Romania vs Hungary: Two Neighbours, One Contested Border and a Thousand Years of History

Romania is the larger of the two neighbours, at 238,397 km² against Hungary’s 93,030 km², so about two and a half times the size, and it has roughly twice the population: 19,053,815 at its 2021 census compared with 9,603,634 at Hungary’s 2022 census. Hungary is slightly richer by nominal GDP per capita, about US$28,430 against Romania’s US$25,690 in the IMF’s 2026 estimates, although measured by purchasing power the two are now level at just over US$50,500 each. Romania’s capital is Bucharest and its language is Romanian, a Romance language descended from Latin; Hungary’s capital is Budapest and its language is Hungarian, a Uralic language distantly related to Finnish and Estonian. They share a border of about 448 km, drawn by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, and most of their history is the story of how the land on either side of it, above all Transylvania, changed hands.

Roman Dacia in 106 CE and the Magyar Arrival of 895

The two peoples reached the Carpathian region by very different routes, and that difference still shows in their languages. In 106 CE the Roman army defeated the Dacian king Decebalus, and Emperor Trajan turned Banat, Oltenia and most of Transylvania into the province of Dacia. Rome withdrew in the 270s under Emperor Aurelian, but the Latin spoken there survived. Scholars who support the Daco-Roman continuity theory see the mixing of Dacians and Roman colonists as the first phase of the Romanians’ origins; others argue that Romanian-speaking Vlachs moved north across the Danube later.

The Hungarians arrived from the Pontic–Caspian steppe as a confederation of seven tribes under Grand Prince Álmos and his son Árpád, occupying the Carpathian Basin between 862 and 895. They raided from Constantinople to as far as Spain until their defeat at Lechfeld in 955; after that, Géza began integrating Hungary into Latin Christendom in 972, and his son Stephen I was crowned the first king, traditionally on 25 December 1000. So from the outset, a Latin-speaking people and a Uralic-speaking people were sharing one mountain basin.

Stephen I’s Kingdom and the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia

For the next five centuries Hungary was the larger power, and Transylvania was part of it. Stephen I set up Catholic bishoprics in Transylvania and Banat in the early 11th century, and the province developed as the kingdom’s eastern frontier. The Székelys settled there around 1100, and German colonists, ancestors of the Transylvanian Saxons, arrived in the 1150s. Andrew II’s Golden Bull of 1222 is often described as the first constitution in continental Europe. The Mongol invasion of 1241–1242 may have killed up to half of Hungary’s roughly two million people, and King Béla IV rebuilt with hundreds of stone castles.

South and east of the Carpathians, the Romanian principalities took shape later. Basarab I united the lands between the southern Carpathians and the Danube and beat a Hungarian royal army at the Battle of Posada in 1330, securing Wallachia’s independence. Moldavia gained full autonomy under Bogdan I around 1360. Inside Transylvania, Romanians were numerous but politically excluded. After a peasant revolt in 1437, the largely Hungarian nobility, the Saxons and the Székelys codified the Union of the Three Nations, which left the peasantry unrepresented, and the Romanians’ Orthodox faith was later merely “tolerated”. That imbalance would drive Romanian national demands for the next 500 years.

From Mohács in 1526 to the Habsburg Takeover

The Ottoman advance hit both, but in different ways. Wallachian and Moldavian princes began paying regular tribute to the sultans from 1417 and 1456 respectively, keeping their own rulers and churches as vassal states, despite the resistance of princes such as Vlad III of Wallachia and Stephen III of Moldavia. Hungary, by contrast, was broken apart. At the Battle of Mohács in 1526 King Louis II died, and after the Ottomans took Buda in 1541 the kingdom was split into three: Royal Hungary under the Habsburgs in the north-west, the Pashalik of Buda in the centre, and the Principality of Transylvania, self-governing under Ottoman suzerainty, in the east. In 1600 Michael the Brave of Wallachia briefly ruled Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania together, a union that lasted only months but became a symbol for later Romanian nationalists.

Buda was retaken by the Holy League in 1686, and by 1699 Transylvania had been absorbed into the Habsburg monarchy. From that point the two stories run on different tracks again: Hungary and Transylvania were under Vienna, while Wallachia and Moldavia remained Ottoman vassals, ruled from the early 18th century by Phanariot Greek princes appointed from Istanbul.

1848, 1859 and 1867: Two Paths to Nationhood

The year 1848 put the two national movements on opposite sides. On 15 March 1848 demonstrations in Pest and Buda launched the Hungarian revolution under Lajos Kossuth, and when the Diet voted to unite Transylvania with Hungary, most Transylvanian Romanians backed the imperial government against the Hungarian revolutionaries. Russian troops helped crush Hungary in August 1849, and 13 leaders of the Hungarian army, the Martyrs of Arad, were executed that October. In Wallachia and Moldavia, revolutionaries of the same year demanded union and freedom for the peasants, and the Wallachians were the first to adopt the blue, yellow and red tricolour, but Russian and Ottoman forces put them down too.

Both got their way within two decades. Moldavia and Wallachia elected the same prince, Alexandru Ioan Cuza, in 1859, creating the core of modern Romania; Carol I took the throne in 1866, Romania declared independence from the Ottomans on 10 May 1877, and it became a kingdom in 1881. Hungary took the path of compromise: the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 created the Dual Monarchy, with a separate Hungarian parliament and Franz Joseph crowned King of Hungary. Transylvania lost its remaining autonomy and was incorporated directly into Hungary, and in 1873 Buda, Óbuda and Pest merged into Budapest.

Alba Iulia and Trianon: Transylvania Changes Hands, 1918–1920

This is the point where the two countries’ fortunes diverged most sharply. Romania entered World War I on the Entente side in 1916 and fared badly on the battlefield, but it ended up on the winning side. As Austria-Hungary collapsed, a National Assembly of Transylvanian Romanians met at Alba Iulia on 1 December 1918 and proclaimed union with Romania, now marked as Great Union Day, Romania’s national holiday. Bessarabia and Bukovina also joined, and by 1920 Romania reached its largest peacetime extent, 295,049 km².

Hungary, on the losing side, went through the Aster Revolution, Béla Kun’s short-lived Soviet Republic and a Romanian occupation of Budapest in August 1919. The Treaty of Trianon, signed on 4 June 1920, left it a landlocked state of about 93,000 km²: it lost 71% of its territory and 66% of its pre-war population, including an estimated 3.3 million ethnic Hungarians now living outside its borders, mostly in what are now Romania, Slovakia and Serbia. The new Hungary–Romania line was drawn by an international commission that included the geographer Emmanuel de Martonne.

Revising Trianon became the top item on interwar Hungary’s political agenda. In the Second Vienna Award of 30 August 1940, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy handed Northern Transylvania, including Cluj, back to Hungary. Both countries fought as Axis allies against the Soviet Union from 1941, but Romania switched sides on 23 August 1944 when King Michael I removed Ion Antonescu, while Hungary was occupied by Germany in March 1944 and ended the war in ruins after the siege of Budapest. The 1947 Paris Peace Treaties restored the Trianon border, and it is no longer officially disputed by either country.

Budapest 1956 and Timișoara 1989

Both became Soviet-bloc states after 1945, yet their communist eras felt very different. Hungary rose against Soviet rule on 23 October 1956; Soviet forces moved in on 4 November, and the repression killed about 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet soldiers; Prime Minister Imre Nagy was hanged in June 1958, and nearly a quarter of a million people fled the country. János Kádár then built a softer system: the 1968 New Economic Mechanism added market elements, and Hungary became known as “the happiest barrack” in the Eastern Bloc. Romania went the other way. Nicolae Ceaușescu, party leader from 1965, kept some distance from Moscow abroad but grew ever more authoritarian at home through the 1980s.

The endings matched. Hungary’s transition was negotiated at Round Table Talks, symbolised by Imre Nagy’s reburial in June 1989, with free elections in May 1990. Romania’s was violent: protests in support of László Tőkés, a Reformed pastor of Hungarian descent, began in Timișoara in December 1989 and became a national uprising that ended with the execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu on 25 December. It was the only Warsaw Pact country in 1989 whose leader was overthrown by force and executed.

NATO, the EU and a Million Hungarians in Romania Today

After 1989, Hungary moved first: it joined NATO in 1999, the EU on 1 May 2004 and the Schengen Area in 2007. Romania joined NATO on 29 March 2004 and the EU on 1 January 2007, but waited until 2025 for full Schengen membership. By the IMF’s 2026 estimates, Romania has almost closed the income gap, and matches Hungary on purchasing power. The politics of the two have also diverged: Hungary spent 2010 to 2026 under Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, often at odds with Brussels, until Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party won the 2026 election, while Romania’s 2024 presidential election was annulled by its Constitutional Court and rerun in 2025, when Nicușor Dan was elected.

The deepest living link is people. At Romania’s 2021 census, 1,002,151 people, about 6% of the population, declared themselves Hungarian, making them the country’s largest minority. Most live in Transylvania, and in Harghita and Covasna counties in the Székely Land they are a clear majority, at about 86% and 74%. Hungarians have the right to schooling in their own language, and where a minority tops 20% of a locality’s population, its language can be used with the local authorities. Our guide to Budapest and guide to Bucharest look at the two capitals, and the regions shaped by this shared history are covered in our guide to Romania’s geography.