 The first Hungarian chronicles were written in the late 11th or early 12th centuries but their texts were preserved in manuscripts compiled in the 13th to 15th centuries . Most extant chronicles show that the earliest works contained no information on the history of the Hungarians before their conversion to Christianity in the 11th century . The only exception is the Gesta Hungarorum , which is the earliest extant Hungarian chronicle , whose principal subject is the Magyars ' pagan past . However , the reliability of this work , which was written by a former royal notary now known as Anonymus , is suspect . In his monograph of medieval Hungarian historians , Carlile Aylmer Macartney describes it as " the most famous , the most obscure , the most exasperating and most misleading of all the early Hungarian texts " . 
