Hungarian-Turkish War of 1521-26
1521 CE to 1526 CE
Suleiman the Magnificent resumes the war against Hungary by attacking the city of Belgrade, the same settlement that had defied Mehmed II over half a century ago.
Despite strong resistance, the city falls to Suleiman.
In 1522 Suleiman takes his army to a strategically successful siege of Rhodes, allowing the Knights Hospital to evacuate for the fort.When Suleiman launches an invasion in 1526 the Grand Vizier constructesa great bridge ahead of the Sulta, allowing his army to march into Hungary.
Despite eighty days of marching and taking five days to cross the Danube River, the Ottomans meet no resistance from the Hungarians.
The original plan of Hungarian King Louis II had been to send a vanguard to hold the Danube where the Ottomans were expected to cross, yet the nobles of the Kingdom refuse to follow the King's deputy in battle, claiming that they do so out of zealous allegiance to the King (and will therefore only follow him).
Consequently, when King Louis II takes the field his army of twenty-six thousand men seems to be doomed to fail against the Ottomans' one hundred thousand.
[ At Mohác, the plains of Hungary allowe the heavier Christian knights to launch an effective charge.
As the Hungarian knights brush aside first the Akinjis, then the Sipahis, the Ottoman cavalry regroups and flanks the knights.
However, the Sultan places his Janissaries and cannon chained up as an effective last line of defense.
The Hungarian cavalry takes serious casualties from the skillfully handled Turkish artillery.
With the cavalry annihilated, the infantry suffers immense casualties as the weight of numbers of the Ottomans and their skill in battle takes their toll.
When Suleiman the Magnificent finds the body of the dead Louis II he is said to have been disappointed at cutting down the youth, who has no heirs.
John Zápolya, who had been instructed by Louis II to raid the enemy's supply lines, arrives at the battle too late and flees the scene.
Suleiman, however, is not ready to annex the Kingdom completely into the Ottoman realm, so Zápolya is installed as the vassal King of Hungary.
Meanwhile, at the Diet of Bratislava Archduke Ferdinand of Austria is declared King of Hungary.
The surviving nobles of Hungary now have to choose between pledging allegiance to a native vassal of Suleiman and a Christian "foreigner".
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In 1490 Vladislav also becomes king of Hungary, and the Polish Jagellonian line rules both Bohemia and Hungary.
The Jagellonians govern Bohemia as absentee monarchs; their influence in the kingdom is minimal, and effective government falls to the regional nobility.
Czech Catholics accepts the Compact of Basel in 1485 and are reconciled with the Utraquists.
Vladislav's son, King Louis, is decisively defeated by the Ottomans at Mohacs in 1526 and subsequently dies.
As a result, the Turks conquer part of the Kingdom of Hungary; the rest (including Slovakia) comes under Habsburg rule.
The Bohemian estates elect Archduke Ferdinand, younger brother of Emperor Charles V, to succeed Louis as king of Bohemia.
Thus begins almost three centuries of Habsburg rule for both Bohemia and Slovakia.
The Bohemian Kingdom had in several instances had the possibility of becoming a Czech national monarchy.
The failure to establish a native dynasty, however, had prevented such an outcome and left the fate of the Bohemian Kingdom to dynastic politics and foreign rulers.
Although the Bohemian Kingdom evolves neither into a national monarchy nor into a Czech nation-state, the memory of it serves as a source of inspiration and pride for modern Czech nationalists.
Hungary’s sickly and frivolous King Louis II, on ascending to the thrones of Hungary and Bohemia, had been adopted by Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I.
When Maximilian died in 1519, Louis had been raised by his legal guardian, his cousin George of Brandenburg.
Louis is declared of age in 1521, but remains under control of the Hungarian magnates.
At the Hungarian court there are two parties arrayed against each other: the Magyar party under the leadership of John Zápolya, Voivode of Transylvania, and the German party under the leadership of George of Brandenburg, whose authority has been increased by the acquisition of the duchies of Ratibor and Oppeln by hereditary treaties with their respective dukes and of the territories of Oderberg, Beuthen, and Tarnowitz as pledges from the king, who cannot redeem his debts.
George makes made an arrangement with Petar Keglević, who is captain of Jajce, in 1521 and pulls back from Hungary and Croatia; this arrangement, which will be accepted by Louis II in 1526, will not be not accepted by Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I until 1559.
The Hungarians have long opposed Ottoman expansion in southeastern Europe, but the fall of Nándorfehérvár (present-day Belgrade, Serbia) and Szabács (now Šabac, Serbia) in 1521 means that most of southern Hungary is left indefensible.
The strongest nobles are so busy oppressing the peasants and quarreling with the gentry class in the parliament that they fail to heed the agonized calls of King Louis against the Turks.
Hungary has suffered political, economic, and military decline during the regime of Vladislav (Ulászló II) Jagiello (reigned 1490–1516) and the regency in the name of his son Louis II.
When the young king is declared of age to rule on Dec. 11, 1521, Süleyman demands tribute.
When Louis refuses to pay, insulting the Turkish ambassador for good measure, the Turks advance toward Hungary, capturing the fortresses of Sabac and …
…Nándorfehérvár (today's Belgrade, Serbia), the strongest Hungarian fortress in the South.
Using these as bases for further incursions to the north of the Danube, …
…the Turks overrun all of eastern and southern Croatia south of the Sava River.
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.
George of Brandenburg, by the further appropriation of the Duchy of Jägerndorf, comes into possession of all Upper Silesia.
As the owner and mortgagee of these territories, he prepares the way for the introduction of the Protestant Reformation, here in Hungary as well as in his native Franconia.
Earlier than any other German prince or any other member of the Hohenzollern line, including even his younger brother Albert, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, he turns his eyes and heart to the new faith proceeding from Wittenberg.
The loss of Belgrade (Nandorfehervar) in 1521 had caused great alarm in Hungary, but the too-late and too-slowly-recruited sixty-thousand strong royal army—led by the king—had forgotten to take food along, so the army therefore disbanded spontaneously under the pressure of hunger and disease without even trying to recapture Belgrade, the southern key of Hungary, from the newly installed Turkish garrisons.
In 1523, Archbishop Pál Tomori, a valiant priest-soldier, is made Captain of Southern Hungary.
The general apathy that had characterized the country forces him to lean on his own bishopric revenues when he starts to repair and reinforce the second line of Hungary's border defense system.
King Sigismund, after some delay, had assented to Albert’s offer to convert the Teutonic Knights realm into a hereditary duchy, with the provision that Prussia should be treated as a Polish fiefdom; and after this arrangement had been confirmed by a treaty concluded at Kraków, Albert had pledged a personal oath to Sigismund I and was invested with the duchy for himself and his heirs on February 10, 1525.
The Estates of the land now met at Königsberg and take the oath of allegiance to the new duke, who uses his full powers to promote the doctrines of Luther.
This transition does not, however, take place without protest.
Summoned before the imperial court of justice, Albert refuses to appear and is proscribed, while the Order elects a new Grand Master, Walter von Cronberg, who receives Prussia as a fief at the imperial Diet of Augsburg.
As the German princes are experiencing the tumult of the Reformation, the German Peasants' War, and the wars against the Ottoman Turks, they do not enforce the ban on the duke, and agitation against him soon dies away.