The Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

Abstract

Under the leadership of Prince Arpad, the Hungarians captured the Carpatho-Danubian basin in the last years of the ninth century. They principally occupied the old Roman province of Pannonia and the plain between the Danube and Tisza rivers. Burial-finds and place-names also suggest their early occupation of parts of modern-day Slavonia and the Banat, and of the principal river valleys in the Slovak Highlands and Transylvania. The Hungarian settlement was accompanied by extensive raiding across both the Balkans and Western Europe.1 At this time, the Hungarians were a linguistically mixed people, whose ruling elite spoke a form of Turkic rather than the Finno-Uralic language of the majority. Whether this elite still practised nomadism is uncertain. The religion of the Hungarians was predominantly shamanistic, although at the time of the conquest some of the invaders were Muslims.2