The legend of the white stallion

When in the ninth century of our era the Magyars conquered the Carpathian Basin, they did so with the conviction that they were simply reconquering a land that was theirs by right of inheritance.  Through the oral histories that were constantly recited by their minstrels, they were fully convinced of their close relationship to the Huns.  They were further strengthened in this belief by the fact that upon their arrival in the lands watered by the rivers Danube, Tisza, and Maros, they found remnants of related peoples who spoke similar languages.

The best example of this is the case of the Szekelys, Szeklers, or Szekely-Magyars of Transylvania.  Their origin is a matter of scholarly dispute, yet their traditions classify them as simply the direct descendants of Attila’s Huns.

The Szekelys believe that they were saved from extinction after Attila’s death and the disintegration of his empire only through the heroism of the great conqueror’s youngest son, Csaba.  This tradition is so ingrained in their ethnic consciousness that not even two centuries of scholarly arguments were able to dislodge it.  It is further strengthened by the fact that throughout their long history the Szekelys have retained the use of a special cuneiform script that is very similar to the early Turkic scripts.  This script had been used for centuries by most Turkic peoples—including the Huns—from the Altaic mountains in Asia to the westernmost edges of Attila’s Europe-based empire.

As postulated recently by Gyula Laszlo, the Hungarian archaeologist and protohistorian, in addition to the Szekelys, the conquering Magyars found a number of other related peoples in their newly conquered land.  There are indications that these earlier conquerors may in fact have been more numerous than the Magyars themselves.  Lazlo calls them Late Avars because they joined the population of the Hungary-centered Avar state around A.D. 670, during the mid-course of the Avar empire.  Laszlo also believes that these “Late Avars” probably spoke a variation of the Magyar language, which made it easy for them to merge with the ninth-century conquerors.

In light of the above, it is only natural that all medieval Hungarian chroniclers speak of Arpad’s conquest of Hungary as the “second conquest.”  In their own assessment, however, the “first conquest” referred not to the late Avars, but rather to the Huns in the early fifth century.