A Brief History
B y European standards, the Hungarians are relative newcomers. They have lived in the Carpathian Basin for a mere 1,100 years — but during that time they’ve had more than their share of suffering.
Early Settlers
The settlement of present-day Hungary goes far back in time. Less than 64 km (40 miles) to the west of Budapest, human traces thought to be half a million years old have been excavated and are now on display at the Hungarian National Museum. The first tribes that came to this area brought skills and tools which improved the lot of the hunter, made farming feasible, and, in time, gave rise to primitive industries.
Around the third century b.c., Hungary was occupied by a Celtic-Illyrian tribe known as Eraviscans, refugees from wars in Greece. They established a tribal centre on top of Gellért Hill and continued the early settlers’ artistic and industrial innovations.
The Roman Empire
Hungary remained beyond the reach of western Europe until the first century a.d., when the Roman empire’s legions advanced and pushed its northeast frontier to the Danube. By the second century, about 20,000 Roman troops were deployed along the river between Vienna and Budapest.
To command and coordinate this long, exposed line, the Romans built a military camp called Aquincum, which became the home of some 6,000 soldiers, and in time spawned civilian suburbs that housed up to ten times that number. In a.d. 106 Aquincum was made the capital of the Roman empire’s province of Lower Pannonia, and its amphitheatres, bathing complexes, aqueducts, and the sheer size and quality of the remains unearthed in present-day Obuda testify to its former importance.
As the Roman empire began to crumble, however, Huns and Vandals swarmed over the river, and during the early fifth century Aquincum fell to the tribes of Attila. It is believed that the town on the west side of the river was named after Attila’s brother (or possibly his brother-in-law), Buda, who was banished there. When Attila died in 453 the Huns were overthrown and the Avars became the dominant power, occupying the region from the middle of the sixth century to the early ninth century.
The First Hungarians
The tribes that were ultimately to settle in the land arrived in 896. They had wandered a long way from their home east of the Ural Mountains, and fell upon the land with such ferocity that the local people thought they too were Huns (one might be tempted to think this is the origin of the English Hungary).
But they were actually Magyars (the Hungarian word for Hungarians); their language was strange to outsiders. The tribe’s name for itself became the name of the country and its language, as well. Related tribes, who had earlier travelled northwest while the Magyars migrated west, ended up in Finland. Their mutually incomprehensible tongues are classified together in the linguistic field as Finno-Ugric.
The first leader of the Magyars, Prince Arpád, founded a dynasty that lasted more than three centuries and introduced statehood to the new land. Prince Géza, his great-grandson, embraced Christianity, and on the legendary date of Christmas Day a.d. 1000, Géza’s son, Steven (István), later St. Stephen (Szent István), was crowned the first king of Hungary in the city of Esztergom, situated on the Danube Bend.
The first record of Pest, meaning “lime furnace” or “ovens” in Slavic, comes from 1061. A landmark of the nation’s civilization in these early days, the Golden Bull of 1222 was a sort of “Magyar Carta” spelling out the rights of nobles and commoners alike. But the rights of man were the last thing on the minds of the Mongols, who overran the country in 1241 and again in 1242. Whole towns and villages, including Buda and Pest, were subjected to an orgy of killing and destruction. The Mongols did not stay, however, nor did they return. King Béla IV then set about reviving the wrecked nation, and founded the town of Buda, wisely building it within fortified walls.
The Angevin Dynasty
The Arpád dynasty ended in 1301; the French House of Angevin (Anjou), in the shape of Károly (Charles) Róbert, claimed the crown. He moved the court to Visegrád before it came permanently to Buda’s Castle Hill.
Two more foreign kings ruled after Róbert, but it was a Hungarian noble, János Hunyadi, who was to become the national saviour in the mid-15th century. The Turks had been threatening the country for some time but Hunyadi led the Hungarian army to victory against them at Nándorfehérvár (now Belgrade) in 1456.
The son of János Hunyadi, Korvin Mátyás (Matthias Corvinus), ascended the throne in 1458 and for the next 32 years the country enjoyed a golden age of intellectual and civic development. Under this enlightened king’s rule, the city of Buda became an advanced centre of Renaissance culture and Pest flourished in trade and industry. King Mátyás’ Royal Palace was the talk of Europe.
Hungarians say that when Mátyás died so did justice, resulting in internal strife. Despotic noblemen repressed the peasants so harshly that an army led by György Dózsa rose in rebellion in 1514, but the insurrection failed; Dózsa was roasted alive and the serfs’ condition continued to decline.
Meanwhile the Turks were again massing for war. This time there was no Hunyadi to lead the weakened nation, and the king, Lajos (Louis) II, and much of his army were killed at the battle of Mohács (in southern Hungary) in 1526.
The neighbouring Austrian Habsburg rulers, fearful that Vienna would be the Ottoman empire’s next conquest, proclaimed themselves rulers of Hungary, thus creating a buffer zone between themselves and the Turks. Hungary was effectively dismembered: the north and west fell to the Habsburgs; Transylvania became a so-called independent principality under Turkish auspices; and central Hungary came under direct Turkish rule. The Turks finally occupied Buda in 1541 and stayed there for almost a century and a half, achieving and bequeathing little of note except, of course, their baths.
By the late 17th century the Christian armies of the West were fully mobilized against the Ottoman infidels. Long, devastating sieges were laid to both Buda and Pest and, when finally liberated in 1686, the cities once again lay in ruins.
Under the Habsburgs
The Hungarian people then found themselves under the rule of the Habsburgs, which was not much better than life under the pashas, and in 1703 Prince Ferenc Rákóczi led an eight-year struggle for independence. Outnumbered and deserted by their French allies, the Hungarians finally lost the war in 1711.
Peace lasted for the rest of the century and the country made great economic strides as a province of the Habsburg empire. Factories, theatres, and newspapers were opened and Pest expanded its role in international trade while Buda regained its status as Hungary’s administrative centre.
But prosperity was not for the majority. The rich were getting richer while the serfs were getting poorer, and the Magyar identity was being repressed by the influence of the Germanic Habsburgs. In the mid-19th century, the Hungarians once again went to war for their independence.
The rebellion of 1848 was led by a group of young intellectuals, including the 25-year-old radical poet, Sándor Petofi. A provisional government was formed, headed by Lajos Kossuth, but it was short-lived. The Emperor Franz Joseph I summoned help from the Czar of Russia and the revolt was crushed in 1849.
All was not totally lost, however. In 1867, under a compromise designed to curtail home-rule agitation, the Austro-Hungarian empire was established and Hungary was finally granted its own government, though key ministries were shared with the Austrians. This “Dual Monarchy” saw out the 19th century on a bright note, with splendid boulevards and proud buildings erected to create the Pest we recognize today. The Chain Bridge became the first permanent link across the river, the Pest metro and the Pest-Vienna railway opened, and, in 1873, the towns of Pest, Buda, and Obuda merged to become Budapest.
Wars and Revolutions
In 1914, as part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Hungary was called upon to enter World War I. Their involvement in the war cost many thousands of Hungarian lives, and the country’s hardships multiplied.
In October 1918, Hungary’s last king, Károly IV, was toppled by what is now called the Bourgeois Democratic Revolution. The revolutionaries joined with the newly-born Hungarian communist movement, but took their reform demands too far and too fast, and only succeeded in provoking a right-wing backlash led by Admiral Miklós Horthy.
Meanwhile, the aftermath of war, as dictated by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, was to cost Hungary very dearly. About two-thirds of the country, including the traditional homeland of Transylvania, was handed over to the new “Successor States” — Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. Horthy maintained his role as regent in the grim twenties and thirties while the country, demoralized and impoverished, seethed over the treaty.
Hitler’s Germany, meanwhile, provided investment in Hungarian industry and a market for Hungarian farm produce, and earned a grudging admiration from the Hungarians for its defiance of the World War I allies. In 1940 Hungary allowed the German army to cross its territory and, as a reward, they temporarily recovered parts of its former lands from Romania and Yugoslavia. It was a false dawn before the country’s blackest hours. Thousands of Hungarians died supporting the Germans on the Russian Front, and just as Horthy thought he could squirm out of Hitler’s grasp by declaring neutrality in 1944, the country was occupied by the Germans.
As the Soviet army moved closer to Budapest in late 1944 and the bombing of the city became more intense, Horthy played his last card by declaring an armistice. The Germans responded by installing in power a Hungarian fascist group called the Arrow Cross. This brutal, fanatical regime murdered hundreds of Budapestis and ensured further destruction of the city by fighting the Red Army to the death. By the time the Russians finally took Budapest, three-quarters of its buildings were demolished and the Hungarian death toll in the war came to about half a million.
In and Out of the Red
Post-war Hungary was transformed from a republic (1946) into a People’s Republic (1949). Life under the Soviets was not much brighter than existence under the Nazis. After a hopeful democratic beginning with free elections, fear and turbulence ensued. Stalin’s man, Mátyás Rákosi, established his sinister AVO secret police to ensure compliance with party doctrine.
After eight years of often brutal repression the people had had enough and, on 23 October 1956, marched on Parliament to air their grievances. The students and workers were met with police bullets. The protest snowballed into a popular uprising and within days a provisional Hungarian government, led by Imre Nagy, had withdrawn from the Warsaw Pact. Soviet retribution took just 12 days. On 4 November, Red Army tanks entered Budapest and quickly crushed the armed resistance. The West watched in horror as Nagy and thousands more were executed. Some 200,000 Hungarians fled the country.
The Soviets installed János Kádár as the new party boss. Although rule began in repressive fashion, gradually, by the mid-1960s, severe ideological doctrines were being relaxed. Hungarians embraced a form of consumerism; they were allowed to take holidays in the West (though limited to once every three or four years, and not to every Western country), and the “goulash economy,” even though it failed to meet its potential, was held up as a model in the Eastern bloc.
As the winds of perestroika blew in from Moscow, Kádár was removed from power in 1988, and, in 1989, the formation of opposition parties was legalized. Hungary was the first country to draw back its Iron Curtain, dismantling the barbed wire along its Austrian border and allowing East Germans to escape to the West. In 1990 the country held its first free elections in 43 years and was called a republic again; in 1991 it became an associate member of the European Community. In 1997 Hungary was offered membership in the NATO.
The transition from communism to capitalism has not been easy, as all the former Eastern bloc states have found, but Hungary, at least, has a significant share of Western investments to help support its rather fragile economy. As a bridge between East and West Europe it is well positioned for any improvement in trade between the two geo-political blocks. Its hopes for the future are full membership of the European Union and two things rare in the history of Hungary: namely, peace and freedom.
