Who won the Battle of Mohács?
The Ottoman Empire won a decisive victory at Mohács on 29 August 1526, annihilating the army of the kingdom of Hungary in a single afternoon. King Louis II died in the rout and much of the Hungarian nobility fell with him; the defeat opened the way for 150 years of Ottoman power in the heart of Europe.
On 29 August 1526, on a plain by the Danube near Mohács, the army of the kingdom of Hungary charged the Ottoman host of Suleiman the Magnificent and was annihilated in a single afternoon. The young King Louis II died in the rout, much of the Hungarian nobility was cut down, and one of the great kingdoms of central Europe simply ceased to function. Mohács opened the way for 150 years of Ottoman power in the heart of Europe.2
A kingdom in the Ottoman path
For a century the Ottomans had pushed up the Danube, and after taking Belgrade in 1521 the road into Hungary lay open. In 1526 Suleiman the Magnificent marched north with a large, well-drilled army built around his janissary infantry and a powerful artillery train. The kingdom of Hungary, divided among its magnates and slow to gather, could raise only a fraction of that strength in time to meet him.3 › The Battle of Nicopolis, 1396
The Hungarians knew the blow was coming. Yet no Christian power sent real help, beyond the money the Pope supplied, the nobility was split into feuding factions, and many magnates simply ignored the orders of their twenty-year-old king. Not even the Diet voted Louis II the money he needed to defend the realm. The kingdom that had once held the Ottomans at bay now met them with an empty treasury and a quarreling council.4
Louis himself was a product of Habsburg dynastic planning. In 1515, at a double wedding in St Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, the nine-year-old prince exchanged rings with Mary of Habsburg, granddaughter of Emperor Maximilian I, while his sister Anne was promised to one of Maximilian's grandsons and later married Ferdinand of Habsburg. The arrangement tied the Jagiellon crowns of Hungary and Bohemia to Vienna, and it would decide who claimed them if Louis died without an heir.5
Armies and commanders
Suleiman brought an army of about 60,000 regular troops, the figure given both by the Hungarian defense ministry's history of the battle and by Britannica. Estimates of his whole force vary more widely, from about 50,000 to as many as 100,000 men, depending largely on how many irregulars and auxiliaries are counted. Its core was the janissaries, professional infantry armed with arquebuses, supported by sipahi cavalry and a large park of guns; Britannica credits the Ottomans with some 300 cannon against about 50 on the Hungarian side. Command of the campaign under the sultan lay with the grand vizier, İbrahim Pasha, who led the Danube campaigns of 1526, 1529 and 1532.6
The Hungarian army was far smaller. The royal chancellor István Brodarics, who stood on the field and wrote the classic account of the battle a year later, put it at about 25,000 men, roughly 15,000 horse and 10,000 foot; Britannica gives 35,000. Much of the infantry came from Bohemia, Moravia and Germany, and the chief of staff was a Polish officer, Lenart Gnoinski. Command fell to Pál Tomori, the archbishop of Kalocsa and captain of the southern border forts, a former soldier turned churchman. According to the Hungarian defense ministry's account he was elected to the post jointly with the magnate György Szapolyai, with Ferenc Batthyány on the right wing and Péter Perényi on the left.7
The road to Mohács
The Ottomans bridged the Drava at Eszék (Osijek) and, according to the Hungarian defense ministry's history, crossed it unopposed between 21 and 23 August. Louis and his captains waited for them on a broad, marshy plain at Mohács, on the west bank of the Danube, and chose to fight there rather than fall back. The Slovak central bank's anniversary history notes that the Hungarians had picked the field and waited weeks for the enemy, yet the ground favored the invaders, who had time to deploy at leisure.9
The decision to give battle was the fatal one. John Szapolyai, the voivode of Transylvania, had set out with his army but got no further than Szeged, the Croatian forces never came, and some of the Bohemian and Moravian infantry stayed away. Britannica estimates that waiting for these reinforcements would have added some 15,000 men to the Hungarian ranks. Tomori and the younger nobles pressed for an immediate fight, trusting the shock of the armored charge that had won so many battles in the past.10
The battle, 29 August 1526
At dawn the Hungarians drew up in two lines, with the infantry in the center of the first. Then they waited, for hours, in armor under the late-summer sun. The Ottoman army came on in battle order, and Suleiman's own campaign diary places its arrival on the field of Mohács at around two in the afternoon. As the Rumelian corps came down from the higher ground and set up its guns, Ottoman light horsemen probed the Hungarian flanks.11
Between three and four o'clock Tomori ordered the attack. The right wing and the infantry of the center went forward, and the charge struck hard: the Ottoman vanguard took serious losses and gave way. Believing the enemy cavalry was in retreat, Tomori threw in his second line as well. It was exactly what the Ottoman order of battle invited. The Hungarian knights rode on into the janissaries and the massed guns behind them.13
Volley after volley from the janissaries' arquebuses stopped the cavalry in its tracks, and the Ottoman guns tore into the packed ranks. Tomori lost touch with Perényi's wing and, with it, any control of the battle. On the left, Perényi's horsemen charged the Anatolian corps and were broken by musket fire in their turn. As the Hungarians fell back, fast Ottoman light cavalry swept round their flanks. The infantry, left alone in the center, was destroyed in close fighting.14
The Slovak central bank's history puts the whole engagement at barely two hours. By nightfall the army of the kingdom of Hungary had ceased to exist.15
The death of a king
Tomori was cut down while trying to stop his fleeing horsemen. Louis II escaped the slaughter only to die in the flight: the usual account, given by the Slovak central bank and by Britannica, has him drowning as he tried to cross the swollen Csele stream, while an alternative version cited by Britannica holds that he was thrown from his horse and killed. Either way, the last Jagiellon king of Hungary was dead at twenty, and he left no heir.16
The losses were staggering. The Hungarian defense ministry's history counts some 10,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry dead, about a third of the horse, along with seven prelates and twenty-eight barons. Britannica puts the Hungarian dead at 18,000 out of 35,000 and the Ottoman losses at about 2,000. Much of the kingdom's political class lay on the field.17
Not all of them died in the fighting. When archaeologists reopened mass grave III at the battlefield in 2020, anthropologists from the University of Szeged found that it held more than 300 dead, mostly young men but also teenagers and a few women and children, from the Hungarian, Czech, Croatian, Polish and German contingents. Many skulls and neck vertebrae carried cuts delivered from behind and above, wounds the team judged incompatible with combat. They read them as the traces of prisoners beheaded after the battle.18
Buda burns, and two kings are crowned
News of the disaster reached Buda the next day, and Queen Mary and her court fled the capital. The Ottomans entered Buda on 11 or 12 September, depending on the account, and met no resistance. They plundered the royal castle and set the town on fire before Suleiman's army turned south again on 25 September; by 10 October the sultan was back in Belgrade. Britannica reports that the army took more than 100,000 captives with it.19
Suleiman did not stay, and Hungary was left to fight over its empty throne. On 10 November 1526 a diet at Székesfehérvár elected John Szapolyai king, and he was crowned the next day as John I. On 17 December a rival diet at Pozsony, today Bratislava, chose Ferdinand of Habsburg, Louis's brother-in-law, who claimed the crown under the 1515 treaties. Ferdinand took Bohemia without difficulty, but in Hungary the double election began a civil war.20
Szapolyai turned to the sultan for protection, and the Ottomans returned. In 1529 Suleiman retook Buda, handed it to John I and went on to besiege Vienna, which held. The Peace of Nagyvárad in 1538 made Ferdinand Szapolyai's heir, but it was never carried out. On 29 August 1541, fifteen years to the day after Mohács, Ottoman troops seized the gates of Buda, and on 2 September Suleiman rode into the city.21
The partition of Hungary
Hungary never recovered. With no king and no army, the kingdom broke apart: the Habsburgs claimed the west and north, the Ottomans occupied the center, and Transylvania became a separate principality under Ottoman overlordship. Mohács is remembered in Hungary as a national catastrophe, the day the medieval kingdom died and central Europe was opened to the Ottomans.22 › The Croatian-Ottoman wars, 1493 to 1593
The division lasted for about 150 years. Buda itself stayed in Ottoman hands for 145 years, and only at the end of the seventeenth century, after the Ottoman defeat at Vienna in 1683 and the wars that followed, did the Habsburgs bring the whole of Hungary under their rule. The Habsburg claim that Mohács created was the one that endured.23 › The Siege of Vienna, 1683
Legacy and memory
Few defeats weigh as heavily on a nation's memory. News of it was already being printed on illustrated broadsheets, like the woodcut above, in the year of the battle, and the battle went on to become a favorite subject of Hungarian national painting in the nineteenth century: Mór Than's canvas of 1856 opens this article, and Bertalan Székely painted the finding of the king's body in 1860. The Ottoman court, for its part, had the victory illustrated in the official histories of Suleiman's reign.24 › The Greatest Battles of the Ottoman Empire
The battlefield itself was found again only in the twentieth century. The first two mass graves came to light in 1960, and three more were uncovered in 1975 and 1976 while a memorial was being built over the site. The Mohács National Memorial at Sátorhely, south of the town, opened in 1976 for the battle's 450th anniversary and covers much of the battlefield; it is run today by the Duna-Dráva National Park.25
In 2020 archaeologists from the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs reopened the third grave so that its dead could be identified, studied and reburied with dignity ahead of the 500th anniversary. That anniversary fell in 2026, and it was marked well beyond Hungary: Slovakia, much of whose territory belonged to Habsburg Hungary in the centuries after Mohács, issued a gold collector coin showing Suleiman above the fallen king.26
