Battle of Mohács
From Freepedia
- This article explains the better-known Battle of Mohács of 1526. There was also another battle in the same locality in 1687.
| Battle of Mohács | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Conflict: Ottoman-Hungarian war | |||
| Date: August 29, 1526 | |||
| Place: Mohács, Baranya, south of Budapest, Hungary | |||
| Outcome: Decisive Ottoman victory | |||
| Combatants | |||
| Ottoman Empire | Kingdom of Hungary | ||
| Commanders | |||
| Suleiman I | Louis II of Hungary Pál Tomori | ||
| Strength | |||
| 50,000–60,000 300 cannons | 26,000 | ||
| Casualties | |||
| 16,000 | 16,000 | ||
| |||
The Battle of Mohács (Hungarian: mohácsi csata or mohácsi vész, Turkish: Mohaç Savaşı or Mohaç Meydan Savaşı) was fought on August 29, 1526 between the Hungarian army led by Louis II and the Ottoman army led by Suleiman the Magnificent.
The Hungarians had long opposed Ottoman expansion in southeastern Europe. The marriage of Louis to Maria of Austria in 1522 drew the kingdom closer to the Habsburgs and the Ottomans saw the need to break this nascent alliance; after Louis refused a peace offer, the Ottomans decided to use military power. In June 1526, an Ottoman expedition advanced up the Danube to attack.
The Hungarian forces chose the battlefield, an open if uneven plain leading down to the Danube, in some places swampy marshes. The Ottomans had been allowed to advance almost unopposed. While Louis waited in Buda, they had besieged several towns and crossed the Sava and the Drava. Louis had assembled around 26,000 soldiers and the Ottoman army was around 50,000–60,000. The Hungarian army was arrayed to take advantage of the terrain and hoped to engage the Ottoman army piecemeal.
The actual battle lasted only two hours. As the first of Suleiman's troops, the Rumelian army, advanced onto the battlefield at 13:00 they were attacked and routed by Hungarian troops led by Pál Tomori. But as the main Ottoman force arrived in the early afternoon (around 14:00) the situation quickly changed. Slow to reinforce the successes on their right, the Hungarian advance became irretrievably exposed. Wave after wave of Hungarian soldiers and heavy cavalry were decimated by Ottoman cannon and musket fire; they could not last and those who did not flee were surrounded and killed or captured. Louis left the battlefield but was thrown from his horse in a river of Csele and died there. Around 16,000 Hungarian soldiers were killed and a similar number of Ottomans.
The victory did not give the Ottomans the security they wanted. The battle meant the end of the independent Kingdom of Hungary, but the Ottoman forces withdrew in September and the territory was contested by the Habsburg Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, Louis's brother-in-law and successor by treaty with King Ladislaus. While Austria dominated the northern third and portions of today's Croatia, the Ottomans obtained southwestern Hungary and suzerainty over semi-independent Transylvania, using these inroads to move against independent Hungarian nobles in the east and Austrian possessions in the northwest, beginning with the siege of Vienna.
This battle is sometimes compared to the battles of Nicopolis and Crécy in the 14th century, where slow knights in heavy armor suffered major defeats at the hands of less armored opposition equipped with ranged weapons.
With this newly secured base in eastern Europe, The Ottoman Empire's efficient light cavalry and cannon would continue to launch advances into central Europe for decades. Their influence in Hungary, beginning with their support for John Zápolya against Ferdinand, continued largely until the Treaty of Karlowitz.
