12 August in military history: the second Battle of Mohács, 1687

12 August 1687 · 339 years ago

The war of reconquest

After Vienna was relieved from the Ottoman siege in September 1683, the imperial army under Charles V of Lorraine carried the war into Hungary and in 1686 retook Buda. The historian Ferenc Tóth calls 1687 one of the most important and eventful years of that war of reconquest, and the battle of 12 August one of its greatest successes.¹ › Battle of Slankamen, 1691

According to Balázs Polgár, after heavy losses at the start of the siege of Osijek (Eszék), Charles withdrew to draw the Ottomans out of their stronghold. Röder von Diersburg and Polgár write that the grand vizier Süleyman Pasha took the move for a retreat and marched out to attack. On 10 August, write Röder and the French volunteer Villars, who rode with the Elector, the allies marched from Mohács toward Siklós to take out its garrison and destroy the place.²

Röder, writing in 1842 largely from manuscripts, gives the imperial army 50,000 men, 20,000 of them horse, and the Ottomans not under 60,000, about 30,000 of them janissaries, with 80 guns, calling the reports contradictory. Csaba Veress counts 57,000 allied soldiers on 11 August, 35,000 foot and 22,000 horse with 48 guns, and puts each of the two Ottoman corps at 15,000 cavalry and 15,000 infantry, with some 80 to 85 guns in all. Polgár calls the two armies roughly equal in strength.³

Harsány Hill

On 11 August the allies camped at the foot of Harsány Hill, with the Ottomans close by in an entrenched camp. Period sources, Veress writes, named the fight after Mount Harsány, never after the village of Nagyharsány at the end of the allied right wing; in his reconstruction the main fighting took place on the site of present-day Villány and south of it.⁴

On the morning of the 12th the army set off toward Siklós. While the right wing passed a defile over the shoulder of the hill, Röder writes, the sipahis burst from the scrub onto the Elector's column on the left. Charles's newly discovered autograph diary, as Tóth reads it, has Ottoman light cavalry falling on that wing's baggage and Charles sending cavalry under Count Piccolomini to help. Max Emanuel was "hurt in the Hand by a Bullet almost spent", the London Gazette reported; Villars calls him slightly wounded in the morning.⁵

Villars writes that Charles at first wanted to continue the march, that the Elector and Louis William of Baden wanted to fight, and that Charles agreed when he saw the janissaries approach; at about three in the afternoon, he writes, they resolved to march on the enemy. Röder has Baden and the Elector prevailing in a council of war. Tóth notes that Charles's own diary credits the Elector with proposing the assault, while later reworked versions of the diary give Charles the initiative. Meanwhile, Röder and Polgár write, the Ottomans threw up entrenchments that remained only half finished.⁶

Storming the camp

In the afternoon the allies advanced. Röder writes that the cavalry brigades of Prince Eugene of Savoy and Rabutin came within musket shot of the first line and, once the infantry had come up, stormed it; Veress also places Eugene's brigade on the left of the first attacking line.⁷

Villars wrote on 15 August that the Ottoman cavalry fled first, without any resistance, then all the rest, "et nous trouvasmes dix ou douze mille janissaires abandonnéz", and we found ten or twelve thousand janissaries abandoned (our translation). The Ottoman historian Silahdar, quoted by Veress in Gyula Káldy-Nagy's Hungarian translation, tells of a violent wind that rose by command of Allah and blew the smoke of the guns and the sand of the plain onto the army of Islam: "No eye could see another, and such crowding and despair arose that each man sought his own head" (our translation from the Hungarian).⁸

General Dünewald's column, sent round to cut off the retreat, failed: Röder says it lost its way in the woods, Villars that it was ill informed of the road. The vizier's broken army fled to the Drava bridge at Osijek, where, Silahdar writes in the same translation, some two thousand people were trampled to death in the crush.⁹

The official Austrian history of Eugene's campaigns writes that in the pursuit he reached the entrenched camp, had his horsemen dismount and led them to the assault, completing the enemy's defeat. Eugene carried the news to Vienna: the Gazette's report datelined "Vienna, Aug. 16" has him "just now come hither".¹⁰

Counting the cost

The figures come from the victors and differ in scope. The Gazette's Vienna report has Eugene seeing "above 8000" Ottoman dead and puts the imperial cost at not "above 500 Men". Villars reported six or seven thousand dead counted on the battlefield; the battle proper, he wrote, had not cost fifty men, the skirmishes before it a good many, and some put the day's loss at five or six hundred. Röder gives 8,000 enemies killed and 2,000 taken. Veress, from the reports, gives 700 Christian soldiers killed and 200 wounded, and 8,000 Ottoman bodies, mostly janissaries, counted on the field, with 2,000 prisoners and an unknown number drowned in the marshes of the Karasica and the Drava.¹¹

Tóth writes that the imperials counted more than 10,000 Ottoman dead the next day. He also notes that the campaign journal compiled by Charles's secretary, Le Bègue, gives 600 allied dead and wounded. Polgár has more than 10,000 janissaries killed.¹²

The captured guns are counted as above 100 pieces (Gazette), 65 guns and eight mortars (Villars), 78 pieces (Röder), 70 guns and 12 mortars (Veress, from Charles's diary, and Polgár) and 67 guns and ten mortars (the autograph diary, per Tóth).¹³

After the battle

The first reports, the Gazette's Ratisbon correspondent wrote, had placed the battle on the 10th, but "the day was mistaken"; later accounts give 12 August.¹⁴

Tóth writes that the victory let the allies enter the Principality of Transylvania; the official history has Eugene in its conquest under Charles that autumn. In the Ottoman Empire, Tóth writes, the run of defeats set off a crisis that toppled Sultan Mehmed IV. Röder describes the army in revolt and the grand vizier beheaded; on 8 November 1687, according to Röder and Abdülkadir Özcan, Mehmed's brother was placed on the throne as Süleyman II.¹⁵

Veress puts the field 15 to 16 km in a straight line from the site of the battle of 1526. Röder describes two medals pairing the defeat of King Louis II of Hungary at Mohács on 29 August 1526 with Emperor Leopold's victory of 12 August 1687; the art historian Júlia Papp notes that prints and medals made abroad, among them one of 1687, often paired the two battles, an excellent propaganda opportunity for the Habsburgs. Tóth regards the link with Mohács as mainly a construction of later historians. See also our article on the Battle of Mohács of 1526 and our article on the Battle of Vienna.¹⁶