Állam és ethnosz a IX-X. századi magyar történelemben

Absztrakt

Humán communities could have been organized in several ways from the earliest times of history. Belonging to a family or a city, being a member of a state, a folk (ethnos) or a religious group: these kind of identities do not exclude, but on the contrary, complete or strenghten each other. The state and ethnos are important ways of organizing communities, but the meaning of these terms can be mistaken and used inproperly. According to generál definitions state is a population of a territory which is ruled by an independent and institutional power, while folk means humán populations with shared ancestry myths, histories and cultures, having a sense of solidarity and an own name. There is no way to schematize the relation between statehood and ethnicity, as we have many different examples from the earliest times up to now. The case of the early Hungárián past is quite a difficult question, because we cannot describe it as a simple linear process. The ancient Hungárián ethnic group split up into three ethnic communities: the descendants of the first one became the inhabitants of Magna Hungaria and were found by the river Volga in 1236, the second one moved to the neighbourhood of Persia, and the third group lived in the regions of East European rivers, in the so-called Etelköz or Dentümogyer. We do not know the date of these separations and the political organization of the first two groups because of the lack of sources, so we can only follow the tracks of the third Hungárián unit. In Etelköz this ethnic group was organized into a state by a dynasty cc. 850. The first monarch was Almos and his political formation can be defined as a steppe-state or steppe-empire. His monarchy which can be named Hungárián Great Principality conquered the Carpathian Basin at the end of the IXth century and existed there until 1000 when King Stephen I - fifth descendant of Almos - reorganized his state according to the christianized post-Roman tradition. There are opposite theories on the structure of the Central-European Hungárián Great Principality: on one hand it has been regarded as a strong centralized monarchy, on the other hand somé scholars asserted that it had been disintegrated into tribes or even „tribal states". The data of sources and the aspects of military history are arguments for the first opinion, the centralized strong state. We can find only few traces which prove that during the era of the Hungárián Great Principality and later of the Hungárián Kingdom the three Hungárián ethnic communities had connections with each other. By now the two first communities had been lost, only the third one is keeping the Hungárián idenhty which has been living in the frame of statehood since cc. 850.