Brief History of Hungary

By way of introduction

To encapsulate the history of eleven-hundred years in some 100 Kbytes of text the author had to be selective - much detail of interest had to be ommitted in order to present the broad outline. Selection, as well as the linking and glossing of the selected facts, inevitably shows up as an editorial view, which might have been subtly different had this text been prepared by someone else -- but few would question, it is to be hoped, the overall factual accuracy of the narrative.

A comment on presentation: reading about history in reverse sequence might be more satisfactory than the orthodox approach beloved of schoolmasters, namely starting with the distant past and moving forward through time, which risks boring the reader with details whose subsequent import and consequences only become clear later on. To avoid this risk, the account that follows (the initial Overview and the Checklist of dates apart) has been arranged to start at the present -- with which the reader is assumed to be at least vaguely familiar -- and then work its way back to successively earlier antecedents of conditions and events.

Anybody who has strong feelings about any of the foregoing or comments on the narrative -- critical or even favourable -- is asked to communicate these to the author.

Stephen Pálffy (sp.insyc@zetnet.co.uk)

October 1995


Contents

Start with the Overview, then read the sections in the sequence shown or picking and choosing in the Contents. And if this little appetiser has given you a taste for more: go and explore the material available from the

Web sites dealing with Hungarian history.

Last updated: July 1998

Number of visitors since December 1996

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