Slovakia, a landlocked country of mountains and fertile lowlands in the heart of Central Europe, between Czechia, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary and Austria, has been inhabited since Neanderthals lived beside the warm springs of Gánovce below the High Tatras about 100,000 BCE. Neolithic farmers, Bronze Age metalworkers and Hallstatt hillfort builders were followed by the Celtic Boii and Cotini, by Roman legions on the Danube frontier at Gerulata and Laugaricio, and by the Germanic Quadi, before Huns, Lombards and Avars passed through and from the 5th and 6th centuries Slavic settlers took the land.

Samo's tribal union of about 623 and Pribina's Principality of Nitra led to Great Moravia, whose Mojmirid princes received the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius in 863 and whose ruler Svatopluk made it a great power before it fell to the Magyars in the early 10th century. Slovaks and Czechs both claim Great Moravia as an ancestor, and historians still disagree about where its heartland lay. From the year 1000 the country belonged for nine centuries to the Kingdom of Hungary as Upper Hungary: German settlers founded the mining and market towns of Spiš and the Hron valley, the Mongols devastated the land in 1241–1242, Kremnica minted the gold florin, Hussite captains and Jan Jiskra's Brethren held the north, and Matthias Corvinus founded the Academia Istropolitana at Pressburg.

After Mohács in 1526 Pressburg (Bratislava) became the capital and coronation city of Habsburg Royal Hungary while the Ottomans held the south, and the estates' uprisings of Bocskai, Bethlen, Thököly and Rákóczi, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation left deep marks. In the 19th century Bernolák and Štúr codified a Slovak literary language, the Slovaks took up arms in 1848, and Matica slovenská was founded in 1863 and dissolved in 1875, as Hungarian governments pursued Magyarisation and hundreds of thousands of Slovaks emigrated to America. Hungarian historians have long described this as the building of a single political nation, Slovak historians as a campaign against their own.

In 1918 the Slovaks joined the Czechs in Czechoslovakia, whose democracy was strained by Hlinka's autonomists and by Munich and the First Vienna Award in 1938. The Slovak State of 1939–1945, led by the priest Jozef Tiso as a client of Nazi Germany, deported most of its Jews and was challenged by the Slovak National Uprising of 1944; Tiso was executed in 1947, and the Beneš decrees expelled most of the Carpathian Germans and burdened the Hungarian minority. Communist rule from 1948 industrialised Slovakia and ended in the Prague Spring of the Slovak Alexander Dubček in 1968, federation in 1969 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Slovakia became independent on 1 January 1993, was led through the 1990s by Vladimír Mečiar, and joined NATO and the European Union in 2004 and the euro in 2009; the murder of the journalist Ján Kuciak in 2018 and the shooting of Robert Fico in 2024 marked a polarised politics. Explore the eleven ages below through selected events from the timeline.