empire
and thus rightfully in possession of the lands of not only the Kingdom of
Hungary, but also the lands of Europe that lay beyond it. Sudár situates this
within a context of other legitimizing actions, such as the appropriation of
religious and ceremonial spaces and the creation of a new Eastern pedigree for
the royal accouterments.
[1] Ármin Vámbéry, “Tarihi Engerusz, azaz Magyarország
története czimű török kézirat ismertetése Vámbéri Armintól,” ed. Antal
Csengery, Magyar akadémiai értesítő. Philosophiai, törvény-és
történettudományi osztályok közlönye 1 (1860): 360–362.
[2] Unidentified. Needs archival research.
[3] Hazai 1996.
[4] “(2b) O zaman kim zarb-ı teğiyle fetheylediği Ungurus
vilayeti kalelerınden birkaç kalenin ehalisi Bic kıralına itaat edip emr-i
padişahiye imtisal ve inkıyad eyelemedikleri ecilden üzerlerine deryamisal
asker çekip varıp cüzvi işaretle fetheyleyip Ustulni Belgırad nam kalede Latin
ibaretince bir kitab ele girip mefhumuna nazar olundukta, Ungurus vilayetinin
kadimü’l-eyyamdan tevarihi olup o vilayet ne vechile mamur olup ve Ungurus dediklerine sebeb ne vechile olmuştur,
ve tahtgahı olan Budine niçin Budin demişlerdir, ve kadim tahtlarının adı
nedir, ve ne denlu kırallar gelip gitmişler, ve ne zamanlarda kimler ile ceng ü
cıdal eylemişlerdir, ve ne miktar kırallık sürüp zindegani kırmışlardır beyan
olunmağa sayedip (3a) bu biçare-i zayıf Tercüman Mahmud bende tercüme eylemeğe
kasdeyledimç Vakat olda padişah-ı devranın ve sahibkıran-ı devr-i zamanın bu
fakir-i hakirin tuhfesine nazar-ı şerifleri mukarin olup bendeleri hakkında
himmeti ve inayeti mebzul buyurıla.”
Transcription published in Hazai 2009, 13-14. Translation is my own based
partially on the Hungarian translation in Hazai 1996, 26.
[5] Josef Matuz, “Die Pfortendolmetscher Zur
Herrschaftszeit Süleymans Des Prächtigen,” Südost-Forschungen 34 (1975):
26–60. Hazai expanded on this work with archival research conducted by
Petritsch. Some of this archival work was partially published in E. D. Petritsch, “Der habsburgisch-osmanische
Friedensvertrag des Jahres 1547,” Mitteilungen des Österreichischen
Staatsarchivs 38 (1985): 49–80.
[6] Hazai 2009, 12.
[7] Hazai 1996, 11.
[8] Ibid., 15.
[9] Ibid., 13.
[10] The manuscript is housed in the Országos Széchényi
Könyvtár, Budapest (shelf mark Cod. 404) and dates between 1330 and 1360. The
147 illuminated illustrations represent a high point in Eastern European
medieval art. It is rather curious that the Tarih-i
Ungurus does not attempt to reproduce any images.
[11] Hazai 1996.
[12] József Budenz, “Tarihi Engerusz, azaz Magyarország
története czimű török kézirat ismertetése Budenz Józseftől,” ed. Antal
Csengery, Magyar akadémiai értesítő. Philosophiai, törvény-és
történettudományi osztályok közlönye 2 (1861): 261–316.
[13] István Borzsák, “A ‘Hungarian History’ Through Turkish
Eyes and the Alexander the Great Tradition,” in Occident and Orient: a
Tribute to the Memory of Alexander Scheiber, ed. Sándor Scheiber and Róbert
Dán (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 31–38.
[14] Balázs Sudár, “Az oszmánok és Magyarország mentális
meghódítása [The Ottomans and the mental occupation of Hungary],” in Identitás
és kultúra a török hódoltság korában, ed. Pál Ács and Júlia Székely
(Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2012), 40–49.