MAGYARS. - An eastern people who at the end of the 9th century settled in the land that took its name from them, MAGYARORSZÁG or Hungary. Historians and ethnographers are divided regarding their origin: Hunfalvy believed them to be a Finno-Ugric tribe, Vambery considered them of Turkish race, a Ural-Altaic tribe. Their language contains various elements. Nowadays it is generally held that they are of Ugric-Finnic origin, with a strong cultural Turkish influence upon their civilization.
At the beginning of the 9th century they are said to have migrated from the steppes between the Urals and the Caspian Sea towards the Black Sea, some moving south into Persian regions, others northwards, settling between the Don and the Dnieper. After 880 the advance of the Pechenegs and Cumans, themselves pressed by the Ghuzz, forced the Magyars to cross the Don, establishing themselves in the region of present-day Bessarabia and Moldavia; they called the land Atescuza or Atelkűr (= land between the rivers); then pressure from the Pechenegs drove them across the Carpathians, where they occupied the land as far as the Tisza. The crossing of the mountains took place about 895-96; in the following years they crossed the Danube and the Magyar population occupied the land as far as the Raab. Their civilization was primitive; they were animists, burying their dead with their horses and slaves; they were shepherds and hunters, living as nomads first in wagons, then in hut-villages. Their household goods and weapons show their eastern origin, and the style of their silverwork is also eastern. They were divided into tribes, governed by chiefs called gyula.
About 860 their first contacts with the western civilized world began, with lightning raids into the Danubian lands. The raids intensified after their settlement in the Hungarian plain: they struck at Moravia, in 860 they entered Italy and reached the Brenta; the following year they invaded much of Lombardy, defeating King Berengar. They returned to Italy in 920-22 and pushed as far as Apulia; in 924 Pavia was burned. Their incursions into Germany were even more terrible, where feudal anarchy left them free to act. It can be said that there was no year in which the Magyars did not launch themselves across the German regions; Bavaria, Thuringia, Saxony were repeatedly sacked. In 915 they reached as far as Bremen. The secret of their success lay in their method of warfare: rapidity of attack, ability to move with lightning speed from place to place, light armament that facilitated attacks on western forces, composed of slow and heavy cavalry. Even their war cry had a depressing effect on the spirits and caused general flight.
Western Europe was disarmed in the face of the savage Magyars until the pitched battle on the Lech, where Otto I defeated them in 955. Yet for some decades both in Italy and Germany people had begun to build castles and prepare to repel the invaders; after 934 the Magyars had begun to make their way into the Balkan regions, threatening the Byzantine Empire, now in agreement, now in conflict with the Pechenegs.
It can be said that after the middle of the 10th century the aggressiveness of the Magyars was in decline. Their tactics were well known and no longer effective: the Slavic populations among whom they lived were gradually moving towards higher conditions of civilization. They left their huts and moved into permanent houses; they began to practice agriculture and Christianity also began to penetrate among them. Their prince Géza about 973 began negotiations with Otto I; in 985, under the influence of his Polish consort Adelaide, he converted to Christianity; his son Stephen was crowned in the year 1000 in the cathedral of Gran with the famous crown sent to him by Pope Sylvester II. Thus begins the history of the Kingdom of Hungary, destined in turn to become a bulwark of Christian civilization against eastern barbarism.