Hungary

From the Magyar conquest of the Carpathian Basin to a European republic, by way of Mohács and Trianon.

Hungary's history begins with the Magyar conquest of the Carpathian Basin around 895-896, when seven nomadic tribes under the chieftain Árpád settled the Danube plain. A century later his great-great-grandson Stephen accepted Christianity and was crowned around the turn of the millennium, founding a Christian kingdom that endured for half a thousand years. That medieval kingdom survived the Mongol catastrophe of 1241 but was shattered at the Battle of Mohács in 1526, after which Hungary was split for nearly two centuries among the Ottomans, the Habsburgs and an autonomous Transylvania. Reunited under Habsburg rule, Hungary rose again in the revolution of 1848-49 and won near-parity in the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. The First World War brought the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, the defining national trauma, which stripped Hungary of about two-thirds of its territory and population and left some three million ethnic Hungarians beyond the new borders. Drawn into alliance with Nazi Germany, occupied and host to the mass murder of its Jews in 1944, Hungary then spent four decades under communism, rose against Soviet rule in 1956, and finally helped pull down the Iron Curtain in 1989 before joining NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.