The Source Value of Toponyms in History

Overview & Synopsis

When investigating the historical context (settlement and ethnic conditions) in the medieval Carpathian Basin (Kingdom of Hungary), the academic field of history also relies on information provided by proper names. This is due to the fact that in the first few centuries of Hungarian written culture, written documents are made up almost entirely of Latin charters; besides these, only four Hungarian texts have survived. Thus, during the early Old Hungarian Era, the tens of thousands of Latin charters provide the key sources for research in historical linguistics, and these are the sources that other fields in history may also rely on when trying to answer various scholarly questions. The Hungarian corpus of Latin charters is mostly made up of proper names as there was vested legal interest in recording these in the vernacular language (to ensure their role as identifiers); European charter writing in general also followed this approach and it obviously served as a model for Hungarian practice as well. The historical source value of the two proper name categories is not identical: there are major differences between toponyms and personal names in terms of the extent to which their use and systems are determined by linguistic factors and the degree to which name giving and name usage are influenced by extra-linguistic forces. For these circumstances, we may consider toponyms to be the more reliable of the two proper name categories when discussing questions related to history. In this paper I outline those scholarly problems in which we can rely on historical toponyms and those in which we cannot expect to move forward with the help of this group of sources.