Miklós Kásler - Zoltán Szentirmay (szerk.): Identifying the Árpád Dynasty Skeletons Interred in the Matthias Church. Applying data from historical, archaeological, anthropological, radiological, morphological, radiocarbon dating and genetic research (Budapest, 2021)
Foreword
be a candidate for the position of the Great Khan. We know that the kurultai, the council electing the Great Khan, which Batu wanted to attend and therefore left Hungary in 1242, was actually only held eight years later. He could have reached home multiple times in eight years. At the same time, for eight months the Mongols could not cross the Danube, they could not occupy several fortresses, because the Hungarian forces prevented them from doing so. Interestingly, after the Mongols retreated in 1242, during his castle-building programme King Béla IV did not have most of the castles built in the East to defend the country against the assumed Tatar threat, they were largely built along the western border. Also peculiar is how the king of the “completely destroyed” Kingdom of Hungary, King Béla IV, was able to regain the stolen western counties from the last Babenberg. We did not learn too much about Kun László (King Ladislaus IV of Hungary) defeating the Mongolian armies during the second Mongol invasion in 1285 close to the ridge of the Carpathian Mountains, and similarly, the story of Endre Lackfi brutally defeating the third wave of the Mongol invasion in 1345 has also disappeared from history textbooks. Later I learned that the Mongols believe the western expansion was halted in the Kingdom of Hungary, which reversed the fate of the Mongolian nation in the making. I did not understand how, for 800 years, everybody, our Holy Kings, the female line of the Árpád dynasty, then the Habsburgs, West-European and Italian books from the 1600s, but before that the contemporary Arabs and Byzantines all knew without exception - as did the Hungarian chronicles - that the Hungarians had descended from Scythian-Hun-Turkic-Avar ancestry, and so had the dynasty. io
