A major defeat of the royal army of Hungary by the forces of the Ottoman sultan Suleyman I (the Magnificent), fought on 29 August 1526.
After a relatively peaceful period of Hungarian-Turkish relations between 1483 and 1520, the Turks took Belgrade, the key to the defense system on the southern Hungarian frontier (1521). The young Louis II, king of Hungary and Bohemia (1516-1526), was unable to organize the defense of the country, which had fallen into political crisis after 1490. In 1526 the Ottoman army, personally led by Sultan Suleyman, departed from Constantinople on 23 April 1526; marching via Belgrade (30 June), it crossed the river Drava on 14 August. The Hungarian royal army, commanded by Paul Tomori, archbishop of Kalocsa, and George Count Sza-polyai, lacked any strategic concept to stop the invaders, and before completing its mobilization, left Buda on 20 July 1526. The Hungarians were inferior in numbers, amounting to some 25,000-50,000 men (including some 10,000 foreign mercenaries, mostly infantry) compared to the Turks’
75,000-120,000. It is still debated by Hungarian scholars whether the Hungarian army had any realistic chance of defeating or halting the Turks.
The Hungarians launched a surprise attack on the Ottoman army while it was still drawing up in battle formation on the plain of Mohacs, a small town on the west bank of the Danube to the east of the city of Pecs. The initially promising attack of the first wave of Hungarian cavalry soon collapsed in the fire of the hidden Ottoman artillery and the disciplined janissary troops, and the whole army turned to panic. Within a few hours, not only the royal army, but the medieval Hungarian kingdom itself was defeated; the king and most of the country’s prelates and dignitaries were dead. The Turks reached the abandoned royal castle of Buda unhindered (12 September), but then withdrew, occupying only a small strip of land. However, the defeat at Mohacs paved the way for the subsequent occupation of most of the kingdom by the Turks (1541), leaving only a northern and western rump under Christian rule.
-Ldszlo Veszpremy
Bibliography
Alfoldi, Laszlo M., “The Battle of Mohacs, 1526,” in From Hunyadi to Rdkoczi: War and Society in Medieval and Early Modern Hungary, ed. Janos M. Bak and Bela K. Kiraly (Boulder, CO: Atlantic, 1982), pp. 189-201.
Perjes, Geza, The Fall of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary: Mohdcs, 1526, Buda 1541 (Boulder, CO: Atlantic, 1989).
Relatives. While Mongke concentrated on the Chinese front, he dispatched his brother Hulegu in 1253 to complete the conquest of Persia, which resulted in the overthrow of the ‘Abbasid caliphate (1258) and the temporary conquest of Syria (1260). Mongke, who died on 11 August 1259 while besieging a Chinese fortress, was the last sovereign to be acknowledged throughout the empire until 1304, since his brother Qubilai, though victorious in the ensuing civil war, was never universally recognized.
The Franciscan friar William of Rubruck, who visited Mongke’s court, was sceptical about Nestorian Christians’ hopes of his conversion, observing that the great khan merely desired every confessional group to pray on his behalf. The Buddhists believed that Mongke favored them, while the Chinese annals of the Mongol era describe him as adhering to the shamanistic practices of his ancestors.
-Peter Jackson
See also: Mongols
Bibliography
Allsen, Thomas T., Mongol Imperialism: The Policies of the Grand Qan Mongke in China, Russia and the Islamic Lands, 1251-1259 (Berkeley: California University Press, 1987).
The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to The Court of the Great Khan Mongke, 1253-1255, ed. Peter Jackson and David Morgan (London: Hakluyt Society, 1990).
World History
