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Czechoslovakia Magyar Invasion
The unification of Czech and Slovak tribes in a single state
was shattered by the Magyar invasion in 907. The Magyars, who
entered the region as seminomadic pastoralists, soon developed
settled agricultural communities; they held the territory until
the Ottoman conquest in the sixteenth century. With the arrival
of the Magyars, the Great Moravian Empire disintegrated. The
chiefs of the Czech tribes in Bohemia broke from the tribes in
Moravia and swore allegiance instead to the Frankish emperor
Arnulf. The political center of gravity for the Czechs shifted to
Bohemia, where a new political unit, the Bohemian Kingdom, would
develop. The Magyars established the Kingdom of Hungary, which
included a good part of the Great Moravian Empire, primarily all
of modern-day Slovakia. As it turned out, the Magyar invasion had
profound long-term consequences, for it meant that the Slavic
people of the Kingdom of Hungary--the ancestors of the Slovaks--
would be separated politically from the western areas, inhabited
by the ancestors of the Czechs for virtually a millennium. This
separation was a major factor in the development of distinct
Czech and Slovak nationalities.
Data as of August 1987
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