The history of Hungary

Hungary lies in the middle of the Carpathian Basin, the broad plain drained by the Danube and the Tisza. Before the Magyars arrived at the end of the ninth century, the land had been held by Celts, Romans, Huns, Goths, Avars and Slavs. The Magyars founded a Christian kingdom in 1000 that was for five centuries one of the major powers of central Europe, until the Ottoman conquest split it apart. Reunited under the Habsburgs, Hungary fought repeatedly for self-government, became an equal partner in Austria-Hungary, lost most of its territory after the First World War, and passed through dictatorship, the Holocaust, communism and a crushed revolution before becoming a democracy in 1989.

The Carpathian Basin has been inhabited since the Palaeolithic, and finds at Vértesszőlős near Tata, roughly 350,000 years old, are among the oldest human traces in central Europe. Farming spread here from the Balkans in the sixth millennium BCE, and the Bronze Age produced fortified settlements and rich metalwork. In the last centuries BCE Celtic tribes settled the region, alongside Illyrian and Dacian peoples.

Rome conquered the land west of the Danube around the start of the common era and organised it as the province of Pannonia. The Danube became a fortified frontier of the Roman Empire, lined with forts and watchtowers, and the town of Aquincum, now part of Budapest, grew into a provincial capital. Savaria, today's Szombathely, and Sopianae, today's Pécs, were other Roman towns. East of the Danube the plain remained outside Roman rule, home to the Iranian-speaking Iazyges.

In the late fourth century the Huns moved into the basin and made it the centre of the Hunnic Empire, which under Attila in the 440s dominated much of central Europe. After Attila's death in 453 the empire broke apart, and Germanic peoples such as the Ostrogoths, Gepids and Lombards held the region in turn. In 568 the Avars, a steppe people, took control and ruled the basin for more than two centuries, until campaigns by Charlemagne in the 790s broke their power. The western part of the basin then fell under the influence of the Carolingian Empire, while Slavic peoples and Great Moravia, a Slavic state to the north, held other areas.

The Magyars spoke a Finno-Ugric language whose closest relatives, Khanty and Mansi, are spoken in western Siberia. Over centuries they moved westwards across the steppe, mixing with Turkic peoples and living for a time under the influence of the Khazars. Driven west by the Pechenegs, seven Magyar tribes led by Árpád crossed the Carpathians around 895 and occupied the basin over the next few years, an event Hungarians call the honfoglalás, the conquest of the homeland.

For half a century Magyar horsemen raided deep into Europe, reaching Germany, Italy and even Spain. Their defeat by Otto I of Germany at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955 ended the raids. Árpád's descendant, Grand Prince Géza, began to convert his people to Latin Christianity and to build a settled state.

Géza's son Stephen was crowned king at the turn of 1000 and 1001 with a crown sent with papal blessing. Stephen I crushed pagan and tribal rivals, founded bishoprics including Esztergom, the seat of the archbishop, and organised the country into counties run by royal officials. He was made a saint in 1083, and the Holy Crown associated with him became the symbol of the Hungarian state. In 1102 the Hungarian king also took the crown of Croatia, beginning a union that lasted, in changing forms, until 1918.

The kingdom grew rich from its farmland and its mines. Royal power weakened over time, and in 1222 Andrew II was forced to issue the Golden Bull, a charter guaranteeing the rights of the nobility. In 1241 the Mongol invasion of Europe reached Hungary: armies of the Mongol Empire destroyed King Béla IV's forces at Muhi and ravaged the country for a year, killing a large part of the population. After the Mongols withdrew, Béla rebuilt the kingdom, encouraging the construction of stone castles and inviting settlers, including Germans and Cumans. He is often remembered as the second founder of the state.

The Árpád dynasty died out in 1301. After years of conflict, Charles Robert of the Anjou family secured the throne, reformed the coinage and exploited Hungary's gold mines, then among the most productive in Europe. His son Louis the Great also became king of Poland in 1370. Sigismund of Luxembourg, king from 1387, was later elected Holy Roman Emperor, and his reign saw the first major clashes with the advancing Ottoman Empire, including a crusader defeat at Nicopolis in 1396.

The general John Hunyadi became the champion of resistance to the Ottomans, and in 1456 he broke the siege of Belgrade by Sultan Mehmed II. His son Matthias Corvinus, elected king in 1458, built a professional standing army known as the Black Army, conquered Moravia, Silesia and Vienna, which he made his residence in 1485, and made his court in Buda a centre of the Renaissance, famed for its great library, the Bibliotheca Corviniana. Heavy taxation paid for his ambitions, and after his death in 1490 the nobles chose weaker kings. A crusade summoned against the Turks in 1514 turned into a peasant revolt under György Dózsa, which was savagely suppressed.

On 29 August 1526 the army of Suleiman the Magnificent destroyed the Hungarian army at Mohács. Young King Louis II drowned while fleeing. Two kings were then elected by rival factions: John Zápolya, a Hungarian magnate, and Ferdinand of Habsburg, brother of Charles V. The Ottomans took Buda in 1541, and Hungary was split into three parts for a century and a half. The Habsburg Monarchy ruled a strip in the west and north known as Royal Hungary, with its capital at Pozsony, today's Bratislava. The Ottomans ruled the centre and south directly. In the east the Principality of Transylvania became a self-governing state under Ottoman overlordship, where Calvinism and religious toleration flourished.

The borderlands were a permanent war zone. The defence of Eger in 1552 and the last stand of Miklós Zrínyi at Szigetvár in 1566 became national legends. The Protestant Reformation won over much of the population, especially in the east, before the Habsburgs promoted a Catholic revival in the seventeenth century. Hungarian nobles in Royal Hungary repeatedly rose against Habsburg rule, led by István Bocskai in 1604 and later by Imre Thököly.

After the failed Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, a Christian coalition advanced into Hungary and recaptured Buda in 1686 after a long siege. The Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 handed almost all of Hungary and Transylvania to the Habsburgs. Resentment at heavy-handed rule led to the war of independence of Francis II Rákóczi from 1703 to 1711, which ended in a compromise peace at Szatmár that preserved the privileges of the Hungarian estates.

The war-ravaged south was resettled with Germans, Serbs, Romanians and Slovaks, so that by the late eighteenth century Magyars made up less than half of the kingdom's population. In 1741 the Hungarian nobility rallied to Maria Theresa when her throne was threatened, and she in turn respected their rights. Her son Joseph II tried to centralise the monarchy and impose German as the language of administration, provoking such opposition that he revoked most of his reforms on his deathbed in 1790.

In the early nineteenth century reformers led by Count István Széchenyi pushed for economic modernisation, symbolised by the Chain Bridge across the Danube, while a national movement revived the Hungarian language and literature. On 15 March 1848, as revolution swept Europe, young radicals including the poet Sándor Petőfi took to the streets of Pest. The Diet passed the April Laws, abolishing serfdom and creating a government responsible to parliament. When Vienna moved to reverse the changes, war broke out, and in April 1849 parliament under Lajos Kossuth declared independence. Russian troops intervened on behalf of the young emperor Franz Joseph I, and the Hungarian army surrendered at Világos in August 1849. Thirteen generals were executed at Arad, and years of absolutist rule followed.

Military defeat by Prussia in 1866 pushed Vienna to reach a settlement. The Compromise of 1867 created Austria-Hungary, a dual monarchy in which Hungary had its own parliament and government and shared only the monarch, foreign policy, defence and related finances with Austria. Buda, Pest and Óbuda were united as Budapest in 1873, which grew into a major industrial and cultural capital. In 1896 Hungary celebrated the millennium of the conquest. Governments pursued Magyarisation in schools and administration, which embittered the Slovak, Romanian, Serb and other minorities who made up about half of the kingdom's population.

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 drew Austria-Hungary into the First World War, which cost Hungary hundreds of thousands of soldiers. As the monarchy collapsed in October 1918, the Aster Revolution brought Count Mihály Károlyi to power and a republic was declared. In March 1919 the communist Béla Kun proclaimed a Hungarian Soviet Republic, modelled on the Russian Revolution, which carried out a Red Terror. It fell in August 1919 as Romanian troops occupied Budapest. Admiral Miklós Horthy then entered the capital with a counter-revolutionary army whose White Terror targeted communists and Jews. In 1920 parliament restored the kingdom and elected Horthy regent.

The Treaty of Trianon, signed on 4 June 1920, confirmed the loss of about 72 per cent of the kingdom's territory and almost two-thirds of its population to Czechoslovakia, Romania, the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and Austria. The lands lost to Czechoslovakia form most of today's Slovakia, and those lost to the southern kingdom include the Vojvodina region of Serbia. Around 3.3 million ethnic Hungarians found themselves outside the new borders. Revision of Trianon became the central aim of interwar politics. Horthy's conservative regime kept a parliament but limited the vote, and from 1920 a numerus clausus law restricted Jewish university admissions.

Seeking to recover lost lands, Hungary drew closer to Nazi Germany and Italy. Through the Vienna Awards of 1938 and 1940 it regained southern Slovakia and northern Transylvania, and in 1939 it seized Carpathian Ruthenia. Anti-Jewish laws from 1938 onwards excluded Jews from much of public and economic life. Hungary joined the Second World War in 1941, taking part in the invasions of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, and in January 1943 its Second Army was almost destroyed on the Don.

When Horthy's government secretly sought terms with the Allies, Germany occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944. Under Adolf Eichmann's direction and with the full participation of the Hungarian gendarmerie, more than 437,000 Jews were deported in under two months, from May to July 1944, nearly all to Auschwitz, where most were murdered on arrival. Horthy halted the deportations in July, but in October, after he announced an armistice, the Germans forced him out and installed the fascist Arrow Cross party, whose militias murdered thousands of Jews in Budapest. Around 600,000 Jews from Hungary, including the annexed territories, died in the Holocaust, along with tens of thousands of Roma. The Soviet siege of Budapest from December 1944 to February 1945 left the city in ruins.

The Paris peace treaty of 1947 restored the Trianon borders. Under Soviet occupation the Communists took power through what their leader Mátyás Rákosi called salami tactics, slicing away rival parties, and the Hungarian People's Republic was proclaimed in 1949. Rákosi ran a Stalinist regime of show trials, forced collectivisation and mass imprisonment. After the death of Joseph Stalin, the reformer Imre Nagy became prime minister in 1953 but was ousted two years later.

On 23 October 1956 a student demonstration in Budapest became a national uprising. Nagy returned to power, freed political prisoners, announced a multi-party system and declared that Hungary would leave the Warsaw Pact. On 4 November Soviet tanks crushed the revolution. Estimates of the dead vary, but around 2,500 to 3,000 Hungarians were killed in the fighting, some 200,000 fled abroad, and Nagy was executed in 1958. The new leader, János Kádár, first carried out harsh reprisals, then from the 1960s presided over a milder system known as goulash communism, which allowed limited private enterprise and comparatively wide personal freedom, financed in part by foreign borrowing.

By the late 1980s reform communists were negotiating with a growing opposition. In May 1989 Hungary began dismantling the fence on its border with Austria, and in September it let thousands of East Germans cross to the West, a decisive moment in the Revolutions of 1989. Imre Nagy was solemnly reburied in June, and the Republic of Hungary was proclaimed on 23 October 1989. Free elections in 1990 brought the conservative József Antall to power. Hungary moved to a market economy, joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.

In 2010, after the 2008 financial crisis and a scandal in which Socialist prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány admitted his party had lied about the economy, Viktor Orbán's Fidesz won a two-thirds majority. It adopted a new constitution in 2011 and kept supermajorities in 2014, 2018 and 2022. Orbán described his model as an illiberal democracy. Critics, including the European Parliament, which in 2022 called Hungary an electoral autocracy, accused the government of weakening courts and media freedom and favouring allies, while supporters credited it with defending national sovereignty, families and border security, notably with a border fence built during the 2015 migration crisis. Relations with the EU were also strained by Budapest's ties with Russia after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. President Katalin Novák resigned in 2024 and was succeeded by Tamás Sulyok.

In the parliamentary election of 12 April 2026, the Tisza party led by Péter Magyar, a former Fidesz insider, won 141 of the 199 seats on a turnout of almost 79 per cent. Orbán conceded on election night, and on 9 May 2026 parliament elected Magyar prime minister, ending sixteen years of Fidesz government.