Kingdom of Hungary

The Kingdom of Hungary was founded in the year 1000 when Stephen I, a member of the ruling Arpad dynasty, was crowned with a crown reputedly sent by Pope Sylvester II, converting the Magyar tribal confederation that had settled the Carpathian Basin around 895 into a Christian monarchy. The kingdom grew into a major medieval European power, particularly under kings such as Louis I, called Louis the Great, in the fourteenth century, before being devastated by the Mongol invasion of 1241 to 1242 under Bela IV, who rebuilt the kingdom's defenses with a network of stone castles afterward. The kingdom's independent medieval history effectively ended with the catastrophic defeat of King Louis II by the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Mohacs in 1526, after which Hungary was divided for more than a century and a half among Ottoman occupation, Habsburg-ruled Royal Hungary, and the semi-independent Principality of Transylvania. The Habsburg dynasty reunified and ruled the Kingdom of Hungary from the late seventeenth century onward, and it continued to exist, eventually as a partner realm within Austria-Hungary from 1867, until the Austro-Hungarian monarchy itself dissolved at the end of the First World War in 1918.