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The Battle of Mohács (1526)

The 1526 Battle of Mohács in which the Ottoman army of Suleiman the Magnificent destroyed the Hungarian kingdom and opened central Europe to Ottoman expansion.

The Battle of Mohács of 29 August 1526 was the decisive engagement of the first major Ottoman campaign into Central Europe under Suleiman the Magnificent. The defeat of the Hungarian army and the death of King Louis II of Hungary opened the way for the Ottoman occupation of Buda, transformed the politics of the region, and set the stage for the long contest between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans for control of Hungary. The battle is one of the central events of the Ottoman golden age and forms an important episode in the broader history of the Ottoman Empire.

The Hungarian kingdom in 1526

Hungary in the early sixteenth century was a kingdom of great size but weak central authority. The Hungarian magnates, the higher nobility, controlled vast estates and private armies, and the kingship was elective in practice. The death of King Matthias Corvinus in 1490 had been followed by a long period of noble faction, during which the kingdom was repeatedly invaded by the Ottomans. The Ottoman-Hungarian frontier had been contested since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when Belgrade, then under Hungarian rule, became the northernmost outpost of the Ottoman advance.

The young king, Louis II, was crowned in 1516 at the age of nine. He inherited a kingdom in fiscal crisis, with a treasury that had been emptied by his predecessors and an army that was poorly equipped and badly led. The magnates, the higher nobility, refused to provide the troops and money needed to defend the country.

The Ottoman campaign

Suleiman left Istanbul in April 1526 at the head of an army of perhaps 80,000 men, the largest Ottoman force yet to invade central Europe. The campaign was launched in part in response to a request from the French king Francis I, who had been defeated at the Battle of Pavia in 1525 and was looking for allies against the Habsburgs.

The army moved up the Danube. It took Peterwardein (Petrovaradin) in July and then crossed into the Hungarian plain. The campaign was accompanied by the Tatar cavalry of the Crimean khan, who provided scouting and harried the Hungarian rear.

The Hungarian preparations

The Hungarian diet met in April 1526 and voted to raise a national army, but the mobilization was slow and the nobles reluctant. The army that finally assembled at Mohács in late August has been estimated at between 20,000 and 30,000 men, the majority of them infantry poorly armed and badly led.

The Hungarians were joined by a small contingent of papal troops and by a force of Czech mercenaries, but the army was too small and too badly organized to face the Ottoman host. The archbishop of Kalocsa, Tomori, who had been appointed to command, was a Franciscan friar with limited military experience.

The battle

The two armies met on the plain of Mohács, south of Buda, on 29 August 1526. The Hungarians advanced across a stream and up a slope toward the Ottoman lines. The Ottoman artillery, well positioned on higher ground, opened fire, and the Hungarian infantry suffered heavy losses before they reached the Ottoman lines.

The Ottoman cavalry attacked on the flanks, and the Hungarian army collapsed. King Louis II was thrown from his horse while fleeing and drowned in a stream. The archbishop Tomori, the papal legate, and most of the Hungarian magnates were killed. The army was virtually annihilated.

The aftermath

The defeat at Mohács was followed by the Ottoman occupation of Buda in September 1526. The Hungarian diet, meeting later that year, elected the Habsburg archduke Ferdinand of Austria as king, in part to call on Habsburg aid against the Ottomans. A rival candidate, John Zápolya, was also elected, and Hungary was divided between the two for decades. The dynasty that had begun with Osman I and that had conquered Constantinople in 1453 was now the dominant power of the Hungarian plain, a position it would hold until the long crisis that ended in the Treaty of Karlowitz of 1699.

The Battle of Mohács is often treated as a turning point in Hungarian history. The kingdom was divided, the nobility fragmented, and the central state weakened. The Ottoman occupation of central Hungary lasted until the late seventeenth century, and the long contest with the Habsburgs was the background to the whole subsequent history of the region.

For the Ottomans, the battle was the first great victory of Suleiman’s reign in Europe. It established the empire as the dominant power of the southern Hungarian plain and opened the way for the unsuccessful first siege of Vienna three years later. The army that returned to Istanbul in 1526 was, for a brief moment, the most powerful in the world. The political consequences unfolded gradually, but within decades the Ottomans were governing Buda and most of the Hungarian plain, a situation that would persist until the long crisis that led to the Treaty of Karlowitz.

The Battle of Mohács, then, was a watershed in more ways than one. It changed the political geography of Central Europe, it shifted the balance of power between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, and it shaped the consciousness of the peoples of the region for centuries. The name Mohács has been a byword for catastrophe in Hungarian memory ever since. The battle is one of the milestones of the broader history of the Ottoman Empire, and it set in motion the long contest that would eventually end in the Treaty of Karlowitz. The foundations of the Ottoman force that won at Mohács were laid in the fall of Constantinople in 1453, a generation earlier.