The Ottoman conquest: how Buda fell

I recently celebrated my 96th birthday. At the family gathering, the conversation turned to some of my earliest memories. I found myself describing the first gift I can remember receiving as a child some 90 years ago: a beautiful edition of Egri Csillagók, Géza Gárdonyi’s great novel of Hungarian heroism, known in English as Eclipse of the Crescent Moon. 

My family recently gave me a new copy. I reread it with pleasure. The central episode of the novel — the fall of Buda to the Ottomans in 1541 — struck me, as it had when I revisited the book as a teenager, as too extraordinary to be true. With the help of AI, 90 years later, I investigated. While the story of the Trojan Horse, told by Homer and Virgil, is considered legend , it turns out that what the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, did at Buda was historical fact. 

By the early sixteenth century, Hungary occupied one of the most dangerous positions in Europe — a buffer between the Christian West and the advancing Ottoman Empire. The kingdom was also deeply divided, its nobility fractious.

The Ottomans made many unsuccessful attempts to conquer Hungary during the fifteenth century. Everything changed when Suleiman the Magnificent came to the Ottoman throne in 1520. A series of military victories followed swiftly: Belgrade fell in 1521, Rhodes in 1522, and then, in 1526, the Hungarian army was annihilated at the Battle of Mohács. The young King Louis II of Hungary drowned in a stream while fleeing the field. He was twenty years old and left no heir.

Into the vacuum stepped two rival claimants. János Zápolya, the powerful Voivode of Transylvania, was crowned King John I by one faction of the Hungarian nobility. Ferdinand of Habsburg, the dead king’s brother-in-law, was crowned by another. Hungary descended into civil war, with each claimant seeking outside support — and John I turning to Suleiman himself for backing. In accepting Ottoman protection, he drew the Ottoman empire’s attention permanently northward.

John I reigned until 1540. He had long lacked an heir, but in 1539 he contracted a political marriage with Isabella Jagiellon, daughter of the King of Poland. She bore him a son, John Sigismund, shortly before John I died in July 1540. The infant was immediately crowned King John II, under the regency of his mother and the formidable Bishop George Martinuzzi.

The Habsburgs had always hoped to incorporate Hungary into their empire. One of their attempts to do so was in 1541. A weakened Hungary with a child-king under a contested regency seemed to offer the opportunity they had long been waiting for. Ferdinand I dispatched a substantial army of around 30,000 troops under the command of Wilhelm von Roggendorf to besiege Buda. In desperation, the Hungarian regency appealed to Suleiman for help.

The Ottomans answered their appeal . The Habsburg forces were decisively defeated by the combined Turkish and Hungarian armies. Roggendorf himself was wounded during the retreat and died shortly afterwards. 

Following the defeat of the Habsburgs, the Sultan invited the leading Hungarian barons to a celebratory feast in his camp. It was a gracious gesture of a generous ally. But Suleiman had observed something important: in the relief and celebration following the victory, the gates of Buda stood open to Ottoman soldiers, who moved freely through the city as allies and guests.

He gave quiet orders. His troops were divided into small groups, their weapons concealed. They drifted into the fortress in ones and twos, apparently sightseeing, admiring the streets and buildings. Then, at a given signal, they drew their weapons, disarmed the Hungarian guards, and planted the Ottoman flag on the towers.

Inside the banqueting tent, the Hungarian nobles heard the commotion and rose to leave. They were detained. When one protested, the Sultan delivered the line that has passed into Hungarian as a permanent expression: A fekete leves még hátra van (“ the black soup [ coffee ] is still to come”). In other words: the worst is yet to happen. 

By the time the barons were released, Buda had fallen without a single Ottoman casualty. Some of the more prominent Hungarians were not released at all. Bálint Török, one of the most powerful men in the kingdom, was taken to Constantinople and imprisoned in the Yedikule Hisarı — the Fortress of the Seven Towers — where he spent the rest of his life.

I like to imagine that Suleiman told this story proudly to his children and grandchildren: how he outmanoeuvred the Hungarians, took their capital without losing a man, and did it all while they were eating his food and drinking his wine.

The fall of Buda was not merely the loss of a city. It was the fracturing of a kingdom into three parts that would persist for over 150 years. The western fringe became “Royal Hungary” under Habsburg rule. The eastern region — Transylvania — survived as a semi-independent principality, its princes nominally Hungarian but effectively vassals of the Sultan. The great central plain, including Buda itself, was absorbed directly into the Ottoman Empire.

Gárdonyi’s Egri Csillagók, first published in 1899 and still voted the most popular novel in Hungary more than a century later, is set against this history. It opens with the fall of Buda and closes with the siege of Eger in 1552, where roughly two thousand Hungarian defenders held off an Ottoman force many times their number for over a month before the Turks finally withdrew. The characters — István Dobó, Gergely Bornemissza, Bálint Török — were real people, as were the events.

A Turkish colleague of mine at Imperial College once offered a pointed observation: that the 150 years of Ottoman rule gave Hungary access to the achievements of an advanced civilisation — its architecture, its administrative systems, its scholarship and culture. Hungarian historians, he noted with some amusement, tend to focus their account of Ottoman cultural influence on the introduction of roses, apricots, and the Turkish bath. 

Let me close with one final piece of evidence about the relationship between Turks and Hungarians, this time from etymology. The word haraç in Turkish means “tax”. In Hungarian, it means “robbery”.

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