Realm
Ethnic group
Hungarians, also known as Magyars, are an ethnic group native to present day Hungary, and the Carpathian Basin who share a common culture, language, history and ancestry. They have a notable presence in parts of the former Kingdom of Hungary. The Hungarian language belongs to the Ugric branch of the Uralic language family, alongside the Khanty and Mansi languages.
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Text from the Wikipedia article “Magyars”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Hungarians, also known as Magyars, are an ethnic group native to present day Hungary (Magyarország), and the Carpathian Basin who share a common culture, language, history and ancestry. They have a notable presence in parts of the former Kingdom of Hungary. The Hungarian language belongs to the Ugric branch of the Uralic language family, alongside the Khanty and Mansi languages.
There are an estimated 14.5 million ethnic Hungarians and their descendants worldwide, of whom approximately 9.6 million live in today's Hungary. About 2 million Hungarians live in areas that were part of the Kingdom of Hungary before the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 and are now parts of Hungary's seven neighbouring countries, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria. In addition, significant groups of people with Hungarian ancestry live in various other parts of the world, most of them in the United States, Canada, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Chile, Brazil, Australia, and Argentina; therefore, they constitute the Hungarian diaspora (Hungarian: szórványmagyarság).
The diaspora can be divided into several subgroups according to local linguistic and cultural characteristics; subgroups include the Székelys (in eastern Transylvania as well as a few in Suceava County, Bukovina), the Csángós (in Western Moldavia), the Palóc, the Matyó and the Magyarabs (in Nubia).
The Hungarians' own ethnonym to denote themselves in the Early Middle Ages is uncertain. The exonym "Hungarian" is believed to have derived from the Huns and the Oghur-Turkic Onoğur (literally "Ten Arrows" or "Ten Tribes").
Prior to the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin when the Hungarian conquerors lived east of the Carpathian Mountains, on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, written sources called the Hungarians: "Ungri" by Georgius Monachus in 837, "Ungri" by Annales Bertiniani in 862, and "Ungari" by the Annales ex Annalibus Iuvavensibus in 881. The Hungarians probably belonged to the Onoğur tribal alliance, and it is possible that they became its ethnic majority. In the Early Middle Ages, the Hungarians had many names, including "Węgrzy" (Polish), "Ungherese" (Italian), "Ungar" (German), and "Hungarus".
In their own language, the Hungarian people call themselves "Magyar". "Magyar" possibly derived from the name of the most prominent Hungarian tribe, the "Megyer". The tribal name "Megyer" became "Magyar" in reference to the Hungarian people as a whole.
The Greek cognate of "Tourkia" (Greek: Τουρκία) was used by the scholar and Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in his De Administrando Imperio of c. AD 950, though in his use, "Turks" always referred to Magyars. However, although the Magyars’ historical social structure was of Turkic origin, and they still retain substantial Turkic roots in their basic vocabulary and certain early Turkic cultural elements, they are not widely considered a Turkic people today.
The obscure name kerel or keral, found in the 13th-century work The Secret History of the Mongols, possibly referred to Hungarians and derived from the Hungarian title király ('king').
The historical Latin phrase "Natio Hungarica" ("Hungarian nation") had a wider and political meaning because it once referred to all nobles of the Kingdom of Hungary, regardless of their ethnicity or mother tongue.
The origin of Hungarians, the place and time of their ethnogenesis, has been a matter of debate. Due to the classification of the Hungarian language in the Ugric family, they are sometimes regarded as an Ugric people originating in Siberia. However, Fóthi et al. 2022 suggests that the conquering Hungarians have origins in three distinct regions on the Eurasian steppe: the Lake Baikal-Altai Mountains, spanning present-day northwestern Mongolia and southern Siberia, the Southern Urals-Western Siberia and the Black Sea-Northern Caucasus. Meanwhile, Neparáczki et al. 2018 proposes that over a third of the Hungarian conquerors' maternal lineages derive from Inner Asia, centred in present-day eastern Mongolia and southern Siberia, while the remainder is derived from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. Maróti et al. 2022 highlights the arrival of three successive tribes in the Carpathian Basin between the 5th and 9th centuries, the Huns, Avars and conquering Hungarians. The study concludes that the Huns and related Avars likely originated in present-day Mongolia and were descendants of the Xiongnu, while the conquering Hungarians derived from an admixture of Ugrians, Sarmatians and Huns.
"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 written evidence. In the 21st century, historians have argued that "Hungarians" did not exist as a discrete ethnic group or people for centuries before their settlement in the Carpathian basin. Instead, the formation 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-3rd millennium BC, the Uralic-speaking peoples in Siberia began to split up. Some dispersed towards the west and came into contact with Turkic- and Iranic-speaking peoples who were spreading northwards. From at least 2000 BC onwards, Ugric-speakers became distinguished from the rest of the Uralic-speaking peoples. 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, Ugric-speakers moved to the west of the Ural Mountains, to the area between the southern Ural Mountains and the Volga River, known as Bashkiria (Bashkortostan) and Perm Krai.
Oghuric-speaking peoples from Inner Asia migrated to the Pontic-Caspian steppe around the mid-5th century.
In the early 8th century, some Ugric-speakers moved to the Don River, to an area between the Volga, Don and the Seversky Donets rivers. Those around the Don River were subordinates of the Khazar Khaganate.
Tradition holds that the Hungarians were organized in a confederacy of seven tribes: Jenő, Kér, Keszi, Kürt-Gyarmat, Megyer, Nyék, and Tarján. Most of the tribal names are believed to be of Turkic origin. The Hungarians neighboured the Oghuric Bulgars on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, with cooperation in gardening, cattle breeding and agriculture.
Around 830, a rebellion broke out in the Khazar khaganate. As a result, three Kabar tribes of the Khazars joined the Hungarians and moved to what the Hungarians call the Etelköz, the territory between the Carpathians and the Dnieper River. The Hungarians faced their first attack by the Pechenegs around 854. The new neighbours of the Hungarians were the Varangians and the eastern Slavs. From 862 onwards, the Hungarians (already referred to as the Ungri) along with their allies, the Kabars, started a series of looting raids from the Etelköz into the Carpathian Basin, against Great Moravia, the Eastern Frankish Empire, the First Bulgarian Empire, and the Balaton principality.
The Hungarians arrived in the Carpathian Basin, a geographically unified but politically divided land, after acquiring thorough local knowledge of the area from the 860s onwards.
After the end of the Avar Kaganate (c. 822), the Eastern Franks asserted their influence in Transdanubia, the Bulgarians to a small extent in the Southern Transylvania and the interior regions housed the surviving Avar population in their stateless state. The downfall of the Avar Khaganate at the beginning of the 9th century did not mean the extinction of the Avar population, contemporary written sources report surviving Avar groups. According to the archaeological evidence, the Avar population survived the time of the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin.
In 862, Prince Rastislav of Moravia rebelled against the Franks, and after hiring Hungarian troops, won his independence; this was the first time that Hungarians expeditionary troops entered the Carpathian Basin. In 862, Archbishop Hincmar of Reims records the campaign of unknown enemies called "Ungri", giving the first mention of the Hungarians in Western Europe. In 881, the Hungarian forces fought together with the Kabars in the Vienna Basin. According to historian György Szabados and archaeologist Miklós Béla Szőke, a group of Hungarians were already living in the Carpathian Basin at that time, so they could quickly intervene in the events of the Carolingian Empire. The number of recorded battles increased from the end of the 9th century. In the late Avar period, a part of Hungarians was already present in the Carpathian Basin in the 9th century, this has been supported by genetic and archaeological research, because there are graves in which Avar descendants are buried in Hungarian clothes. An important segment of this Avar era Hungarians is that the Hungarian county system of King Saint Stephen I may be largely based on the power centers formed during the Avar period. According to some genetic studies, there is a genetic continuity from the Bronze Age, a continuous migration of the Steppe peoples from east of the Carpathian Basin.
The foundation of the Hungarian state is connected to the Hungarian conquerors, who arrived from the Pontic steppes as a confederation of seven tribes. The Hungarians arrived in the frame of a strong centralized steppe-empire under the leadership of Grand Prince Álmos and his son Árpád, they became founders of the Árpád dynasty, the Hungarian ruling dynasty and the Hungarian state. The Árpád dynasty claimed to be a direct descendant of the great Hun leader Attila. Medieval Hungarian chronicles from the Hungarian royal court like the Gesta Hungarorum, Gesta Hunnorum et Hungarorum, Chronicon Pictum, Buda Chronicle, Chronica Hungarorum claimed that the Árpád dynasty and the Aba clan are the descendants of Attila.
Árpád, Grand Prince of the Hungarians, says in the Gesta Hungarorum:
The land stretching between the Danube and the Tisza used to belong to my forefather, the mighty Attila.
The Hungarians took possession of the Carpathian Basin in a pre-planned manner, with a long move-in between 862 and 895. This is confirmed by the archaeological findings. In the 10th-century Hungarian cemeteries, the graves of women, children and elderly people are located next to the warriors. They were buried according to the same traditions, wore the same style of ornaments, and belonged to the same anthropological group. The Hungarian military events of the following years prove that the Hungarian population that settled in the Carpathian Basin was not a weakened population without a significant military power. Other theories assert that the move of the Hungarians was forced or at least hastened by the joint attacks of Pechenegs and Bulgarians. According to eleventh-century tradition, the road taken by the Hungarians under Prince Álmos took them first to Transylvania in 895. This is supported by an eleventh-century Russian tradition that the Hungarians moved to the Carpathian Basin by way of Kiev. Prince Álmos, the sacred leader of the Hungarian Great Principality died before he could reach Pannonia, he was sacrificed in Transylvania.
In 895/896, under the leadership of Árpád, some Hungarians crossed the Carpathians and entered the Carpathian Basin. The tribe called Megyer was the leading 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. It is uncertain whether or not those conflicts contributed to the Hungarian departure from Etelköz.
From the upper Tisza region of the Carpathian Basin, the Hungarians intensified their campaigns across continental Europe. In 900, they moved from the upper Tisza river to Transdanubia, which later became the core of the arising Hungarian state. By 902, the borders were pushed to the South-Moravian Carpathians and the Principality of Moravia collapsed. 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 Przemyśl) suggest that 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.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Hungarians”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.