Battle of Mohács

The Battle of Mohács, fought on 29 August 1526 on the plain near Mohács in southern Hungary, was a crushing Ottoman victory over the Kingdom of Hungary. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent destroyed the Hungarian royal army in a few hours, and the young King Louis II died fleeing the field. The defeat ended the medieval Hungarian kingdom as a united, independent state and led to its division for more than 150 years.

Under Matthias Corvinus, who died in 1490, Hungary had been a major Central European power with a large professional army. His successors, Vladislaus II and his son Louis II, were weak rulers dominated by the great nobles, who cut taxes, let the mercenary army dissolve and left frontier fortresses unpaid. A great peasant revolt in 1514 was crushed with great brutality, deepening divisions in the country. Meanwhile the Ottoman Empire was expanding. Suleiman took the key fortress of Belgrade in 1521, opening the road north.

Suleiman left Constantinople in April 1526 with a large army and artillery, while his grand vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, led the advance guard and took the fortress of Pétervárad in July. Louis appealed to the Christian princes of Europe, but they were divided by the Reformation and by the wars between France and the emperor Charles V, and almost no help came. The Hungarian forces gathered slowly. A Transylvanian army under John Zápolya and Croatian troops were still on their way when the king's commanders, urged on by nobles eager for battle, decided to fight at Mohács instead of falling back.

The Hungarian army numbered some 25,000 to 30,000 men, a mix of armoured cavalry, mercenary infantry and noble levies, commanded by Archbishop Pál Tomori. The size of the Ottoman army is uncertain; estimates range from about 50,000 to 100,000 men, and it was far stronger in artillery and in disciplined Janissary infantry. In the afternoon the Hungarian heavy cavalry charged and at first drove back the Ottoman front line. But the Ottoman centre gave way in good order, the attackers pushed too far, and they were caught by cannon and musket fire and by cavalry attacks from the flanks. Within about two hours the Hungarian army had collapsed.

Louis II, aged twenty, escaped from the battlefield but drowned in a swollen stream, dragged down by the weight of his armour, and his corpse was only recovered weeks later. Hungarian losses were enormous: perhaps more than 14,000 soldiers, along with Tomori, many barons and seven bishops. Captured soldiers were killed after the battle. The Ottoman army moved on to Buda, which it plundered and partly burned in September before returning south.

With Louis dead and childless, the Jagiellonian line in Hungary and Bohemia ended. Two rival kings were elected: John Zápolya, backed by much of the Hungarian nobility, and the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand, Louis's brother-in-law. Their struggle drew Suleiman back, leading to the Siege of Vienna in 1529. After the Ottomans occupied Buda in 1541, the country was split into three: a Habsburg-ruled Royal Hungary in the north and west, an Ottoman province in the centre, and a principality of Transylvania in the east. Hungary would only be reunited after the Ottoman retreat at the end of the seventeenth century. In Hungarian memory, Mohács remains the classic image of national catastrophe.

Our 1500 map shows the Kingdom of Hungary before the battle. On our 1530 map much of the country appears on the Ottoman side, and the 1700 map shows it under the Habsburg Monarchy.