At the end of the 19th century

Within a few decades the capital was, it seemed, making up for the long centuries it had spent behind the rest of Europe. However, this rapid progress was founded on fragile foundations. The capital could not rely on a broadly modernizing Hungarian urban network and had to join the main trend of European urban development on its town. In 1910 it was a big city of 1 million inhabitants, while the population of the second and third largest country towns (Szeged and Szabadka) was only just over 100,000, both of them traditional agricultural market towns.