The Forger It Was Blamed On In 1866 the codex was attributed to a man who really did forge things, on no evidence connecting him to it. The attribution has outlived every attempt to test it, and the case against it is now stronger than the case for it.
The mainstream Hungarian position for most of the last century and a half has been that the Rohonc Codex is a nineteenth-century fake. The name attached to it is Sámuel Literáti Nemes. He was a real forger, and a good one. He is also, on the evidence available, an unproven suspect who was named because he fit.
I. Who Nemes Was
Sámuel Literáti Nemes lived from 1796 to 1842. He was a Transylvanian antiquarian and dealer, and he was not a marginal figure: he was a co-founder of what became the National Széchényi Library in Budapest. He was also, it emerged over the decades after his death, a prolific forger whose work had deceived some of the most respected Hungarian scholars of his day.
Two of his fabrications are documented. The Massman Tablets he appears to have made for money. The wooden book of Túroc looks to have been made for a different reason, closer to the one that explains the whole pattern: the 1830s in Hungary were a period of intense national feeling, there was an appetite for evidence of a deep and distinguished Hungarian past, and Nemes supplied it. He had the skills, in calligraphy and in ageing paper, and he had the position to place an object where it would be found and believed.
So when Károly Szabó proposed in 1866 that the codex was Nemes's work, he was not reaching. A book of unreadable signs, of no provenance, surfacing in a Hungarian noble library in 1838, at the height of the fashion Nemes was feeding, four years before Nemes died, is exactly the shape of thing he made.
II. What the Case Actually Rests On
Set out plainly, the case against Nemes is:
| Point | Weight |
|---|---|
| He was a forger | True and documented |
| He was active at the right time | True |
| He had the skills | True |
| The codex has no provenance before 1838 | True |
| Any document, letter, sale record or witness connecting Nemes to this manuscript | None |
| Any physical analysis identifying his materials or hand | None published |
Every point that supports the attribution is a point about Nemes. Not one is a point about the codex. That is a profile, and a profile is not evidence about a particular object. It identifies a class of things Nemes might have made, and this book is in that class along with an unknown number of genuine ones.
It is also worth noticing how the verdict formed. Hungarian scholarship in the 1840s had hoped the codex was an ancient Hungarian script. That hope collapsed. The forgery verdict arrived in 1866, in the wake of the disappointment, and it settled the question in a way that allowed everyone to stop. A conclusion that lets a field put an awkward object down deserves more scrutiny than one that creates work, and it has generally had less.
III. The Case Against the Case
Benedek Láng, a historian of science, took the question apart properly, first in Cryptologia in 2010 and then in a book, The Rohonc Code. His conclusion is that the forgery verdict is implausible on the evidence, and that if the text is not a hoax it must be a deliberately encoded one.
The core of the argument is economic, and it is the strongest single point anyone has made about this manuscript.
A fake exists to be bought or believed, and both happen quickly. A forger's incentive is to spend as little effort as possible to reach a convincing surface. What the Rohonc Codex actually contains is 448 pages of internally consistent writing, with a reading direction, sentence delimiters, a number system, a table of contents, chapter headings and enough regularity that three independent investigators with different tools all concluded it is not improvised. Nobody produces that to fool a buyer. The forgery hypothesis has to explain why a man motivated by money and fame did months or years of invisible structural work that no purchaser could ever have noticed.
The illustrations point the same way. A forger selling a sensational relic makes it look impressive. These pictures are crude, and their crudeness has always been used as an argument for forgery. It works better as an argument against one: an object made to dazzle would have been made to dazzle.
Láng's own conclusion is not that the codex is authentic in some romantic sense, but that it is a real encoded document, and he lays out the three things it could then be, assessed against what is known of secret writing in early modern Europe:
| Possibility | What it would mean |
|---|---|
| A cipher | An ordinary language written in a concealing system. The period is full of these, and cipher use was widespread and well documented. |
| A shorthand | A stenographic system for writing a known language fast, of the kind that proliferated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. |
| An artificial language | A constructed tongue. The period had a genuine vogue for inventing perfect or universal languages, so this is not the exotic option it sounds. |
Tokai and Király's later finding, that the system is a code in which sign-groups stand for whole words without representing their internal structure, sits closest to the first two and is not quite either. It also explains why the question stayed open so long: everyone was looking for a cipher, and a cipher is exactly what it is not.
IV. Where It Stands
The honest summary is that the forgery hypothesis has never been demonstrated and has never been formally withdrawn. It persists because it was stated early, by a serious historian, and because for a long time nothing contradicted it.
What now weighs against it is not a document. It is the accumulated structural work: a consistent reading direction found in 1970, sentence delimiters found in the 1990s, a number system, a table of contents and a chapter apparatus found after 2010, and content matching identifiable scripture. Each of those is something a hoaxer would have had no reason to build, and together they are a great deal of invisible labour to spend on a lie.
It could still be a fabrication by somebody who was doing something stranger than fraud. That possibility cannot be closed from the text alone. But the specific accusation, that this book was made by Sámuel Literáti Nemes to be sold, is a hundred and sixty years old and has never had a single piece of evidence attached to it.