Aquincum and the Romans
The Romans made the Danube their frontier and put a legionary fortress and a civil town at Aquincum, in what is now Óbuda, from the first century AD. It was the capital of Lower Pannonia and held perhaps thirty to forty thousand people. The remains — an amphitheatre, the waterworks, a museum on the site — are in District III and are easy to miss and worth not missing.
The Magyars and the kingdom
The Magyar tribes arrived in the Carpathian Basin around 895–896, a date fixed in Hungarian public memory and encoded in the height of half the buildings in the city. In the year 1000, Stephen took the crown from the Pope and made Hungary a Christian kingdom.
In 1241 the Mongols destroyed almost everything. Béla IV, returning, ordered fortified towns on high ground, which is why the walled town on Castle Hill exists. Under Matthias Corvinus in the fifteenth century, Buda became a Renaissance court of European standing, with one of the great libraries of the age.
The Ottoman century
Mohács in 1526 broke the Hungarian army and killed the king. Buda fell in 1541 and the Ottomans held it for a hundred and forty-five years. The country was split three ways: Ottoman centre, Habsburg west and north, and a semi-independent Transylvania. Buda became a garrison town; the churches became mosques; the bathhouses were built, and some are still running.
The siege that retook Buda in 1686 left the town in ruins.
Habsburg rule and the Dual Monarchy
The eighteenth century was Habsburg rebuilding. 1848 brought revolution — Petőfi, Kossuth, a war of independence put down in 1849 with Russian help — and then, after two decades of repression, the Compromise of 1867, which created Austria-Hungary and gave Hungary its own government.
What followed was Budapest’s boom. The three towns united in 1873. The population quadrupled in fifty years. The Parliament, the Opera, Andrássy út, the M1, the Great Market Hall, the millennium monuments and most of what visitors come to see were built in a single generation between 1867 and 1914.
Trianon and the wars
Defeat in 1918 was followed in 1920 by the Treaty of Trianon, which took two-thirds of Hungary’s territory and left a third of Hungarian speakers outside the borders. It is impossible to overstate how present this remains in Hungarian politics.
Hungary entered the Second World War on the Axis side, was occupied by Germany in March 1944, and the deportation of Hungarian Jews began that spring — over four hundred thousand in under two months, mostly to Auschwitz. In Budapest, the ghetto was sealed in November and the Arrow Cross murdered thousands on the riverbank. The siege of Budapest, from December 1944 to February 1945, destroyed some four-fifths of the buildings in the city and every bridge.
Communism, 1956 and 1989
Rákosi’s Stalinist decade, then the uprising of October 1956 — twelve days, crushed by Soviet armour, 2,500 dead and 200,000 gone. Kádár’s thirty-two years of goulash communism followed: comparative comfort in exchange for silence.
In June 1989 Imre Nagy was reburied before a quarter of a million people at Heroes’ Square. Hungary opened its border to East German refugees that summer, which began the sequence that ended at the Berlin Wall. The Republic was declared on 23 October 1989, the anniversary of the uprising.