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László Veszprémy
In this article László Veszprémy notes how the earliest Latin chronicler in Hungary, writing about the year 1200, offered a mythical account of how the Hungarian kingdom was established. This emphasized that before the magnates elected the first king, they drew up a binding code of laws. The point of the myth was to assert that the laws and constitution of the kingdom existed prior to the election of a ruler. The author then notes how very similar mythical accounts of the foundation of kingdoms can be found in medieval Spain, yet there can have been no direct connection between the Hungarian and Spanish sources. The article suggests that the similarities arose because the chroniclers were using the same corpus of texts drawn from Roman law as the basis of their current constitutions, and then projecting these back in time to assert the antiquity of their legal and constitutional systems.
