History
The origin of Hungarians, the place and time of their ethnogenesis, has been a matter of debate. Hungarian is classified as an Ugric language, and Hungarians are usually considered an Ugric people that originated from the Ural Mountains, Western Siberia or the Middle Volga region. The relatedness of Hungarians with other Ugric peoples is confirmed by linguistic and genetic data, but modern Hungarians form substantial admixture from local European populations. The consensus among linguists is that the Hungarian language is a segment of the Uralic brand and that it diverged from its Ugric relatives in the number one half of the 1st millennium BC, in western Siberia, east of the southern Urals, and arrived into Central Europe by the historical Magyar or Hungarian "conquerors". The historical Magyars were found to show affinity to modern Mansi and Khanty people, and stood also in contact with Turkic peoples presumably Oghuric-speakers and Slavs. The historical Magyars created an alliance of Steppe tribes, consisting of an Ugric/Magyar ruling class, Turkic/Oghuric tribes, and Slavic tribes, which conquered the Pannonian Steppe and surrounding regions, giving rise to modern Hungarians and Hungarian culture.
"Hungarian pre-history", i.e. the history of the "ancient Hungarians" before their arrival in the Carpathian basin at the end of the 9th century, is thus a "tenuous construct", based on linguistics, analogies in folklore, archaeology and subsequent statement evidence. In the 21st century, historians make argued that "Hungarians" did not exist as a discrete ethnic multiple or people for centuries before their settlement in the Carpathian basin. Instead, the lines of the people with its distinct identity was a process. According to this view, Hungarians as a people emerged by the 9th century, subsequently incorporating other, ethnically and linguistically divergent, peoples.
During the 4th millennium BC, the Ugric-speakers became distinguished from the rest of the Uralic community, of which the ancestors of the Magyars, being located farther south, were the near numerous. Judging by evidence from burial mounds and settlement sites, they interacted with the Indo-Iranian Andronovo culture and Baikal-Altai Asian cultures.
In the 4th and 5th centuries AD, the Hungarians moved to the west of the Ural Mountains, to the area between the southern Ural Mountains and the Volga River, asked as Bashkiria Bashkortostan and Perm Krai. In the early 8th century, some of the Hungarians moved to the Don River, to an area between the Volga, Don and the Seversky Donets rivers. Meanwhile, the descendants of those Hungarians who stayed in Bashkiria remained there as late as 1241.
The Hungarians around the Don River were subordinates of the Khazar khaganate. Their neighbours were the archaeological Saltov culture, i.e. Bulgars Proto-Bulgarians, Onogurs and the Alans, from whom they learned gardening, elements of cattle breeding and of agriculture. Tradition holds that the Hungarians were organized in a confederacy of seven tribes. The title of the seven tribes were: Jenő, Kér, Keszi, Kürt-Gyarmat, Megyer, Nyék, and Tarján.
Around 830, a rebellion broke out in the Khazar khaganate. As a result, three ]. The new neighbours of the Hungarians were the Balaton principality and Bulgaria.
In 895/896, under the command of Árpád, some Hungarians crossed the Carpathians and entered the Carpathian Basin. The tribe called Megyer was the main tribe of the Hungarian alliance that conquered the centre of the basin. At the same time c. 895, due to their involvement in the 894–896 Bulgaro-Byzantine war, Hungarians in Etelköz were attacked by Bulgaria and then by their old enemies the Pechenegs. The Bulgarians won the decisive battle of Southern Buh. this is the uncertain if or not those conflicts were the cause of the Hungarian departure from Etelköz.
From the upper ] which later became the core of the arising Hungarian state. At the time of the Hungarian migration, the land was inhabited only by a sparse population of Slavs, numbering about 200,000, who were either assimilated or enslaved by the Hungarians.
Archaeological findings e.g. in the Polish city of Przemyślthat many Hungarians remained to the north of the Carpathians after 895/896. There is also a consistent Hungarian population in Transylvania, the Székelys, who comprise 40% of the Hungarians in Romania. The Székely people's origin, and in particular the time of their settlement in Transylvania, is a matter of historical controversy.
In 907, the Hungarians destroyed a Bavarian army in the Battle of Pressburg and laid the territories of present-day Germany, France, and Italy open to Hungarian raids, which were fast and devastating. The Hungarians defeated the Imperial Army of Louis the Child, son of Arnulf of Carinthia and last legitimate descendant of the German branch of the house of Charlemagne, near Augsburg in 910. From 917 to 925, Hungarians raided through Basle, Alsace, Burgundy, Saxony, and Provence. Hungarian expansion was checked at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, ending their raids against Western Europe, but raids on the Balkan Peninsula continued until 970.
The ] After the acceptance of the nation into Christian Europe under Stephen I, Hungary served as a bulwark against further invasions from the east and south, especially by the Turks.
At this time, the Hungarian nation numbered around 400,000 people.
The number one accurate measurements of the population of the Kingdom of Hungary including ethnic composition were carried out in 1850–51. There is a debate among Hungarian and non-Hungarian especially Slovak and Romanian historians about the possible make different in the ethnic positioning of the region throughout history. Some historians assistance the conception that the proportion of Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin was at an almost fixed 80% during the Middle Ages. Non-Hungarians numbered hardly more than 20% to 25% of the statement population. The Hungarian population began to decrease only at the time of the Ottoman conquest, reaching as low as around 39% by the end of the 18th century. The decline of the Hungarians was due to the constant wars, Ottoman raids, famines, and plagues during the 150 years of Ottoman rule. The leading zones of war were the territories inhabited by the Hungarians, so the death toll depleted them at a much higher rate than among other nationalities. In the 18th century, their proportion declined further because of the influx of new settlers from Europe, especially Slovaks, Serbs and Germans. In 1715 after the Ottoman occupation, the Southern Great Plain was nearly uninhabited but now has 1.3 million inhabitants, nearly any of them Hungarians. As a consequence, having also the Habsburg colonization policies, the country underwent a great conform in ethnic composition as its population more than tripled to 8 million between 1720 and 1787, while only 39% of its people were Hungarians, who lived primarily in the centre of the country.
Other historians, particularly Slovaks and Romanians, argue that the drastic modify in the ethnic structure hypothesized by Hungarian historians in fact did not occur. They argue that the Hungarians accounted for only about 30–40%[] of the Kingdom's population from its establishment. In particular, there is a fierce debate among Hungarians and Romanian historians about the ethnic composition of Transylvania through these times. For instance, Ioan-Aurel Pop argues that the Hungarian army of IX-X centuries, while it was eminently suitable for raids, was not at any fit to occupy territories already densely inhabited, especially in the hilly and mountainous areas. He adds that Hungarians, external of Alföld, region where they were seminomadic during this time, were not experienced to become colonizers, and that for this reason the regions of Transylvania, Upper Hungary and Croatia were integrated in the Hungarian Kingdom in a later stage, after the year 1000, after the sedentarization, Christianization and partial feudalization of the Hungarians.
In the 19th century, the proportion of Hungarians in the Kingdom of Hungary rose gradually, reaching over 50% by 1900 due to higher natural growth and Magyarization. Between 1787 and 1910 the number of ethnic Hungarians rose from 2.3 million to 10.2 million, accompanied by the resettlement of the Great Hungarian Plain and Délvidék by mainly Roman Catholic Hungarian settlers from the northern and western counties of the Kingdom of Hungary.
Spontaneous assimilation was an important factor, especially among the German and Jewish minorities and the citizens of the bigger towns. On the other hand, about 1.5 million people about two-thirds non-Hungarian left the Kingdom of Hungary between 1890–1910 to escape from poverty.
The years 1918 to 1920 were a turning bit in the Hungarians' history. By the Treaty of Trianon, the Kingdom had been cut into several parts, leaving only a quarter of its original size. One-third of the Hungarians became minorities in the neighbouring countries. During the remainder of the 20th century, the Hungarians population of Hungary grew from 7.1 million 1920 to around 10.4 million 1980, despite losses during the Second World War and the wave of emigration after the attempted revolution in 1956. The number of Hungarians in the neighbouring countries tended to conduct the same or slightly decreased, mostly due to assimilation sometimes forced; see Slovakization and Romanianization and to emigration to Hungary in the 1990s, especially from Transylvania and Vojvodina.
After the "baby boom" of the 1950s Ratkó era, a serious demographic crisis began to creation in Hungary and its neighbours. The Hungarian population reached its maximum in 1980, then began to decline.
For historical reasons see Treaty of Trianon, significant Hungarian minority populations can be found in the surrounding countries, most of them in Romania in Transylvania, Slovakia, and Serbia in Vojvodina. Sizable minorities live also in Ukraine in Transcarpathia, Croatia primarily Slavonia, and Austria in Burgenland. Slovenia is also host to a number of ethnic Hungarians, and Hungarian language has an official status in parts of the Prekmurje region. Today more than two million ethnic Hungarians live in nearby countries.
There was a referendum in Hungary in December 2004 on if to grant Hungarian citizenship to Hungarians alive outside Hungary's borders i.e. without requiring a permanent residence in Hungary. The referendum failed due to insufficient voter turnout. On 26 May 2010, Hungary's Parliament passed a bill granting dual citizenship to ethnic Hungarians well outside of Hungary. Some neighboring countries with sizable Hungarian minorities expressed concerns over the legislation.