Hungarians

The Hungarians, who call themselves Magyar, are a Central European people native to the Carpathian Basin, with a shared language, culture and history. Their language is part of the Uralic family's Ugric branch, alongside Khanty and Mansi, which sets it apart from the Slavic, Germanic and Romance languages around it. Of an estimated 14.5 million Hungarians and people of Hungarian descent worldwide, about 9.6 million live in Hungary.

The name Magyar probably comes from Megyer, the leading tribe of the early confederation. The outsiders' name, Hungarian, is usually traced to the Onogurs, a Turkic tribal alliance whose name meant "ten arrows", and perhaps also to the Huns. Where and when the Hungarians formed as a people is debated. Linguists trace their language to Ugric speakers who separated from other Uralic groups by about 2000 BCE. Recent genetic studies point to a mixed ancestry for the ninth-century conquerors, drawing on Ugric, steppe and Inner Asian populations, and many historians now see the Hungarian people as taking shape gradually, by the ninth century, rather than existing as a fixed group for millennia.

By the eighth century, groups ancestral to the Hungarians lived near the Don river as subjects of the Khazars. Tradition describes a confederation of seven tribes, most with names of Turkic origin. Around 830, after a revolt among the Khazars, three Kabar tribes joined them, and they moved west to Etelköz, the land between the Dnieper and the Carpathians. They faced their first attack by the Pechenegs around 854. From 862 Hungarian horsemen began raiding into the Carpathian Basin and were hired by rulers there, and Western chroniclers began recording them as Ungri.

Led by Grand Prince Álmos and his son Árpád, the Hungarians crossed the Carpathians in 895–896. Whether the move was long planned or hastened by Pecheneg and Bulgarian attacks on Etelköz is still argued. The basin they entered was politically divided: Frankish power reached into Transdanubia, Bulgaria held parts of the south-east, and remnants of the former Avar population lived in the interior. By around 900 the newcomers controlled Transdanubia, and the Principality of Moravia collapsed soon afterwards. The Árpád dynasty later claimed descent from Attila the Hun, a claim repeated in medieval Hungarian chronicles.

For half a century Hungarian armies raided widely across Europe, defeating a Bavarian army at Pressburg in 907 and reaching Germany, France, Italy and beyond. Their defeat at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955 ended raids into the west, though raids into the Balkans continued until 970. Their leaders then turned to Christianity, and Stephen I was crowned king in 1001, founding the Kingdom of Hungary. By then the Hungarians numbered around 400,000 people.

Ottoman wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries hit Hungarian-populated areas hard, and resettlement in the eighteenth century made the kingdom far more mixed. After the First World War, the Treaty of Trianon of 1920 left about a third of Hungarians as minorities in neighbouring states.

About two million Hungarians live in Hungary's neighbours, chiefly Romania, especially Transylvania, Slovakia and Serbia's Vojvodina, with smaller communities in Ukraine, Croatia, Austria and Slovenia. Regional groups include the Székelys of eastern Transylvania and the Csángós of Moldavia. A wider diaspora lives in the United States, Canada, Germany and elsewhere. Hungarian culture blends Central European traditions with older steppe elements, among them a horse culture and traces of shamanic belief in folklore.

Our maps label the Hungarians as Magyars and draw their territory on the maps for 700, 800, 900 and 1000, first on the steppe north of the Black Sea and later in the Carpathian Basin, beside the Khazars and Pechenegs. The outlines are approximate, and from 1100 the maps show the Kingdom of Hungary.