A 1991 alliance borrowed its name from a medieval royal trade summit
When the leaders of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland met in February 1991 to plot their route out of the Soviet orbit, they picked a small Hungarian castle town on purpose. Six and a half centuries earlier, three kings had gathered at Visegrád to cut out a greedy middleman: the city of Vienna.
At the Congress of Visegrád in 1335, the Hungarian king Charles I, the Bohemian king John I and Poland's Casimir III agreed to open fresh trade routes around Vienna. The city held staple rights, meaning merchants passing through had to unload their goods and offer them for sale there before carrying them further. The kings also confirmed Bohemian control of Silesia. A second meeting in 1339 settled that if Casimir died without a son, the Polish crown would go to Charles's son Louis, which is exactly what happened in 1370.
Over the following centuries much of the region came under the sway of the Habsburgs, ruled from the very city those kings had tried to sidestep, until Austria-Hungary broke apart in 1918. After World War II the three countries became Soviet satellite states. The collapse of communism in 1989 let them turn toward democracy and market economies.
The modern group was launched on 15 February 1991 by Václav Havel of Czechoslovakia, Lech Wałęsa of Poland and József Antall of Hungary. Their shared goal was to leave the communist system behind and qualify for Western institutions such as NATO and the European Union. When Czechoslovakia split peacefully in 1993, the Czech Republic and Slovakia each took a seat, turning three members into four and giving the bloc its nickname, the V4.
All four entered the European Union together on 1 May 2004, fulfilling the group's central aim. Since then much of its work has run through the Visegrad Fund, which supports cultural exchange and links between civil servants and citizens across the four countries, alongside expert cooperation on topics such as infrastructure.
Source: Visegrád Group
