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A reconstruction of a section of Trajan’s Roman bridge over the Danube in Drobeta-Turnu Severin (Stage 16)

The Great Migrations

After a period of tribal infighting, a number of nomadic tribes from the Asian Steppes started crossing the Carpathian mountains. In the sixth century, Slavs settled in Serbia, from where they expanded across much of the southern Balkans. The Avars arrived in Romania and Hungary in AD568, while the Bulgars captured Moesia from the Byzantines in AD681, creating the first Bulgarian kingdom. Apart from a brief return to Byzantine rule in 11th–12th centuries, the Bulgars remained in power until overrun by Ottoman Turks in 1396. The Magyars came to the region after AD830, at first trying to dislodge the Bulgars, but when this failed they turned north to take Romania and Hungary from the Avars in AD895.

Árpád, leader of the Magyars, is commemorated in Ráckeve (Stage 1)

Hungary and the Magyars

The Magyars, led by Árpád, settled Hungary between various tribal groups. The conversion to Catholic Christianity in 1000 of King Istvan I (Stephen I), who was canonised as Szent Istvan, and adoption of western European script and methods of government, established the country as a European nation. Over the next 500 years a succession of kings steadily expanded the Greater Hungarian Kingdom and by the beginning of the 16th century in addition to Hungary and Transylvania (northern Romania) it included all of modern day Slovakia, much of Croatia plus parts of Austria, Poland, Serbia and Ukraine. However a peasants’ revolt in 1514 and disputes between the king and his nobles left the country in a weak position between two other powerful empires, the Ottoman Turks and Austrian Habsburgs.