500 year ago/1526

If there were a date what every Hungarian knows by heart from childhood, it is, most probably, 1526 – some others are, probably, 1956, 1920, 1848-49, and 1241. The year of the Battle of Mohács or “mohácsi vész” – “disaster or catastrophe of Mohács” – in Hungarian tradition remarks a turning point not only in the history of the Hungarians, but the history of the region. However, the causalities can be and are debated, some think the importance of the battle is overrated – as well as the tradition about the role of the “weak” kings ruling the Hungarian Kingdom after I. Mátyás (Matthias Corvinus or Matthias I; 1458-1490) – and that the rise of the Habsburgs in the West and the Ottomans in the East would inevitably have caused the fall of the states in this region. Not to forget, the Ottoman army was one of the most advanced at the time as well. This scenario became important for the next centuries as well for the region: stuck between East and West.

The wars against the Ottomans started about one and half centuries before, but it was unsuccessful at the end, the Ottoman Empire expanded through the Balkans towards North and West. After the fall of Constantinople (1453), János Hunyadi – father of Matthias I – could stop the Ottoman expansion at the Battle of Nándorfehérvár (today Belgrade; 1456). Under Matthias I the Hungarian Kingdom became a regional power, he even could challenge the Habsburgs. However, after the death of Matthias I fight had broken out because of the succession (Matthias didn’t have legitimate successor), and the kingdom started to decline. In 1521 Nándorfehérvár fell to the Ottomans, and in 1526 the Hungarian army were decisively defeated at Mohács, even II. Lajos (King Louis II) lost his life.

The Hungarian Kingdom fell apart into two, then three parts – one ruled by the Habsburgs, one by the Ottomans, one in Transylvania which remained a kind of successor of the Hungarian “state” – and was a theatre of war until the end of the XVII century. It had devastating consequences on the population, even if some heroic events of Hungarian history happened in this period, like the Siege of Kőszeg (1532), the Siege of Eger (1552), the Siege of Szigetvár (1566), or the Bocskai uprising (1604-1606), and some significant leader emerged like Gábor Bethlen or I. Rákóczi György (George I Rákóczi) in Transylvania. The decline of the Ottoman power in Hungary were remarked by the Siege of Buda (1686), the Battle of Zenta (1697) and the “Karlócai béke” (Treaty of Karlowitz, 1699), which seemed most of the territories of the former Hungarian Kingdom freed from the Ottoman Empire. However, the independent Hungarian state wasn’t restored for more than two more centuries, and it happened after another disastrous events, the defeat in the WWI (1914-1918) and the Treaty of Trianon (1920) – but it’s another story.