Makkay János: A magyarság keltezése – A Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Múzeumok közleményei 48. (1994)

Hungarian language was a newcomer on its arrival in AD. 895. Gy. Gyorffy for instance suggests 200,000 and 400,000 as the number of natives and newcomers at the time of the Conquest. To support these proportions, he adduces a wide range of evidence. This includes, for example, a few contemporary or slightly later records describing the demographic situation in some parts of the Carpathian Basin after the Avarian wars of Charlemagne or more particularly after the aggressive wars of the Danubian Bolgars against the Late Avarians in the first quarter of the 9th Century. As a matter of fact, these wars ended the political and military power of the late Avarian chiefdom. The sources reporting the total extinction of the Late Avarian populations after the troubles of the 9th century in Transdanubia (and also in the Great Plain) must on the other hand exaggerate. Gyorffy writes, "the Slovene population of Pannónia stayed in place; they only changed their masters. It is characteristic of this change of rule without a war that the majority of the Slavic toponyms survived in the regions of Lake Balaton, Western Transdanubia and the Drava, and that the clan system of the Slavonians remained intact as well" . This however is simply a distortion of the historical facts. In reality the surviving dominant Slavic toponyms appear not to comprise the larger part of the early toponyms from Transdanubia, but are only a small fraction of them. In some cases, historians delicately transform historical sources to produce the so-called Avarum solitudines, Avaria vastata, Pannónia desolata. Gy. Györffy for instance refers to short records from Muslim geographers concerning the demographic situation in the Carpathian Basin shortly before the Hungarian Conquest. One source correctly says that from the Bolgars on the Lower Danube to the Moravians (probably in the NW part of the Basin in present Slovakia) the distance is a 10 days' journey, but Györffy interprets this short record as follows: between the Bolgars and the Moravians there was an uninhabited, deserted [üres - 'empty of habitants'] area as big as a 10 days' journey (see our notes 357—358!). In fact, this source does not mention emptiness at all, but simply states that the distance between these two lands was a 10 days' journey. To sum up, there is no reason to think that peoples as prosperous, peaceful and fecund as the natives of the Late Avarian chiefdom were killed, exterminated, fell into captivity, etc, and chapters 2.11. and 2.12. 214