A map showing the political relations in the Carpathian Basin, just before the invasion of the Magyars. The areas under Bulgarian rule are highlighted in yellow:
08.11.2024 Lavoy Joe
Just before the Magyar’s arrival in the late 9th-century, Slavic languages were the predominant languages in the territory of present-day Hungary. In recent years, studies have come to the conclusion that a Slavic language that was closest to Bulgarian was spoken in large parts of what is today Hungary up until the 13th century. The majority of Slavic borrowings (including terms related to agriculture, Christianity, and feudalism) entered Hungarian prior to the denasalization of nasal vowels in Slavic languages. It has been considered that the Slavic borrowings with nasal vowels had to have entered Hungarian before the late 10th century; however, if they came from Bulgarian-type dialects (which preserved nasal vowels far longer than other Slavic languages), then they could have entered later, even as late as the 11th–12th centuries, when conversion to Christianity and establishment of feudal institutions had been achieved, and settled lifestyle became common among the Magyar (Hungarian) population. Place names such as Pest (“cave”, a reference to the large cave systems in the Buda Hills), Putnok (“traveller”) in northeast Hungary, Csongrád (“black castle”, a former county seat) in southern Hungary imply that a Bulgarian language was spoken in an area from eastern Slovakia / northeast Hungary through Hungary’s central regions to the southern regions of Hungary / Vojvodina province of Serbia. The geographic name Bélkő (“white stone”, from Slavic belь “white” and Hungarian kő “stone”) is a great example of early Hungarian-Slavic bilingualism in the area. In the 12th-century Hungarian chronicle Gesta Hungarorum, exactly these regions are described as territories under Bulgarian rule before the beginning of Magyar conquest. For many years, the Gesta has been dismissed by historians as an unreliable historic document that contains invented stories about the Magyar conquest. However, the results of more and more modern researches and studies seem to coincide with the events preserved in the Gesta. The anonymous author of the chronicle described the political state of the regions in question: “the great Khan, duke of Bulgaria, had taken possession of the land that lies between the Danube and the Tisza, as far as the borders of the Ruthenes and the Poles, and had made the Slavs and Bulgarians live there.” In this description, a distinction between the local Slavs and the Turkic-origin Bulgarians is preserved. According to the Gesta, the eastern border of the Bulgarian settlement area was in today’s Transcarpathia region of Ukraine, when they were invaded by the hitherto-unknown Magyars: “Duke Árpád, having despatched his armies, took for himself the whole land that is between the Tisza and the Bodrog, as far as Ugocsa, together with all its inhabitants, and he also took the castle of Borsova….when the Bulgarian Duke Salan eventually heard from those of his men who had taken to flight of all that had happened, he began to wonder in many ways who they were and whence they who dared to do such things had come…” Speakers of the Bulgarian language were gradually assimilated into the Hungarian-speaking population; this process was completed after the 1241–1242 Mongol invasion of Hungary. In the regions west of the Danube river, a Slavic language that was closest to modern Slovenian was widely spoken until about the 11th century. In that regions, the assimilation of the Slavic population was more rapid, as the leading Magyar tribes settled there, due to its proximity to trading routes and its more developed infrastructure (inherited from Roman and Frankish times).
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