Hungary historical timeline

Chronology

1. 560s — The Avars found a khaganate that holds the Carpathian Basin for more than two centuries, until Charlemagne's Franks break it in campaigns through the 790s. The basin has been a single strategic unit ever since, which is why Hungary's borders have been fought over rather than negotiated.
2. 899–970 — Hungarian mounted raids reach across Europe: researchers count 47 of them, only eight unsuccessful. Western Europe's memory of that century is why the Magyars arrive in its chronicles as a catastrophe rather than a migration.
3. 972 — Prince Géza of the Árpád dynasty begins integrating Hungary into Christian western Europe. His son Stephen I becomes the first king after defeating his pagan uncle Koppány, and is the saint the Budapest basilica is named for.
4. 1006 — Stephen's reforms turn Hungary into a western-style feudal state and switch administration into Latin — which stays the official administrative language until 1844. Eight centuries of Latin paperwork is the reason Hungarian nationalism in the 1800s was so preoccupied with language.
5. 1241–1242 — The Mongol invasion kills up to half of a population of two million. Béla IV admits Cumans and Jassic people fleeing the same armies, and rebuilds in stone: the hilltop castles of the Danube Bend date from the response to this.
6. 1301 — The Árpád line ends with royal power already weakened, and an interregnum follows until the first Angevin king takes the throne.
7. 1458–1490 — Matthias Corvinus, son of John Hunyadi, is the last strong king of medieval Hungary and the first nobleman elected to the throne without a dynastic claim. The first Hungarian Bible translation had been completed in 1439, and his Renaissance court is the high-water mark the country's national memory returns to.
8. 1526 — After roughly 150 years of war the Ottomans win decisively at Mohács, where Louis II dies fleeing. The nobility then elects two rival kings, and the kingdom splits three ways — Ottoman, Habsburg and Transylvanian.
9. 1686 — A Holy League army of over 74,000 men retakes Buda. Ottoman rule is gone from the whole kingdom by 1718, after 150 years, and almost nothing built in Hungary before it survives outside Eger and the Turkish baths.
10. 1703–1711 — Francis II Rákóczi leads a large-scale war of independence against the Habsburgs, taking provisional power as ruling prince after their dethronement at the Diet of Ónod in 1707 but refusing the crown.
11. 1825–1848 — The Reform Period, after the emperor is forced to convene the Diet again. It is when Hungarian replaces Latin, when the Chain Bridge and the Academy are founded, and when the country acquires the institutions it fights for next.
12. 1848 — On 15 March, mass demonstrations in Pest and Buda carry a list of twelve demands, and under Lajos Kossuth and Lajos Batthyány the House of Habsburg is dethroned. 15 March is still a national holiday.
13. 1867 — Austrian military defeats force the Austro-Hungarian Compromise and the dual monarchy. The fifty years that follow build most of what a visitor photographs in Budapest, the Parliament and the Millennium Underground included.
14. 1920 — The Treaty of Trianon, on 4 June, takes 71 per cent of Hungary's territory and 66 per cent of its pre-war population, its raw materials and its only port at Fiume, leaving an estimated 3.3 million ethnic Hungarians outside the new borders. Every Hungarian political argument since has this in it somewhere.
15. 1944 — The Holocaust in Hungary: over 600,000 Hungarian Jews are killed, with arrests in Budapest through late October. As many as 280,000 other Hungarians are raped, murdered, executed or deported for forced labour, and over 60 per cent of the economy is destroyed. Budapest surrenders on 13 February 1945 after a siege, which is why the city's Danube bridges are all post-war.
16. 1949 — Mátyás Rákosi, chosen by Moscow to front Stalinisation, rules until 1956.
17. 1956 — The Revolution. Imre Nagy returns as premier, promises free elections and takes Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact before Soviet armour ends it; Time makes the Hungarian freedom fighter its Man of the Year. János Kádár then leads the party until 1988.
18. 1989 — From this year the overriding foreign-policy goal is integration westward: Partnership for Peace in 1994, then NATO and the European Union.
19. 2026 — At the election of 12 April the Tisza Party under Péter Magyar wins a supermajority, putting Fidesz into opposition for the first time in sixteen years; Magyar is sworn in as prime minister on 9 May.