Count Francis Taaffe’s participation with Habsburg forces in various battles associated with the Siege of Vienna in 1683 marks one of the earliest encounters between Ireland and Hungary in modern times. The example is a point of departure for encounters and comparisons between the two countries later in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. From Count Taaffe in the late seventeenth century to Arthur Griffith and James Joyce in the early twentieth century, Hungary’s historical relation to the Habsburg dynasty, influenced in part by the country’s experience of Ottoman rule from the sixteenth century, has shaped Irish perceptions of the East-Central European territory. Irish nationalist images of Hungary moved between identification and distancing, images that were sometimes more a matter of imaginative invention than objective reflection. Understanding the awareness of Hungary in Irish politics and poetry during the nineteenth century requires recognition of Hungarian encounters with and perspectives of Ireland in turn. The transnational perspectives and engagements between the two countries culminated in the meeting William Smith O’Brien with Hungarian Prime Minister, Ferenc Deák, in Budapest in 1861. The case for the Ausgleich as a model for Irish Home Rule in the 1880s was a pretext for one of the most influential political publications of the early twentieth century in Ireland: Arthur Griffith’s The Resurrection of Hungary. Griffith’s work is the outcome of perspectives and debates between Ireland and Hungary stretching back to the 1840s. The various strands of these attitudes and discussions form a vital part of the transnational dimension of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the great modernist novel that looks back to Dublin in the year in which The Resurrection of Hungary was first published.