The Hungarians, led by Prince Árpád, settled in the Carpathian Basin around A.D. 896. Árpád's descendant was Stephen I, the founder of the Hungarian state, who received his royal crown from Pope Sylvester II and introduced the country to Christianity. His successors, the kings of the House of Árpád, ruled from 1000 to 1301, a period which, despite occasional struggles for the throne and attacks from abroad, brought political, economic, and social progress and prosperity to the Hungarian nation.

When the last male descendant of the Árpád Dynasty died in 1301, heirs on the distaff side of the family tried to gain the Hungarian crown. In the eight years of strife among the Bohemian king, Wenceslaus II, Prince Otto of Bavaria, and Charles Robert of Naples, the country sank into anarchy, ruin, and poverty.

In the 13th century, one branch of the Angevins, a House of French origin, acquired the "two Sicilies," i.e., the thrones of Naples and Sicily. A member of this family, Charles II (Charles the Lame) married a royal princess of the House of Árpád, Mary, granddaughter of Béla IV, the famous Hungarian king who rebuilt his country from its ruins following the Mongol invasion. Charles Robert, the grandson of Charles II of the House of Angevin and Mary of the Árpád Dynasty, was first crowned the king of Hungary in 1301, but not even after being crowned for the third time in 1310 was he able to gain a firm hold on the country, where real power was in the hands of the feudal oligarchs. Charles Robert regarded the breaking of the landlords as his number one task. He succeeded by winning first the first battle of Rozgony in 1312, and then various other smaller battles and skirmishes. The struggle was concluded with the reoccupation of Transylvania and Slavonia.

Regained inner stability made it possible for Charles Robert to develop the country's economy and culture. As pointed out by Dezső Dercsényi, a noted Hungarian scholar on the period, "a monetary reform was one of the cornerstones of the new economic policy." In 1325, the king introduced the gold florin, patterned after Florentine currency, as well as silver groats of stable value. He acquired the gold and silver he needed for minting by making landowners interested in the exploitation of mines. Thanks to this reform, Hungary became one of the most important gold mining countries in Europe at the time. Through the grant of various privileges, Charles Robert helped promote the rapid development of towns and an upswing in trade. At the same time, his tax and customs policy brought about an enormous increase in treasury revenues. The man who deserves the most credit for successfully carrying through the king's plans was his Chief Lord Treasurer, Demeter Nekcsei.

We do not know the exact date of Nekcsei's birth, although he is known to have come from the Aba Dynasty, which was related to Stephen I, and to have died in 1338. Historical documents first mention his family in the 13th century, from which time onwards its members belonged to the royal court. The first tenure they acquired was that of Lipóc (North-East of Košice, in Czechoslovakia) [Kecerovský Lipovec, in Slovakia], which gave the family its name. They were then granted Nekcse (Našice, in Yugoslavia) [Našice, in Croatia], and then Csatár (in Zala County) in 1246. In 1312, Charles Robert granted permission for the construction of a castle in Nekcse. From then on, Sándor, one of the commanders in the battle of Rozgony, and his brother, Demeter, the Chief Lord Treasurer, adopted a new name, calling themselves the Nekcseis in place of the old family name of Lipóci.

Demeter Nekcsei's early years are a blank. According to Dezső Dercsényi, "It is quite possible that he attended one of the Italian universities." Later on, he became bailiff of several counties, and then, as Lord Chief Treasurer, became one of the highest dignitaries in Hungary.

He commissioned a Bible as Lord Chief Treasurer, which seems to have been meant for some kind of "church" (a church being a building where religious services take place as well as the congregation that gathers in the building.) Thus was born the book known today as the Nekcsei Bible, a codex containing the text of the Old and New Testaments in Latin, and differing from the Vulgate (the version canonized by the Catholic Church) in that each biblical book is preceded by prologues. Consequently, the text of the Nekcsei Bible can be classed among the so-called 13th-century Paris manuscripts. The fact that the commissioner must have been Demeter Nekcsei himself was established by Dezső Dercsényi on an initiative by Meta Harrsen, a scholar of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. The coat of arms in the margin above the opening lines of the Book of Genesis on folio 5^v of the Bible, he established, had been used by Demeter Nekcsei alone. However, scientific researchers have remained in disagreement up to this day over who could have produced the Bible and for whom; in other words, who the illuminators were and which church was to be beneficiary of the gift. The disagreement most certainly results in part from the fact that most scholars have so far been unable to lay hands on the Bible and study it first-hand.

The publishers of the present edition, naturally, do not wish to take sides in this controversy. That is why it has been decided that the introduction should contain only a brief outline of some of the more important ideas, all the more so since Dezső Dercsényi, the greatest authority on the subject in Hungary, who had been asked to write the accompanying study, died before he was able to fully expound his position.

These positions can be summed up as follows: Meta Harrsen held that Demeter Nekcsei had bestowed the Bible on the St. Peter and Paul Provostship of Óbuda (a town which today is part of modern Budapest). According to Ferenc Levárdy, the Bible was commissioned for the Birth of Mary Parish Church in Gyöngyöspata, in the north of the country. Dezső Dercsényi and Tünde Wehli claimed that the Bible was to be a gift from the Lord Chief Treasurer to the Paulite Monastery he had founded in Csatár presumably as a burial site for himself.

The question of the identity of the illuminators is even more complex.

According to the studies done by Dezső Dercsényi in 1942, the codex follows the oldest style of the Bologna group of painters who incorporated French elements and reflected a Byzantine influence in their work.

Meta Harrsen has recognized the work of several different hands among the illuminators of the Nekcsei Bible. She has attributed the two richly ornamented incipit pages to a Bologna artist. She has regarded the two figures with dark faces to be the work of the same hand that painted the Passion of Christ and the Legend of St. Alex in the Hungarian Angevin Legendary, noting an influence of the Italian style and the traditions of Italian iconography on the work of this master. Finally, she has attributed the portrayal of the apostles of St. James and St. Paul in the Nekcsei Bible to the same artist who painted the pictures of St. James and St. Ladislas in the Legendary, while also making use of Czech and Balkan-Byzantine painting.

Ferenc Levárdy: "I associate the work of the illuminators of the Nekcsei Bible and the Angevin Legendary with Bologna, more precisely, with Pseudo-Niccolò, a master who had worked in the Bologna University area. I believe that the two codices were produced in Hungary, a view shared by Cesare Gnudi of Bologna. While looking for the artistic roots of the Legendary, I had to take note of the fact that our Illuminated Chronicle could not just rise as a single bright star in the sky of Hungarian miniature painting. Following in the footsteps of Emil Jakubovich, Edit Hoffmann, and Ilona Berkovits, I had to study the valuable material, scattered in several European libraries, of the rich miniature painting associated with Bologna University, and the large group of Hungarian scholars who may have had some kind of relationship with Bologna.

"I believe I have found a clue that leads to the royal Hungarian workshop of codex illuminators in the royal land-grant of 'Magister Hertul' of 1328 and in its confirmation in 1331. I found support to back my line of thinking while conducting art historical research at Gyöngyöspata. There I found murals painted when the church was owned by Nekcsei. I could not ignore these suggestive impressions while engaged in an analytical research of the Nekcsei Bible."

Tünde Wehli: "The place of origin and the question of the relationship among the illuminators of the Nekcsei Bible and the relics associated with the Hungarian Angevin court--such as the Hungarian Angevin Legendary, the Illuminated Chronicle, etc.--are open to argument. I belong to the group of researchers who regard both the Nekcsei Bible and the Hungarian Angevin Legendary to be the work of a Bologna workshop and who consider the Illuminated Chronicle, produced in the second half of the 14th century, the Oxford Codex, and the Istanbul Antiphonary, which are similar in style, to be of Hungarian origin. These works represent the culture of the Hungarian Angevin court.

"Unfortunately, I have not seen the Nekcsei Bible itself. Therefore, in order to identify the hands that had painted the various pictures and initials I had to rely on photographs. I have distinguished between three hands in this Bible. The first--and most talented--is responsible for the opening pictures. The second hand painted most of the initials. The third, towards the end of the Bible, primarily used rustic forms and darker tones of color. No identity of masters, only perhaps an identity of the workshop can be posited between the Nekcsei Bible and the Hungarian Angevin Legendary."

According to Cesare Gnudi, the Italian features of the Bible reflect the short stay in Esztergom of a Bologna master, who combined Italian features with local characteristics as well as with traditions from Prague and other places in Central Europe. Gnudi identified this particular illuminator of the Nekcsei Bible with a painter of the Justinianus Institutiones in Cesena.

Alesandro Conti regards the Nekcsei Bible as the work of the group of illuminators called, for lack of a better name, the "Maestro del 1328," while also adopting Gnudi's conclusions concerning the different masters associated with the illuminiations.

Scholars also disagree as to the whereabouts of the workshop in which the Nekcsei Bible was produced. Ilona Berkovits was the first to claim that the workshop had been in Hungary. According to Meta Harrsen, the illuminators were probably members of one of the church institutions in Esztergom. Ferenc Levárdy, like Berkovits and Harrsen, believes the Bible to be of Hungarian origin. Tünde Wehli is of the opinion that it was produced in Bologna.

What we know of the history of the Bible is as follows:

It was produced for a church in the early 14th century. From the following two centuries, not a single fact concerning the ownership or the location of the Bible has come down to us. The next piece of information is a handwritten entry on folio I^v in Volume I. According to the researchers, Zuleman (Suleiman) was probably one of the "men" of Hieronymo Adorno (an Austrian ambassador to the Porte) who was neither prominent nor insignificant. Professor Dercsényi assumed that he may have received the Bible from King Ferdinand as a kind of severance pay. That only makes it likely, but does not prove, that the codex was still in Hungary in the mid-16th century. We have no idea of when and how it left the country or what the stages of its itinerary were. The only thing that is certain, based on Meta Harrsen's publication, is that it was sold at an auction of the library of Henry Perkins in Hanworth Park (near Feltham, in England) in 1873. It was bought by the Library of Congress, which has owned it ever since.

The Nekcsei Bible is one of the most valuable relics of the Angevin period, a work of outstanding significance in Hungarian cultural history. We are confident that by publishing an edition featuring 108 of its most beautiful pages we will do more than satisfy interest in a so far inaccessible Hungarian art treasure and offer a genuine artistic experience to book lovers who appreciate rarities. By means of this publication, we also hope to give fresh impetus to scientific research in Hungary and throughout the world.