History
The codex was named after the city of Rohonc, in Western Hungary (now Rechnitz, Austria), where it was kept until 1838, when it was donated to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences by Gusztáv Batthyány, a Hungarian count, together with his entire library.
The origin of the codex is unknown. A possible trace of its past may be an entry in the 1743 catalogue of the Batthyánys' Rohonc library, which says "Magyar imádságok, volumen I. in 12.", (Hungarian prayers in one volume, size duodecimo). The size and the assumable content agree with those of the codex, but this is all of the information given in the catalogue, so it may only be a hint.
The codex was studied by the Hungarian scholar Ferenc Toldy around 1840, and later by Pál Hunfalvy, but with no result. It was also examined by the Austrian paleography expert Dr. Mahl in vain. Josef Jireček and his son, Konstantin Josef Jireček, both university professors in Prague, studied 32 pages of the codex in 1884–1885 without success. In 1885 the codex was also sent to a German researcher, Bernhard Jülg, a professor at Innsbruck University, but he was not able to decipher it either. Mihály Munkácsy, the celebrated Hungarian painter, took the codex with him to Paris in the years 1890–1892 to study it, but this also yielded no result.
The majority of Hungarian scholars take the codex to be a hoax of Sámuel Literáti Nemes (1796–1842), Transylvanian-Hungarian antiquarian, co-founder of the National Széchényi Library in Budapest, infamous for many historical forgeries (mostly made in the 1830s) which even deceived some of the most renowned Hungarian scholars of the time. This opinion goes back as far as 1866, to Károly Szabó (1824–1890), Hungarian historian. Since then, this opinion is maintained by mainstream Hungarian scholarship.
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