ABSTRACT
Notions relating to the origin of people and state were already organic constituents of the “national” consciousness that had already begun to form in Europe around halfway through the Middle Ages; moreover—unlike the typically modern notions—they formed the chief ideological pillars of these structures. Nevertheless, in regard to the origin of peoples, these notions per se had very little to do with the actual ethnogenesis. The peoples of medieval Europe learned to believe in fictitious “prototypical peoples” that their lettered scholars constructed for them in the Middle Ages from remaining scraps of historical, geographical, and ethnographical information of late antiquity; to the extent that such beliefs took root, these theories of origin were subsequently transformed into myth. Only exceptionally, and then in a subordinated position, which was usually divested of meaning, was a genuine historical core or ethnic tradition preserved in these constructions which at one and the same time served the historical and logical integration of their own people into God’s plan for the universe, and the accentuation of differentiation, specific “function,” and identity within the Christian republic. This applies to virtually all the archaic “national” mythopoesis of medieval Europe, from the Trojan origins of the French to the Hunnish origins of the Magyars.
