A Note on the End of Islam in Medieval Hungary: Old Mistakes and Some New Results

Abstract

The disappearance of Muslims from the medieval kingdom of Hungary has exercised scholars for some time, because the circumstances of it are not documented in medieval sources. This disappearance is usually dated to the second half of the thirteenth century because no data on Muslims—apart from converts or their descendants—living in the kingdom after that period is known until the Ottoman period, and because some Muslim sources suggest that the Mongol invasion of 1241–2 destroyed the Muslim communities of Hungary.1 Another, wholly mistaken view, refers to the expulsion of Muslims in the fourteenth century. Thomas Arnold claimed that in 1340 Charles Robert compelled all those among his subjects who were not yet Christian to embrace Christianity or leave the country.2 Charles Robert in fact did not issue such legislation. Medieval chronicles may be one of the sources of this mistake: they recount how King Louis (Charles Robert’s son and heir), who wanted but failed to convert the Jews to Christianity, expelled them from Hungary. The chronicle accounts do not, however, refer to Muslims, only to Jews, and are quite explicit about ‘de iudeorum expulsione’.3 A similar assertion about the end of Islam under Charles Robert in another work is based on the misattribution of King Kálmán’s late eleventh- and early twelfth-century laws to King Charles Robert of the fourteenth century.4 There is no evidence of a fourteenth-century expulsion of Muslims from Hungary, yet the mistake crops up in the latest literature as well.5