Stephen's crown launched a millennium-long Central European realm
Around the year 1000, Stephen I's coronation at Esztergom turned the Grand Principality into a Catholic Kingdom of Hungary that endured until 1946. Árpád rulers, Ottoman partition, Habsburg bargaining, and Austro-Hungarian dualism all wore the same Saint Stephen legacy.
Ottoman occupation in the sixteenth century split the country into Habsburg Royal Hungary, Ottoman Hungary, and semi-independent Transylvania after Mohács. Independence wars against Habsburgs flared across the seventeenth century and again in 1848–49. From 1867, crown lands entered Austria-Hungary as the Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen until the monarchy's post–World War I collapse.
Multiethnic from the start until Trianon, the kingdom once spanned today's Hungary, Slovakia, Transylvania and other Romanian lands, Carpathian Ruthenia, Vojvodina, Burgenland, and more. Demographers claim roughly 80 percent Hungarian before Mohács, yet by the mid-nineteenth century fewer than six million of fourteen million subjects were Hungarian after resettlement and immigration.
Stephen's feast on 20 August is still a national holiday, Foundation Day. The ground was laid a century before him, when Hungarians under Árpád settled the Carpathian Basin in 895; their raids into Western Europe stopped only after Otto I beat them at Lechfeld. Stephen, baptised out of the name Vajk, was crowned on Christmas Day 1000, two years after crushing his rival Koppány near Veszprém with Bavarian help. In 1102 King Coloman took the crown of Croatia and Dalmatia at Biograd, usually read as a personal union of the two realms. Andrew II's Golden Bull of 1222 set down legal principles, but in 1241 the Mongols destroyed the Hungarian and Cuman host at Mohi, and the invasion killed an estimated 15 to 25 percent of the people, some 300,000 to 500,000. After the Árpád line ended with Andrew III in 1301, the Angevin Charles I rebuilt royal power, worked the gold mines until Hungary stood high among European producers, introduced the forint, and in 1326 founded the Order of Saint George, called the first secular chivalric order.
Source: Kingdom of Hungary
