The Battle of Mohács

JAN 01 1526 · 12:00

Searchers find the drowned body of King Louis II Jagiellon after Mohács, 29 August 1526: Bohemia passes to the Habsburgs. Place: Mohács plain, southern Hungary, and the Csele creek nearby Figures: Louis II Jagiellon, King of Bohemia and Hungary (twenty years old, drowns) · Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottomans · Pál Tomori, archbishop of Kalocsa and Hungarian commander (killed) · Ferdinand of Habsburg, Louis's brother-in-law, in Vienna Louis II Jagiellon is twenty years old in the summer of 1526. He has been king of Bohemia and Hungary since he was ten. The Bohemian estates, mostly, leave him alone; the Hungarian estates, less so. Suleiman the Magnificent crosses the Sava in July with perhaps seventy thousand men. Louis can raise barely twenty-five thousand; the Czech reinforcements, called up too late, are still marching across Moravia when the armies meet on the Mohács plain south of Buda on August 29. The battle lasts an hour and a half. The Hungarian cavalry charges twice and breaks the Ottoman first line; the Ottoman artillery, several hundred guns chained together, breaks the Hungarian cavalry on its return. Pál Tomori, the archbishop commanding, is killed. Most of the Hungarian episcopate dies on the field. Some fourteen thousand Hungarians, including Louis, are dead or fleeing by sunset.