How Magyars scourged, then founded a nation over 1,000 years

THE HUNGARIANS: A THOUSAND YEARS OF VICTORY IN DEFEAT

By Paul Lendvai.

Translated from the German by Ann Major

Princeton University Press. $29.95, 572 pages, illlus.

REVIEWED BY STEPHEN GOODE

For half a century beginning in 899, the Magyars — the name Hungarians call themselves — ravaged Europe. Fierce warrior horsemen from the East, they penetrated German lands, northern Italy and France. An ardent prayer of the time implores, “From the arrows of the Hungarians, O Lord, deliver us.” “La Chanson de Roland” calls them “breeds of Satan.”

Then in 955 the Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great won a resounding victory over them at Lechfeld near Augsburg and the Magyars did what no other band of horsemen who had scourged Europe did — they settled down and created their own nation.

Their first Christian king, Istvan (Stephen) I, descendant of Arpad, the greatest of the Magyar pagan tribal leaders, received his crown from the pope on Christmas Day in 1000. In 1083, 46 years after his death, he was canonized, the first of eight saints of the House of Arpad before the male line of the dynasty came to an end in 1301.

Paul Lendvai, a Hungarian who escaped the country after the failed 1956 Revolution and became a well known Vienna-based journalist (editor in chief and copublisher of Europaische Rundschau) takes up the history of the Magyars and tells their extraordinary story from earliest times to the present day in “The Hungarians.”

It’s not an easy job to write the better-than-1,000-year history of a people. The text can’t become bogged down in detail — yet often it is details that are the most interesting, and revealing, part of history. Nor can the story be told abstractly and apart from the blood and guts, the errors and triumphs that make up any nation’s life.

Mr. Lendvai avoids both pitfalls, for the most part. He has themes that unite Hungary’s history: the strong feeling of Magyar “aloneness” in Europe, for example, sandwiched as it is between Slavs and Germans, peoples who speak languages in no way related to Hungarian.

He avoids caricature. His Hungary is the legendary land of gypsy violin music, of dashing men and beautiful women, and romantic nights in small Budapest cafes on winding cobblestone streets near the Danube. But it is also a place where much that’s tragic has happened. It’s a country, in Mr. Lendvai’s book, where, on occasion, heroism has been exemplary and heartrending — as in the ill-fated Hungarian Revolution of 1956. At the same time it is a nation whose past has its unlovely, meretricious, and downright ugly moments.

Mr. Lendvai is very good at choosing the right anecdote to underline the point he’s making about Hungarian history and the right words to describe the various characters who inhabit this history. Thus when he discusses the hothouse nationalist fervor that hit Hungary during its 19th-century revival, Mr. Lendvai brings up Istvan Horvat (1784-1846), who represents that fervor at its most extreme. A professor at the country’s leading university, his “books and lectures … on Hungary’s early history inspired an entire generation.”

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