On the partly cloudy summer’s day of 29 August 1526, 30,000 troops led by Louis II, the king of Hungary and of Bohemia, waited near Mohács, a hamlet in southern Hungary. Spread out over six kilometres on a riverside plain of the Danube, they stood ready to prevent the armies of Suleiman I – the Ottoman Sultan commonly known as Suleiman the Magnificent (r.1520-1566) – from reaching the ancient capital of Buda, about 200km further north. At stake was nothing less than the future of the independent Kingdom of Hungary.
What Louis’ troops couldn’t appreciate was the sheer scale of the Turkish forces taking up position to the south of them: two or three times their size, with 300 cannons to their own 50 to 80. Together, Ottoman efficiency in organisation, discipline, command, and technology would destroy Louis’ forces that day in a battle from which the already much-diminished Hungarians would never fully recover.
Ottoman advances
Following the occupation of Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman power had been in the ascendancy. The Turkish empire boasted 14 million inhabitants, with tributes from vassal lands outmatching those of Spain; a standing army of 60,000 (swelling threefold with conscription during campaigns); and a navy larger than the combined French-Venetian fleet that won the first battle of Lepanto in 1499. And it could fight on varied fronts, taking on the Suffavid dynasty of Persia while expanding into Christian Europe.
Excavating the CA archive: Great sites associated with the early church