Siege of Buda (1686)

 

In 1541, Buda was conquered by the Turks in the siege of Buda, and was under Ottoman rule for the next 145 years. Under Ottoman rule the economic decline of Buda, the capital city of Hungary, was characterized by the stagnation of population. The population of Buda was not larger in 1686, than the population of the city two centuries earlier in the 15th century.^[5] The Ottomans allowed the Hungarian royal palace to fall into ruins.^[6] The amortized palace was later transformed into a gunpowder storage and magazine by the Ottomans,^[7] which caused its detonation during the siege in 1686. The original Christian Hungarian population did not feel secure during the Ottoman conquest, their numbers significantly shrank in the next decades, because they fled to the Habsburg ruled Royal Hungary. The number of Jews and Gypsy immigrants became dominant during the Ottoman rule in Buda.^[8][9] It became an Ottoman cultural and commercial center.

Following the Ottoman failure in the second siege of Vienna, which started the Great Turkish War, Emperor Leopold I saw the opportunity for a counter-strike and the conquest of Hungary, so that the Hungarian capital Buda could be gained from the Ottomans. With the aid of Pope Innocent XI, the Holy League was formed on 5 March 1684, with King Jan Sobieski of Poland, Emperor Leopold I and the Republic of Venice agreeing to an alliance against the Turks.

However, the Holy League's first attempt on Buda ended in defeat, the Austrians and their allies having to withdraw with great losses after 108 days of besieging the Ottoman-held city.

 

 

In 1686, two years after the unsuccessful first siege of Buda, a renewed campaign was started to take the city. This time the Holy League's army was much larger, consisting of 65,000-100,000 men,^[2] including German, Hungarian, Croat, Dutch, English, Spanish, Czech, Italian, French, Burgundian, Danish and Swedish soldiers, and other Europeans as volunteers, artillerymen and officers. The Turkish defenders consisted of 7,000 men.

By the middle of June 1686 the siege had begun. On July 27 the Holy League's army started a large-scale attack, which was repulsed with a loss of 5,000 men. A tercio of 300 Spanish troops spearheaded the assault of the city walls.^[10] A Turkish relief army arrived at Buda in the middle of August led by Grand Vizier Sarı Süleyman Paşa, but the besieged Ottoman forces, led by commander Abdurrahman Abdi Arnavut Pasha, were unable to mount any offensive and he was shortly afterwards killed in action. Abdi Pasha's defensive efforts are referred to as "heroic" by Tony Jaques in his book "The Dictionary of Battles and Sieges".^[11]

Prince Eugene of Savoy and his dragoons were not directly involved in entering the city but secured the rear of their army against the Turkish relief army, which could not prevent the city from being entered after 145 years in Turkish possession. According to a Hungarian chronicler, the final assault was led by Spanish troops ahead of the Bavarian contingent.^[12]

After the conquest, the Christian Western European victorious soldiers took out their fury on the hated "heathens". Knowledge of the Turkish threat was firmly embodied in the consciousness of Europe at that time, fueled by reports of Turkish atrocities against civilians and the religious attitudes of the Christian Church:

Buda was taken and abandoned to plundering. The soldiers committed thereby such excesses. Against the Turks, because of their long and persistent resistance, which had cost an amazing quantity of its comrades their lives, they spared neither age nor sex. The Elector of Bavaria and the Duke of Lorraine, disturbed by knowing of men killed, and women raped, gave good orders that the butchery must stop, and the lives of over 2000 Turks were saved.^{[citation needed]}

Over 3,000 Turks were killed in the slaughter perpetrated by imperial troops, and the violence was directed not only against the Muslims, but likewise against the Jewish population of Buda.^[13] As subjects of the Ottoman Empire, who enjoyed greater tolerance under the Ottomans compared to the Habsburgs,^[3] the Jews had fought side-by-side with the Turks^[14] and were considered their allies.^[3] After the conquest of the city, the Jewish community of Buda, which at its height had numbered 3,000 persons,^[15] was almost completely destroyed.^[3][16] Approximately half of the city's 1,000 Jews were massacred;^[17] hundreds of Jews and 6,000 Muslims were captured to be sold as slaves or held for ransom^[17][18] as a "punishment" for their loyalty to the Ottoman Turks.^[17][19] The homes and properties of the Jews were looted and destroyed.^[19] The Reformation Hungarian Protestants advocated the complete removal of the Jewish population of Hungary.^[19] Most of the Jews remaining in Buda,^[16] as well as most of those in the rest of Hungary, left with the retreating Turks.^[16][20] The captured ones were sent to Vienna, Pozsony or Mikulov.^[3] The mosques and minarets of Buda were destroyed and three synagogues were burned, along with numerous valuable books, by the Army of the Holy Roman Empire.^[17]

The bloodiest events of the siege have been recorded by Johann Dietz of Brandenburg, an army doctor in the besieging army:

. . . Not even the babies in their mother's wombs were spared. All were sent to their deaths. I was quite horrified by what was done here. Men were far more cruel to each other than wild beasts (Bestien).^[21]

The imperial troops buried their own dead and threw the dead bodies of the Turks and Jews into the Danube.^[14]

Buda had been under Ottoman rule for a century and a half, and Ottoman rule had not ended by an uprising of the Hungarians themselves, but by the forceful intervention of the Habsburgs. This fact was reflected in the post-war arrangements.

As a consequence of the recapture of Buda from the Turks, as well as the victory in the Battle of Mohács (1687), the Hungarian parliament recognized at Pressburg in November 1687 that the inheritance of the Hungarian crown had passed to the Habsburgs, without the right to object as well as resist. In addition, the Hungarian parliament committed itself to crown the Habsburg successor to the throne still during his father's lifetime as king of Hungary. Thus on 9 December 1687 Joseph, the nine-year-old son of emperor Leopold, was crowned as a first hereditary king with the Stephanskrone crown. Hungary was a hereditary country of the Habsburgs and already in June 1688 the "commission for the mechanism of the Kingdom of Hungary" was now finally created, in order to create in the country of the Stephanskrone a strong monarchistic government.

Today, a monument in Budapest marks the spot where Spanish troops breached the walls to re-take the city from the Ottomans. Another monument honors Catalan soldiers in the Spanish tercio who participated in the siege.^[22]

• The Great Siege of Buda (1686) Archived 2019-06-09 at the Wayback Machine