Hungarian History

Hungarian History



Hungarian History

Hungary lies in Eastern Europe. In 1949, a Communist-led People's Republic was established. Soviet troops suppressed an uprising against Communist domination in 1956. Popular demands for democracy from 1989 culminated, in 1990, in free multi-party elections, in which the Hungarian Democratic Forum was victorious. In 2010, a coalition of two right-of-centre parties, the Christian Democratic People's Party and Fidesz—Hungarian Civic Alliance was elected to office. A new Constitution, approved by the legislature in 2011, entered into effect in 2012. Budapest is the capital. The language is Hungarian. The Republic of Hungary is a landlocked country in central Europe. The land is mostly low-lying and drained by the Danube (Duna) and its tributary, the Tisza. Most of the land E of the Danube belongs to a region called the Great Plain (Nagyalföld), which covers about half of Hungary. To the West of the Danube is a hilly region, with some low mountains, called Transdanubia. This region contains the country's largest lake, Balaton. In the NW is a small, fertile and mostly flat region called the Little Plain (Kisalföld).

General Information

Population density (mid-2010): 108 per sq km

Population (rounded figure, mid-2010): 10,000,000

Life expectancy (years at birth, 2010): 74.2 (males 70.5; females 78.1)

Area: 93,027 sq km

Political Form of Government

Next election: Legislative, due 2014

Last election: Legislative, 11 April and 25 April 2010

Head of State: President János Áder

Head of Government: Prime Minister Viktor Orbán

History and Evolution over Time of the Borders to the Modern Country

Magyar nomads under Arpad and his family settled the present area and parts of Transylvania in the 9th cent and came into collision with the Germans in the 10th. Istvan or St. Stephen (?-1038) gave them institutions suitable for a territorial state namely a monarchy at Buda, an endowed church centered on Esztergom and a local administration. He obtained political recognition from the Byzantine Emperor but, in return for Papal support, the Church was a Latin-speaking western church. Magyar was a central Asiatic language intelligible only to Magyars and amounting to a barrier between them as a ruling caste (populus or people) and the indigenous peasantry (plebs) until the plebs learned to speak it. Similarly, it represented a potentially dangerous isolating factor in the wider world. Hence Latin, the Church language of the West was embraced as the second language of the populus and govt. This linked them psychologically with Rome and the Papacy against German colonizing aggressions while tribal and eventually Mongol pressure from the N.E. linked them militarily with the Byzantines. (Várdy, 2008)

These essentially unstable balances of a minority populus over a majority plebs and a populus-based state between greater powers to the East and N.W. remained a feature of Hungarian politics and history into modern times. Latin was still being taught as a spoken language in 1939.

Through trade and diplomatic interplay between Germany, Hungary and Rome western connections developed. Two sons of K. Edmund Ironside went there in the time of Canute. One died; the other, Edward the Aetheling, married a daughter of Istvan ...