Chronica Hungarorum

A Printed History of the Hungarian Kingdom

János Thuróczy’s Chronica Hungarorum was first printed at Brno in 1488 and appeared again the same year in a far more lavish edition from the Augsburg press of Erhard Ratdolt. The work assembles earlier Hungarian chronicle traditions and continues the narrative into the reign of Matthias Corvinus.

It begins with legendary origins and the history of the Huns, moves through the arrival of the Hungarians, the dynasty of Saint Stephen, invasions, civil conflicts, and royal successions, and culminates in recent events. Myth, dynastic memory, and contemporary political history are woven into a single national narrative.

History in Woodcuts

Ratdolt’s Augsburg edition is distinguished by its extraordinary pictorial programme. Large woodcuts present rulers, battles, sieges, cities, councils, and prodigies. Some images were conceived for specific episodes; others recur and acquire new meaning through context.

The pictures gave Hungarian history a visibility that manuscript chronicles could never achieve on the same scale. Readers encountered a sequence of royal portraits and dramatic events in which past and present formed a continuous visual genealogy. The chronicle became not only a text about the kingdom, but a printed image of the kingdom.

Printing Political Memory

A chronicle does more than record events. By choosing beginnings, arranging dynasties, and connecting legend with recent history, it explains why a kingdom exists and how authority has passed from one ruler to another. Thuróczy’s narrative gives the Hungarian past a long duration extending from Hunnic ancestry to the contemporary court. The sequence turns memory into political order. Readers are invited to see victories, disasters, saints, kings, and conflicts as parts of one continuing history.

The woodcuts intensify this effect. Repeated types of ruler, battle, council, or city create visual continuity even when the events are separated by centuries. At the same time, selected scenes receive individual emphasis and become anchors of remembrance. The reuse of blocks is therefore not simply economy; context enables one image to carry different historical meanings. The printed page teaches the reader how to recognise categories of power and event.

Ratdolt’s technical refinement gave the work additional authority. Careful typography, ambitious illustration, and the possibility of coloured or gilded finishing allowed copies to serve different audiences, from practical readers on paper to elite owners of parchment exemplars. Print did not abolish uniqueness: hand colouring, gold, and initials could transform a mechanically reproduced book into a singular luxury object.

The distinction from the 1473 Buda chronicle is essential because the shared title conceals very different works. The Thuróczy edition belongs to the final years of Matthias Corvinus and to an international printing network connecting Hungary, Moravia, and Augsburg. It is both a national history and a European incunable, shaped by the movement of texts, artists, printers, and patrons across borders.

Luxury Copies and the Corvinian World

The National Széchényi Library holds several copies of the Augsburg edition. Among them are parchment exemplars printed in black and gold and enriched with coloured and gilded woodcuts and initials, as well as paper copies with uncoloured illustration. The shelfmarks Inc. 1146 and 1143b represent different material states of the same edition and were used for the modern facsimile.

This work must not be confused with Andreas Hess’s Chronica Hungarorum of Buda, 1473, the first book printed in Hungary. Thuróczy’s chronicle is a later and much more extensively illustrated historical synthesis. In Ratdolt’s hands it became a masterpiece where Hungarian memory, Renaissance historiography, and the visual power of the incunable book converge.