Hungarian Coat of Arms: Noble Families & Magyar Heraldry

In France or England the nobility was one or two per cent of the population. In Hungary it reached around five per cent, and in some counties a good deal more.

The reason is the armalista — the noble by letters patent. From the fifteenth century, and overwhelmingly during the long Ottoman wars, Hungarian kings granted nobility to soldiers, officers and useful men by armales: letters patent conferring noble status together with a coat of arms, but without land.

Thousands were issued, sometimes to whole companies at once. The recipients were legally noble — exempt from tax, entitled to vote in the county assembly — and frequently worked their own smallholdings. They are the Hungarian equivalent of the Polish petty nobility, and they are why so many ordinary Hungarian families have a documented grant of arms.

So "was my Hungarian family noble" is a much more likely yes than it would be in western Europe — and, as in Poland, it means much less.

The visual signature of Hungarian heraldry comes almost entirely from those military grants.

• The armoured arm. A mailed arm, couped at the elbow and issuing from the side or from a crown, gripping a sabre. It is the single most common charge in the tradition, and it appears again in the crest above the helm.
• The severed Turkish head. Frequently impaled on the sabre, or lying beneath it, drawn with a turban and moustache. It is a direct record of the Ottoman wars and it is extremely common — jarring to modern eyes, and entirely historical.
• The hármas halom. The triple green mound at the base of the shield, on which charges frequently stand. It comes from the national arms and it is diagnostic: a triple mound almost always means Hungary or its successor territories.
• The crane holding a stone. A bird standing on one leg holding a pebble in the raised foot, common as a crest, from the old idea that a watchful crane drops the stone if it falls asleep.
• Growing figures. Hungarian crests very often show a demi-figure — a half lion, half griffin or half man — issuing from the coronet.

The national arms themselves combine the Árpád stripes — barry of eight Gules and Argent, one of the oldest dynastic devices in Europe — with the double cross on a triple mound beneath a crown. The double cross is shared with Slovakia, which is a reminder of how much territory the Kingdom of Hungary covered.

Hungarian heraldry has a peculiarity found nowhere else: the Holy Crown of St Stephen is not merely a symbol of the monarch but was treated in law as the source of sovereignty itself, holding rights independently of whoever wore it.

That is why the crown, with its famously bent cross, sits atop the arms of Hungary rather than beside them, and why it appears constantly in Hungarian civic and family heraldry. The Doctrine of the Holy Crown made the object itself a legal person.

Hungarian puts the family name before the given name — Nagy Péter, not Péter Nagy. Western records almost always reverse it, and this causes constant confusion in immigration documents and indexes. Search both orders.

The main sources of Hungarian surnames:

• Occupational — Kovács (smith, and one of the most common), Szabó (tailor), Molnár (miller), Varga (cobbler), Juhász (shepherd), Halász (fisherman), Fazekas (potter), Mészáros (butcher).
• Nickname — Nagy (big, the most common Hungarian surname), Kiss (small), Fehér (white), Fekete (black), Balog (left-handed), Farkas (wolf).
• Place — with the suffix -i, meaning "of": Szegedi (of Szeged), Budai (of Buda), Debreceni, Erdélyi (of Transylvania). Noble families used this form with the estate name, written in front: nagybányai Horthy Miklós.

The ethnonym surnames

A category that carries real historical information. A great many Hungarian surnames are simply the Hungarian word for another people, given to a family that arrived from elsewhere:

Tóth (Slovak, or more broadly Slav) · Horváth (Croat) · Németh (German) · Oláh (Vlach, Romanian) · Rácz (Serb) · Lengyel (Pole) · Orosz (Russian or Rusyn) · Török (Turk) · Olasz (Italian).

Tóth and Horváth are among the five most common surnames in Hungary. If you carry one, the name is telling you that an ancestor was the outsider in a Hungarian village — which is a genuine piece of family history, recorded in the name itself.

This is the practical thing every researcher with Hungarian ancestry needs to know.

The Kingdom of Hungary before 1920 covered roughly three times the territory of modern Hungary. The Treaty of Trianon transferred most of it: Transylvania and the Banat to Romania, Upper Hungary to Czechoslovakia, Croatia-Slavonia and the Vojvodina to Yugoslavia, Subcarpathia eventually to Ukraine, Burgenland to Austria.

Records followed the territory. So a Hungarian family's parish registers, county archives and nobility files may now sit in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, Ukraine or Austria — under place names that have changed, sometimes twice.

The first step in Hungarian research is therefore not a surname search. It is establishing the pre-1920 county and village, and then finding out which modern country holds its records and what the place is called now.

• Siebmacher's Wappenbuch — the Hungarian and Transylvanian volumes (Der Adel von Ungarn, Der Adel von Siebenbürgen) are among the largest in the whole series, and are the single most useful heraldic source for Hungarian families. Digitised.
• Nagy Iván, Magyarország családai — the great nineteenth-century compendium of Hungarian families, twelve volumes, freely available.
• Kempelen Béla, Magyar nemes családok — the standard twentieth-century continuation.
• The Hungarian National Archives (MNL), which holds the royal books (Libri Regii) recording grants of nobility and arms — the primary evidence for any armalista family.
• County archives and, for lost territories, the corresponding archives in Romania, Slovakia and Serbia.
• Hungaricana and FamilySearch, for digitised parish registers and civil registration from 1895.

The Heritage Volume sets out what the historical record holds for a surname — where it comes from, what it meant, where its bearers were concentrated, and the arms associated with it. How Your Report Is Made explains which parts come from public records and which our system builds.

Display the arms in a framed coat of arms, or carry the crest on a signet ring.