A major defeat of the royal army of Hungary by the forces of the Ottoman sultan Süleyman I (the Magnificent), fought on 29 August 1526.
After a relatively peaceful period of Hungarian-Turkish relations between 1483 and 1520, the Turks took Belgrade, the key to the defense system on the southern Hungarian frontier (1521). The young Louis II, king of Hungary and Bohemia (1516-1526), was unable to organize the defense of the country, which had fallen into political crisis after 1490. In 1526 the Ottoman army, personally led by Sultan Süleyman, departed from Constantinople on 23 April 1526; marching via Belgrade (30 June), it crossed the river Drava on 14 August. The Hungarian royal army, commanded by Paul Tomori, archbishop of Kalocsa, and George Count Sza- polyai, lacked any strategic concept to stop the invaders, and before completing its mobilization, left Buda on 20 July 1526. The Hungarians were inferior in numbers, amounting to some 25,000-50,000 men (including some 10,000 foreign mercenaries, mostly infantry) compared to the Turks’ 75,000-120,000. It is still debated by Hungarian scholars whether the Hungarian army had any realistic chance of defeating or halting the Turks.
The Hungarians launched a surprise attack on the Ottoman army while it was still drawing up in battle formation on the plain of Mohacs, a small town on the west bank of the Danube to the east of the city of Pécs. The initially promising attack of the first wave of Hungarian cavalry soon collapsed in the fire of the hidden Ottoman artillery and the disciplined janissary troops, and the whole army turned to panic. Within a few hours, not only the royal army, but the medieval Hungarian kingdom itself was defeated; the king and most of the country’s prelates and dignitaries were dead. The Turks reached the abandoned royal castle of Buda unhindered (12 September), but then withdrew, occupying only a small strip of land. However, the defeat at Mohacs paved the way for the subsequent occupation of most of the kingdom by the Turks (1541), leaving only a northern and western rump under Christian rule.