Around the turn of the century, the ever changing networks of aristocratic party leaders and their noble followers in the triangular tug-of-war between crown, baronage and county nobility became so complicated that neither contemporary observers nor modern historians can disentangle the threads. There were years when both the king and nobility called a diet, and chief officers of the crown were deposed and reinstated under conditions as close to anarchy as those of the noble commonwealth in eighteenth-century Poland. In the meantime, the situation at the southern border, the provisioning and defence of the border castles virtually used up all of the kingdom’s revenues. Attempts at mobilising the population against the Ottomans in a crusade, in 1514, turned into a peasant war, the ‘crusaders’ blaming the lords for abandoning them to the pagans. Szapolyai rescued the country by defeating the ‘holy host of the poor’ and executing its leader, George Szekely-Dozsa, on a throne of flames.
Even though a number of able and conscientious barons and their servitors did their best to keep the southern defences intact, the country could not face serious confrontation. The royal army was too small and too late to relieve Belgrade, when, in 1521, after the king had inexplicably refused to renew the truce, Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent laid siege to this key fortress. With Belgrade in Ottoman hands the country would be defenceless whenever the sultan chose to attack again. Calls for help went out in all directions, but because of previous diplomatic blunders and general European disinterest they yielded little more than encouraging words. On August 1526, the Hungarian army was routed on the field near Mohacs: the king, most of his barons, almost all prelates and tens of thousands of nobles and soldiers died and the central parts of the kingdom were devastated. Even though Suleyman soon retreated to the Balkans, Hungary could not recover from the shock and the loss of its best men. Two kings were elected, John Szapolyai by one faction and Ferdinand of Habsburg by another. King John counted on Ottoman support, Ferdinand on Habsburg resources to reunite the country, but both failed. When Buda fell, twenty-five years later, the country came to be divided into three parts: the Habsburgs holding the west and north, the Ottomans the centre and Szapolyai’s son, John Sigismund, becoming prince of a vassal state by the sultan’s grace in Transylvania and eastern Hungary. After more than five hundred years of statehood, the independent kingdom of Hungary had ceased to exist.