Mary of Hungary

Maximilian, in order to reduce the growing pressures on the Empire brought about by treaties between the rulers of France, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, and Russia, as well as to secure Bohemia and Hungary for the Habsburgs, meets with the Jagiellonian kings Ladislaus II of Hungary and Bohemia and Sigismund I of Poland at the First Congress of Vienna on July 22, 1515.

Here they arrange for Maximilian's granddaughter Mary to marry Louis, the son of Ladislaus, and for Anne (the sister of Louis) to marry Maximilian's grandson Ferdinand (both grandchildren being the children of Philip the Handsome, Maximilian's son, and Joanna of Castile.

The broad coalition against Lithuania and Poland ceases, but the war between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Grand Duchy of Moscow will last until 1520.

Archduchess Mary of Austria, becomes queen of Hungary and Bohemia on the death of her father-in-law in 1516.

Born in Brussels on September 15, 1505, between ten and eleven in the morning, Mary was the fifth child of King Philip I and Queen Joanna of Castile.

Her birth was very difficult; the Queen's life was in danger and it took her a month to recover.

On September 20, she was baptized by Nicolas Le Ruistre, Bishop of Arras, and named after her paternal grandmother, Mary of Burgundy, who had died in 1482.

Her godfather is her paternal grandfather, Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, who had promised, on March 17, 1506, to marry her to the first son born to King Vladislaus II of Hungary.

At the same time, the two monarchs decided that a brother of Mary would marry Vladislaus' daughter Anne.

Three months later, Vladislaus' wife, Anne of Foix-Candale, gave birth to a son, Louis Jagiellon.

Queen Anne died in childbirth and the royal physicians made great efforts to keep the sickly Louis alive.

After the death of Mary's father in September 1506, her mother's mental health had begun to deteriorate.

Mary, along with her brother, Archduke Charles, and her sisters, Archduchesses Eleanor and Isabella, had been put into the care of her paternal aunt, Archduchess Margaret, while two other siblings, Archduke Ferdinand and posthumously born Archduchess Catherine, remained in Castile.

Mary, Isabella, and Eleanor had been educated together at their aunt's court in Mechelen.

Their music teacher was Henry Bredemers.

Mary had been summoned to the court of her grandfather Maximilian in 1514.

On July 22, 1515, Mary and Louis had been married in St. Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna.

At the same time, Louis' sister Anne had been betrothed to an as yet unspecified brother of Mary, with Emperor Maximilian acting as proxy.

Due to their age, it was decided that the newly married couple would not live together for a few more years.

Anne had eventually married Mary's brother Ferdinand and had come to Vienna, where the double sisters-in-law are educated together until 1516, when the death of Mary's father-in-law makes Louis and Mary king and queen of Hungary and Bohemia.

Mary moves to Innsbruck, where she will be educated until 1521.

Maximilian encourages her interest in hunting, while childhood lessons prompt an interest in music.

This passion will later be demonstrated during her tenure as governor of the Netherlands.

Mary of Austria, having wed Louis II on July 22, 1515, had traveled from her home in Innsbruck to Hungary in June 1521, two and a half years after the death of her guardian, Emperor Maximilian.

She is anointed and crowned queen of Hungary by Simon Erdődy, Bishop of Zagreb, in Székesfehérvár on December 11, 1521.

The queen's coronation is followed by brilliant festivities.

Queen Mary’s coronation had been followed by brilliant festivities, the royal marriage blessed on January 13, 1522 in Buda.

Mary's anointment and coronation as queen of Bohemia takes place on June 1, 1522.

Mary and Louis fell in love when they are reunited in Buda, and both pursue a life of riotous pleasure, soon disqualifying the teenage king from affairs of state.

Hans Krell, who had started his career as court painter of George of Brandenburg in Ansbach, in 1522 enters into the service of King Louis II of Hungary in Prague and Buda, where he is employed as court portraitist.

Hungary, its fortresses in the southeast under attack by the Ottoman Turkish forces of Sultan Süleyman, has formed an anti-Turkish alliance with Safavid-ruled Persia and the Habsburg-ruled Holy Roman Empire.

French monarch Francis, despite his mixed feelings about an alliance with Islamic “infidels,” supports the Ottoman Empire due to his enmity toward Habsburg emperor Charles V. The magnates, suddenly alive to the Turkish danger, vote to reestablish a standing army, but nothing is done to raise it, since each rival faction tries to put the burden of its upkeep on the others.

Appeals for help from abroad meet with little response.

Meanwhile, the early appearance of Protestantism is further worsening internal relations in the country.

The first reformatory writings had begun the work of winning George of Brandenburg over to the evangelical cause.

Martin Luther's powerful testimony of faith at the Diet of Worms in 1521 has made an indelible impression upon his mind, and the vigorous sermons of evangelical preachers in the pulpits of St. Lawrence and St. Sebald in Nuremberg, during the diet there in 1522, have deepened the impression.

King Francis I of France had been defeated at the Battle of Pavia on February 24, 1525 by the troops of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. After several months in prison, Francis had been forced to sign the Treaty of Madrid.

In a watershed moment in European diplomacy, Francis had come to an understanding with the Ottoman Empire, which has led to a formal Franco-Ottoman alliance.

The objective for Francis I is clearly to find an ally against the powerful Habsburg Emperor, in the person of Ottoman Sultan Suleiman.

The Ottoman-French strategic, and sometimes tactical, alliance will last for about three centuries.

It does, however, cause quite a scandal in the Christian world.

To relieve the Habsburg pressure on France, Francis has asked Suleiman to make war on the Holy Roman Empire, and the road from Turkey to the Holy Roman Empire leads across Hungary.

The request of the French king coincides nicely with the ambitions of Suleiman in Europe and gives him an incentive to attack Hungary in 1526.

The Ottomans see the growing alliance between Hungary and Bohemia and the Habsbugs as a threat to their power in the Balkans and have worked to break this alliance.

After Suleiman I came to power in 1520, the High Porte had made the Hungarians at least one and possibly two offers of peace.

It is unclear why King Louis refused the offer.

It is possible that Louis is well aware of Hungary's situation (especially after the Battle of Chaldiran and Polish-Ottoman peace from 1525) and he believes that war is a better option than peace.

Even in peacetime the Ottomans raid Hungarian lands and conquer small territories (with border castles), but a final battle still offers a glimmer of hope.

To such ends, an Ottoman army had set out from Istanbul on April 16, 1526, led by Suleiman the Magnificent personally.

In the Hungarian kingdom, riven by social and national divisions stimulated by the Reformation, a general call to arms is proclaimed, but the most important forces—those from Transylvania and Croatia—are late in obeying it.

Louis hurriedly assembles a force of some sixteen thousand men and advances from Buda to meet the Turks.

The Hungarian nobles, who still do not realize the dimensions of the approaching danger, do not heed their King's call to arms.

Louis II orders them to encamp on July 2 but no one reports on this day—not even the King.

Only when Louis himself furnishes an example with his appearance in the camp do things start to move.

The Hungarian war council—without waiting for their reinforcements only a few days march away—makes a serious tactical error by choosing the battlefield near Mohács, an open but uneven plain with some swampy marshes.

The Hungarian army is divided into three main units: the Transylvanian army under John Zápolya, charged with guarding the passes in the Transylvanian Alps, with between eight thousand and thirteen thousand men; the main army, led by Louis himself (beside numerous Spanish, German, Czech and Serbian mercenaries); and another smaller force, commanded by the Croatian count Christoph Frankopan, numbering around five thousand men.

Due to geography, the Ottoman army's ultimate goal could not be determined until it was crossing the Balkan Mountains.

Unfortunately for the Hungarians, by the time the Ottoman army had crossed, the Transylvanian and Croatian army was further from Buda than the Ottomans were.

Contemporary historical records, though sparse, indicate that Louis preferred a plan of retreat, in effect ceding the country to Ottoman advances, rather than directly engaging the Ottoman army in open battle.

The Hungarian forces choose the battlefield, an open but uneven plain with some swampy marshes near Mohács leading down to the Danube.

The Ottomans had been allowed to advance almost unopposed.

While Louis waited in Buda, they had besieged several towns and crossed the Sava and Drava Rivers.

Louis has assembled around twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand soldiers (with Croatian and Polish contingents and about eight hundred to one thousand soldiers of the Papal States) while the Ottoman army was long thought to have numbered around fifty thousand.

However, military history books from the twenty-first century will calculate the number of the Ottoman Army around one hundred thousand men.

In addition, the Ottoman forces have up to one hundred and sixty cannon.

Most of the Ottoman Balkan forces registered before this battle are labeled as Bosnians or Croats, as a designation of the territory in which they had been they were recruited.

The Hungarian army is arrayed to take advantage of the terrain and hopes to engage the Ottoman army piecemeal.

The only advantage the Magyars have is that their troops are well-rested, while the Turks have just completed a strenuous march in scorching summer heat.

Rather than attacking their fatigued enemy, however, the Hungarians merely watch as they struggle through the marshy terrain.

It would be "unchivalrous" to attack the enemy when they are not yet ready for battle.

Hungary has built up an expensive but obsolete army, structured similarly to that of King Francis I at the Battle of Pavia mostly reliant on old fashioned heavily armored knights on armored horses (gendarme knights).

The Hungarian line consists of two lines, the first with a center of mercenary infantry and artillery and the majority of the cavalry on either flank.

The second line is a mix of levy infantry and cavalry.

The Ottoman army is a more modern force built around the elite, musket-armed Janissaries, and artillery.

The rest of the army consists of feudal Timari cavalry and conscripted levies from Rumelia and the Balkans.

Like the uncertainty over the number of actual combatants, there is debate over the length of the battle.

Its starting time is generally placed between 1:00 PM and 2:00 PM, but the endpoint is difficult to ascertain.

As the first of Suleiman's troops, the Rumelian army, advance onto the battlefield, they are attacked and routed by Hungarian troops led by Pál Tomori.

This attack by the Hungarian right is successful in causing considerable chaos among the irregular Ottoman troops, but even as the Hungarian attack presses forward, the Ottomans rally with the arrival of Ottoman regulars deployed from the reserves.

While the Hungarian right advances far enough at one time to place Suleiman in danger from Hungarian arrows that strike his cuirass, the superiority of the Ottoman regulars and the timely charge of the Janissaries, the elite troops of the Ottomans, probably overwhelms the attackers, particularly on the Hungarian left.

The Hungarians take serious casualties from the skillfully handled Turkish artillery and musket volleys.

The Hungarians cannot hold their positions, and those who do not flee are surrounded and killed or captured.

The result us a disaster, with the Hungarians advancing into withering fire and flank attacks.

The king leaves the battlefield sometime around twilight but is thrown from his horse in a river at Csele and dies, weighed down by his heavy armor.

Some one thousand other Hungarian nobles and leaders are killed also.

It is generally accepted that more than fourteen thousand Hungarian soldiers were killed in the initial battle.

The Ottoman army does not retreat from the field and enter camp after the battle; instead, they remain on the field all night without food, water, or shelter.

Given that the Ottoman historians all note that it was raining, it seems likely that had the battle been short and ended early in the afternoon, by 5:00 PM at the latest, when the Sultan would have ordered his army to camp or at least to return to their baggage.

The few reliable sources indicate that Louis left the field at twilight and made his escape under cover of darkness; since the sun would not have set until 6:27 PM on August 29, 1526, this would imply that the battle lasted significantly longer than two to three hours (perhaps as long as four or five).

The Turks have also suffered heavy losses, particularly among the sultan’s elite Janissary corps, but Süleyman regroups his forces and advances on Buda.

Suleiman cannot believe that this small, "suicidal" army is all that the once powerful country could muster against him, so he waits at Mohacs for a few days before moving cautiously against Buda.

The king of Hungary, Louis II, had died in 1526 in the Battle of Mohács without an heir to throne, but the Ottoman Empire had not annexed Hungary after the war and the Hungarian throne had been left vacant for several months.

Two claimants had emerged: Ferdinand I, the archduke of Austria; and John Zápolya, aka János Szapolyai, the voivode (governor) of Transylvania (Turkish: Erdel, western part of modern Romania).

Although Szapolyai had the backing of a majority of the Hungarian elite, Ferdinand nevertheless had declared himself the legal king of Hungary with the support of his older brother Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.

The Ottoman Empire, however, backs Szapolyai.