How a people from the forests and steppes east of the Ural Mountains crossed half a continent, absorbed Turkic and Khazar allies, settled the Carpathian Basin in 895, and raided Europe from Spain to Constantinople.
Stop 01 · c. 1000–500 BCE
Cousins in the Forest
Hungarian is not related to the languages around it. It belongs to the Uralic family, and its closest relatives are Khanty and Mansi, spoken today by small communities along the Ob River in western Siberia; together they are traditionally grouped as the Ugric branch, though some linguists question that grouping. There are no written records from this time, so dates are rough, based on language and archaeology. Sometime in the first millennium BCE, often put at about 1000–500 BCE, the ancestors of the Hungarians separated from their Ob-Ugric relatives. As the climate shifted, they moved south from the forest into the forest-steppe east of the Ural Mountains, and took up horse-breeding. The open steppe further west came much later.
Traditional Hungarian costumes from Jassic- Cuman area, 1822The original uploader was Lily15 at Hungarian Wikipedia . · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
On the map
South into the forest-steppe, c. 1000–500 BCE · Migration
Hungarian is not related to the languages around it. It belongs to the Uralic family, and its closest relatives are Khanty and Mansi, spoken today by small communities along the Ob River in western Siberia; together they are traditionally grouped as the Ugric branch, though some linguists question that grouping. There are no written records from this time, so dates are rough, based on language and archaeology. Sometime in the first millennium BCE, often put at about 1000–500 BCE, the ancestors of the Hungarians separated from their Ob-Ugric relatives. As the climate shifted, they moved south from the forest into the forest-steppe east of the Ural Mountains, and took up horse-breeding. The open steppe further west came much later.
Over the following centuries the early Magyars crossed the Urals westward. Many historians place them, by the middle of the first millennium CE, on the steppe west of the southern Urals, in what is now Bashkortostan, though this is still debated. Medieval writers later called this area Magna Hungaria, 'Greater Hungary'. A 9th- or 10th-century cemetery near where the Kama meets the Volga shows burial customs, such as death masks and horse remains in graves, also found among the Hungarians of the Carpathian Basin. In 1235 a Dominican friar, Julian, set out to find the people left behind, and in 1236 he met people near the Volga who still spoke Hungarian. The Mongols destroyed them a few years later.
Moving southwest, the Magyars lived among Turkic-speaking peoples for centuries: Onogurs, the Bulgars of the Volga, and the Khazars, whose khaganate dominated the steppe from the Volga to the Dnieper after about 650. Some scholars think they spent a long period near the Kuban River, north of the Caucasus. Hungarian took in hundreds of Turkic words from them, about 450 before the year 900, including the vocabulary of wine-making: bor (wine) and szőlő (grapes) are both Turkic. Byzantine and Arab writers of the time simply called the Magyars 'Turks'. Even the name 'Hungarian' probably comes from 'Onogur', which is what outsiders called them, while 'Magyar' was their own name for themselves.
By the 800s the Magyars had moved onto the Black Sea steppe, first to an area the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII called Levedia, which most historians place near the Don, and then, around 850, after an attack by Pechenegs, to Etelköz, 'the land between the rivers', between the Dnieper and the lower Danube. They were a federation of seven tribes. According to Constantine, the Khazar khagan had their chiefs raise Árpád as overall leader, and Arab writers describe a dual kingship: the kende rode at the head of 20,000 horsemen, but real command lay with the gyula. Three tribes of Kabars, Khazar rebels, joined them as an eighth group, and fought in the front line of their wars.
In 894 war broke out between Byzantium and the Bulgarian tsar Simeon I. The emperor Leo VI hired the Magyars, led by Árpád and Kurszán, and Byzantine ships ferried their warriors over the lower Danube; they routed Simeon and plundered his capital, Preslav. In 895 Simeon answered by making peace with Byzantium and bribing the Pechenegs, another steppe people, to strike the Magyar homeland in Etelköz while the warriors were away. The Bulgarians then beat the returning Magyars. They could not go back. Under Árpád, the survivors crossed the Carpathian Mountains, by tradition through the Verecke Pass, into the plains of the Carpathian Basin.
Hungarians call it the honfoglalás, the 'taking of the homeland'. The Magyars first settled east of the Danube, and moved into Pannonia only after the East Frankish emperor Arnulf died in 899. Over the next few years they took the Carpathian Basin from the remnants of the Avars, Slavs, the Bulgarians and Great Moravia, which they destroyed before 906. The Bavarians murdered the Magyar leader Kurszán at a peace banquet in 902 or 904, and in July 907 a Bavarian army marched east to drive the Magyars out. It was annihilated at Brezalauspurc, probably Pressburg (Bratislava). The Magyars mixed with the people already living there, and the plain became the centre of Hungary, as it still is.
BattlesPressburg (Bratislava): Bavarian army destroyed, 907
From their new home the Magyars raided Europe for half a century. Light cavalry archers moved fast, lived off the land and could not be caught, and they were masters of the feigned retreat. In September 899 they crushed King Berengar I's Italian army on the Brenta River and plundered as far as Vercelli and Modena. In 907 they destroyed a Bavarian army at Pressburg, killing Margrave Luitpold, Archbishop Theotmar of Salzburg and 19 counts. In 908 they won at Eisenach, and in June 910 they beat the army of the East Frankish king, Louis the Child, near Augsburg. Louis agreed to pay tribute, and Berengar too paid them yearly. Many towns paid them tribute to be left alone.
Over the next decades, Magyar raids reached almost everywhere. They burned Bremen in 915, and in 917 sacked Basel. In 924 an army turned from Italy into Burgundy and southern France as far as Nîmes; in 926 they plundered the monastery of St Gall and crossed the Rhine, and in 937 they rode right across France to the Atlantic. In 942, paid by the king of Italy, they rode through northern Italy and southern France into Muslim Spain, besieging Lleida for eight days and ransoming a captured local ruler. To the south, they raided the Balkans to the walls of Constantinople, where in 934 they camped for 40 days. Constantinople paid them to stay away.
The raids began to fail. On 15 March 933 King Henry the Fowler beat a Magyar army at Riade in Saxony, after he refused to keep paying tribute. In summer 955 a large Magyar force, perhaps 8,000 to 10,000 horse archers, besieged Augsburg, defended by its bishop, Ulrich. On 10 August it was beaten on the Lechfeld by an army of similar size under Otto I, who soon became Holy Roman Emperor, crowned in 962. Heavy rain and flooded rivers then trapped the fleeing Magyars, and many were hunted down. Their leaders Bulcsú, Lél and Súr were captured and hanged. After that the western raids stopped, and the Byzantines ended the southern ones at Arcadiopolis in 970.
The Magyars settled down. Árpád's descendant Géza made Esztergom his seat around 972 and invited Christian missionaries. His son Stephen, born there and given the pagan name Vajk, had to defeat a pagan rival, his kinsman Koppány, after Géza's death in 997. Stephen was crowned the first King of Hungary on Christmas Day 1000 (some sources say New Year's Day 1001), in Esztergom or Székesfehérvár, with a crown sent with the blessing of Pope Sylvester II. He founded bishoprics, and Hungary became a Christian kingdom, a bulwark of Latin Europe on the steppe frontier. Stephen was made a saint in 1083. The kingdom's borders in the Carpathian Basin lasted, with changes, for more than 900 years.