Hungary in its modern borders roughly corresponds to the Great Hungarian Plain . During the Iron Age, it was located at the crossroads between the cultural spheres of the Celtic Tribes Dalmatian Tribes and the Germanic Tribes .
The name "Pannonian" comes from Pannonia, a province of the Roman Empire. Only the western part of the territory of modern Hungary formed part of the ancient Roman Province of Pannonia. The Roman control collapsed with the Hunnic invasions of 370–410 and Pannonia was part of the Ostrogothic Kingdom during the late 5th to mid 6th century, succeeded by the Avar Khaganate civil. The Magyar invasion takes place during the 9th century.
The Magyars were Christianized at the end of the 10th century, and the Christian Kingdom of Hungary was established in AD 1000, ruled by the Árpád dynasty for the following three centuries. In the high medieval period, the kingdom expanded beyond Pannonia, to the Adriatic coast. In 1241 during the reign of Béla IV, Hungary was invaded by the Mongols under Batu Khan. The outnumbered Hungarians were decisively defeated at the Battle of Mohi by the Mongol army. King Béla fled to the Holy Roman Empire and left the Hungarian population at the mercy of the Mongols. In this invasion more than 500,000 Hungarian population were massacred and the whole kingdom reduced to ashes. After the extinction of the Árpád dynasty in 1301, the late medieval kingdom persisted, albeit no longer under Hungarian monarchs, and gradually reduced due to the increasing pressure by the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. Hungary bore the brunt of the Ottoman wars in Europe during the 15th century. The peak of this struggle took place during the reign of Matthias Corvinus . The Ottoman–Hungarian wars concluded in significant loss of territory and the partition of the kingdom after the Battle of Mohács of 1526.
Defense against Ottoman expansion shifted to Habsburg Austria, and the remainder of the Hungarian kingdom came under the rule of the Habsburg emperors. The lost territory was recovered with the conclusion of the Great Turkish War, thus the whole of Hungary became part of the Habsburg Monarchy. Following the nationalist uprisings of 1848, the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 elevated Hungary's status by the creation of a joint monarchy. The territory grouped under the Habsburg Archiregnum Hungaricum was much larger than modern Hungary, following the Croatian–Hungarian Settlement of 1868 with settled the political status of the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia within the Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen.
