Hungría

Roman Pannonia left Aquincum, beneath Budapest. In 1000 Stephen I received an apostolic crown from the pope: one of Europe's oldest surviving royal insignia. Matthias Corvinus's Bibliotheca Corviniana was in the fifteenth century Europe's second library after the Vatican's.

The Magyars settled in the Carpathian basin at the end of the ninth century. The coronation of Stephen I in the year 1000 with a crown sent by the pope fixed the kingdom's Latin orientation.

The Golden Bull of 1222 limited royal power seven years after Magna Carta. Defeat at Mohács in 1526 delivered the country to the Ottoman Empire for a century and a half, then to the Habsburgs. The Compromise of 1867 created the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy.

The Treaty of Trianon in 1920 stripped Hungary of two-thirds of its territory and left three million Magyars outside its borders: a trauma that still structures political debate. The 1956 uprising, crushed by the Red Army, and the opening of the Iron Curtain in 1989 mark the century. A member of the Union since 2004.