The Fall of The Medieval Kingdom of Hungary: Mohacs 1526 - Buda 1541

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Atlantic Research and Publications, Inc., conducts research,organizes conferences, and publishes scholarly books in historyand related fields. The Open Society Fund helped us incompleting research and holding conferences. The editorial work for this volume was done by Professor JanosM. Bak with the assistance of Professors Gustav Bayerle andMarjorie Sinel and Dr. Gabriele P. Scardellato. The preparationof the manuscript for publication was administered by PatriciaStracquatanio of Atlantic Research and Publications, Inc. Themaps were prepared by Mrs. Ida Etelka Romann. To all these institutions and persons I wish to express my mostsincere appreciation and thanks.

Highland Lakes, N.J. March 15, 1988

Bela K. Kiraly Professor Emeritus of HistoryEditor-in-Chief

Preface to the Series

The present volume is the twenty-sixth of a series which, whencompleted, will present a comprehensive survey of theinteractions between war and society in East Central Europe fromthe eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. In some cases, andthis volume is a case in point, we reach much farther back intime if and when the exposition of a particular subject seems toadvance our goals. These volumes deal with the peoples whosehomelands lie between the Germans to the west and Adriatic Seasto the south. They constitute a particular civilization, anintegral part of Europe, yet substantially different from theWest. Within the area there are intriguing variations inlanguage, religion, and government; so too, are theredifferences in concepts of national defense, of the charactersof the armed forces, and of ways of waging war. Study of thiscomplex subject demands a multi-disciplinary approach: therefore,we have involved scholars from several disciplines, fromuniversities and other scholarly institutions of the UnitedStates, Canada, and Western Europe, as well as the East CentralEuropean socialist countries and the Soviet Union.

Most of the volumes contain papers selected from thosepresented at our twenty international and interdisciplinaryconferences; others, like this volume, are solicited to make theseries as comprehensive as possible.

Our investigation focuses on a comparative survey of militarybehavior and organization in these various nations and ethnicgroups, to see what is peculiar to them, what has been sociallyand culturally determined, and what in their conduct of war wasdue to circumstance. Besides making a historical survey, we tryto define different patterns of military behavior, including thedecision making processes, the attitudes and actions of diversesocial classes, and the restraints of them shown in war.

We endeavor, in this and future volumes, to presentconsiderable material on social, economic, political, andtechnological changes, and on changes in the sciences and ininternational relations and their effects on the development ofdoctrines of national defense and practices in militaryorganization, command, strategy, and tactics. We present data onthe social origins and mobility of the officer corps of thevarious services, and above all, on the civil-militaryrelationship and the origins of the East Central European brandof militarism. The studies will, we hope, result in a betterunderstanding of the societies, governments, and politics ofEast Central Europe, most of whose peoples are now members ofthe Warsaw Treaty Organization, although one country is a memberof NATO and two are non-aligned.

Our methodology takes into account that in the last threedecades the study of war and national defense systems has movedaway from narrow concern with battles, campaigns, and leaders,and has come to concern itself with the evolution of society asa whole. In fact, the interdependence of changes in society andchanges in warfare, and the proposition that militaryinstitutions closely reflect the character of the society ofwhich they are a part have come to be accepted by historians,political scientists, sociologists, philosophers, and otherstudents of war and national defense. Recognition of this factconstitutes one of the central concerns of our approach to thesubject. Works in Western languages adequately cover thediplomatic, political, intellectual, social, and economichistories of these peoples and this area. In contrast, fewsubstantial studies of their national defense systems have yetappeared in Western languages. Similarly, although somesubstantial, comprehensive accounts of the non military aspectsof the history of the whole region have been published in theWest. However, before the present series, nothing had appearedin any Western language on the regions national defense systems.Nor is there any study of mutual effects of the concepts andpractices of national defense in East Central Europe. Thus, ourcomparative study of War and Society in East Central Europe hasbeen a pioneering work. The Editor-in-Chief has, of course, theduty of assuring the comprehensive coverage, cohesion, internalbalance, and scholarly standards of the series he launched. Hecheerfully accepts this responsibility and intends this work tobe neither a justification nor a condemnation of the policies,attitudes, or activities of any of the nations involved. At thesame time, because so many different disciplines, languages,interpretations, and schools of thought are represented, thepolicy in these, past and future volumes has been, and shall be,not to interfere with the contributions of the variousparticipants, but to present them as a sampling of the schoolsof thought and the standards of scholarship in the manycountries to which the contributors belong.

Bela Kiraly

About This Book

As the editor of this series states in his preface, the Englishtranslation of the present monograph is an important steptowards presenting recent Hungarian scholarship to a wideraudience. I might go even further: by publishing Geza Perjes'smonograph, we acquaint the reader with more than one aspect ofcontemporary Hungarian intellectual history simultaneously. Thisbook can be seen as serving several functions and fitting withinthree more or less different contexts. While not all of thesefunctions were consciously chosen by the author, once a text ispresented to the public, it acquires its own right to life andmay assume roles ("readings") not necessarily intended by itsmaker.

The Decline of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary, originallyentitled Mohacs, is a meticulous reconstruction of events ofsome four and half centuries ago by a practical and theoreticalexpert of military science; it is also a cardinal piece in ahistoric-political debate that pushed history writing into theforefront of public interest in the Hungary of the 1970s; and,because of these first two functions, it is a major statementabout historical and not-so-historical choices and alternativesof an endangered country in the middle of central Europe.Chronologically speaking, we should start with the secondaspect, for it was the "Mohacs debate" that had moved the authorto turn to this topic, as he himself states in the preface tothe Hungarian edition (below, p. xxi). However, logically, andespecially for the reader outside Hungary, the first, themonographic, aspect is surely the most obvious; and since thatrequires the least circumstantial presentation let me start withthat.

The author, born in 1917, belongs to the last prewar graduatingclass of the prestigious Ludovika Academy, the century-oldofficer training school of Hungary. Having seen action in theUkrainian-Russian theater of World War II, Capt. Perjes turned toscholarship and became one of the first practitioners of theresurrected discipline of sociology. However, sociology was soondenounced as '"bourgeois pseudo-science", and Perjes was forcedout of academia. After quite a few years of involuntary silencehe was able to return to intellectual work, and in the lastthirty-odd years he has written extensively on Hungarian history(military and otherwise) and military science, above all on thefamous founder of "modern" military thinking, Clausewitz. [1]Thus, when (for specific reasons to be discussed below) heturned to the analysis of the historical battle of Mohacs, hebrought with him the experience of an active officer as well asthe insights of a military theorist, qualities which few if anyof the other writers on this topic have had at their command.Having studied most of the available sources and the relevantliterature on the age, he attempted a systematic reconstructionof the battle, its prehistory, the probable battle plan of thecommanders, the details of its course and its immediateconsequences. To do so, he called upon contemporary behavioralsciences, on calculations based on practical data about movingtroops and materiel as well as on traditional historicalresearch. Some of the specific arguments on troop strength andthe like may appear tedious to the non-military reader, buteditor and author agreed to present them in their original form,for it is unlikely that anyone will ever take the pains torepeat such calculations. (Altogether, we accepted the author'swish to edit his Hungarian text as little as possible, preciselybecause details are so important for the monographic and, evenmore, for the other aspects of this work.) The many tables andsketches demonstrate amply the expertise of Dr. Perjes in thesematters. One more "experimental" aspect may be worth noting:owing to growing interest in the age, particularly for the 450thanniversary in 1976, a film was shot about Mohacs, and Dr.Perjes had the rare advantage as a scholar of being asked toassist in its preparation. This task allowed him to explore theterrain for the practical reason of moving actors and extras onthe field. His acknowledgments to participants in that project(below, p. xxi) tell about the value of this experience for hiswriting of the present monograph.

Anyone scanning the bibliography of Perjes's writings will notethat before 1970 he did not touch the problems offifteenth-sixteenth century Turco-Hungarian warfare. As hehimself has noted several times, it was the publication of abook by the noted writer and film-critic, Istvan Nemeskurty, in1966 about the years following Mohacs that triggered both his"angry response", and, in the subsequent years, the Mohacsdebate, of which the present book is an important document.Nemeskurty's book was an unusual] piece on the Hungarian scene:neither historical novel nor learned monograph with the usualfootnoting, in fact it is not very different from highlysuccessful English-language books on historical topics, like those of Barbara Tuchman. Hungarians have for centuries regardedthe battle of 1526 as the crucial historical tragedy whichexplained the problems of the subsequent 500-odd years. Surelynot a deheroizing attempt, yet one which claimed to berealistic, Nemeskurty's book proposed that the lost battle,though a major debacle, was not the last chance of the "nation",but rather that lack of unity and low public morale in thefollowing decades brought about the final decline of thekingdom. It became a best seller, came out in several neweditions, and started a many-sided debate in professionaljournals, literary-political magazines, and even in the dailypress. Clearly, the author here, just as later with books on thepeasant war of 1514, on the fall of Buda, and on the SecondWorld War, touched a very sensitive nerve of Hungarian publicconsciousness.

Since few of the protagonists, writings are known outside ofHungary, and the major issues are referred to anal debated inthe present volume, it would be tedious to rehearse thearguments presented in the course of the ten to twelve years ofthe "Mohacs debate." [2] The discussion itself ran alongseveral lines. Strong words were exchanged between"professional" historians and the "dilettante" writer, theformer accusing the latter of innumerable factual mistakes andunwarranted conclusions and altogether questioning thelegitimacy of writing "parallel history." While some reviewershailed the realism of the book in contrast to the romanticpathos of traditional history writing, most historianschallenged the basic tenet of a second chance, or even severalchances, after Mohacs on the basis of numbers (of soldiers,commanders etc.). It was at this stage that Perjes entered thering with a long article (that became a book) on "A Country Castto the Roadside" [3] in which he presented innuce theargument of his later monograph: he found good reason to believethat there was an "offer" from Stambul that would have allowedHungary to survive as an Turkish satellite, especially becausethe Carpathian Basin was beyond the reasonable radius ofoperation of the Ottoman army.

For a while the debate was centered around the years after1526, but soon several protagonists, Perjes included, shifted topre-1526 problems, and by the time the wind of the battle's450th anniversary filled the sails of the discussion, the causes of the defeatwere receiving as much attention as the real and imaginedconsequences. Most critics of Perjes doubted the mere existenceof the "Suleyman's offer", particularly before 1526, for whichno explicit documentary evidence survives; others pointed to thetypical method of "gradual conquest" used by the Ottomans on theBalkans which might have included a temporary "offer" of thissort, but in the last resort would have led to the same result.Several historians, who had done extensive archival research onthe period, and others, who were experts in the one or the otherspecific field, joined the debate and pointed both to allegedinaccuracies in Perjes's details and to the problematiccharacter of his working hypotheses. In some cases, hypothesisstands against hypothesis; in others, details may need revisionor polishing. These are, however, features characteristic ofactive scholarly debate. There can be no doubt that the authorof the present monograph grinds an axe; the book was writtenwith both "anger" and "devotion" (cum ira et studio). Indeed,the tone of the debate was at some stages so bitter that one isnot surprised at the author's words in the preface, where hespeaks of "another battle" which surrounded the writing of hisbook. The study the readers hold in their hands is a summary ofall that which Perjes now believes to be the result of hisinquiry, including a few passages responding to some of hiscritics. Historians of our day are not always anxious toestablish final and only truths; hence this monograph can standon its own, regardless whether any one of its hypotheses willprove to be better founded than those of its critics. Thereconstruction of the battle itself and much about itssurroundings will most certainly not become obsolete for sometime to come as it is unlikely that either significant newsources on matters military, or many researchers willing tospend as much time on the terrain as our author did, will befound. Political, diplomatic, and economic history consists, asPerjes points out in his methodological preface (p. 7, below),of too many factors and too many conjectures to allow similarlong-term prognoses about the validity of Perjes's conclusions.The reader will notice, especially when reaching Chapter IV,that Perjes was right to change the title of the book: one ofhis most detailed analyses is devoted to the fate of the countryin the decade and a half between Mohacs and the final divisionof historical Hungary into three regions, an event that was,indeed, decisive for the country's development for centuries tocome. Because so little is generally known about this periodoutside of Hungary (and even within, to be sure), the authorchose to include extensive passages from the sources, just as hedid for the chapters reconstructing the battle. Since few if anyof these texts are easily available in modern translations otherthan Hungarian, it seemed appropriate to keep them, even if theytranscend the usual ratio between text and quotation. Also,here, too, nonspecialists may find the personal and politicalarguments rather detailed, but I should like to assure them thatthe author is not shadowboxing, but talking to a readershipstrongly influenced by centuries old prejudices, for example,against King John Szapolyai, or Friar George. And this is alsothe part which bears most explicitly on issues that are notmerely scholarly - and not only historical.

Central Europe is a region where daily political issues areoften debated in the guise of history, almost as much as inChina, where emperors of thousands of years ago served asprotagonists on pro- or anti-Maoist datsebaos. Questions ofnational identity, of independence, of alliances, and ofpolitical choices are often expressed in images, monuments,dramas, and even rock operas about events many centuries past.The decision of St. Stephen to call for Bavarian missionaries orthe role of General Arthur Gorgey in the defeat of 1849 areissues of public debate as vivid as events in the private livesof American presidential candidates or government influence -peddling scandals on this side of the Atlantic. Of course, theheated debates are not truly aimed at the king who died 900years ago or the commander of the Honved army, but at politicalchoices of today, such as western or eastern orientation, orcompromise with a neighboring great power vs. heroic, even ifhopeless, resistance.

Clearly, the Mohacs debate has been closely connected withmatters of national life and death, not only in the years1966-80, but much earlier as well. As Perjes notes, the "Mohacscomplex" is as old as the battle itself. Mohacs was a paradigmfor writers on Hungarian national resurrection and a shorthandfor nemzethalal ("national demise") for the Romantics. Morerecently, the ex-prime minister of Hungary, who engineered theHungarian declaration of war against the USSR in 1941 (and hadto pay for this act with his life as a war criminal in 1946),wrote in 1943 a book about Hungarian politics after Mohacs [4] surely not because he was a devoted scholar of sixteenth centurypolitics, but as a disguised apology for his choice to maneuverthe country into Hitler's war. That the recent debate around Mohacs, which began ten years after another defeat andanother compromise of another "King Janos (John)", was not withoutdeep political implications is beyond doubt. To be sure, mostprotagonists, our author included, did not consciously refer tohistorical parallels, even if the notion of realism vs.romanticism in politics may have been on their minds. Justanecdotically: a major critic of the existence of "Suleyman'soffer" read about the Mohacs debate first in the newsletter ofthe jail where he served time for his role in 1956. When hedecided to argue against the real possibility of an honorablecompromise close to four and half centuries before, was heconsciously warning against the impending compromise of the"consolidation"?

Historians tend to fight over details and conceptions for theirown sake, moved by their own professional instincts. Butplaywrights, poets, and hundreds of writers ofletters-to-the-editor would hardly be mobilized by merelycritical concerns for archival precision. They, obviously, wereengaged in debates of immediate concern, in this case, about thechances of resisting an overwhelming foe, about the merits ofRealpolitik, or the preference of a stance motivated by nationalself-esteem (ideological or otherwise ) to rational decisionsregardless of sympathies, and many more. Perhaps the '"battle"around this book, albeit not chosen by the author, was also aconcatenation of historical conditions and trends, not very muchunlike the one fought on the field of Mohacs in August 1526.

I believe, it is useful even for readers many thousands ofmiles away from the theater of both battles to keep thesecontexts in mind to appreciate the achievement of the author andthe place of his book in contemporary Hungarian historicalscholarship and politics.

Janos M. Bak

The Fall of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary: Mohacs 1526 - Buda 1541

by Geza Perjes

To my wife

Preface to the American Edition

The original title of this book was "Mohacs", the name of thetown near which the Ottoman army annihilated the Hungarian armyon August 29, 1626. King Louis II, a significant portion of thearistocracy and of the Church hierarchy, several hundred nobles,and about 20,000 troops lost their lives. Hungarian traditionassociates the fall of the medieval kingdom with this singlebattle. All the humiliation, suffering, loss of life and goodsthat preceded and followed it-- during 150 years of Ottomanrule--have been compressed into the one word Mohacs, even thoughit should be obvious that all this happened as a result of afateful concatenation of historical circumstances and not of asingle encounter. Of course, the identification of a historicalturning point with a famous battle is not a unique Hungarianfeature: "Hastings", "Agincourt", "Waterloo", "Sedan", the"Marne", and "Stalingrad" are well-known parallels.

In contrast to this fixation on one event, which I call the"Mohacs complex" of Hungarian public opinion, it is my beliefthe country's fate can be understood only in a wider contextwhich includes at least the fifteen years from the battle ofMohacs in 1526 to the Fall of Buda in 1541. In fact the laststage of the decline which characterized the Kingdom of Hungaryafter the death of King Matthias Corvinus in 1490 began by 1520at the latest and ended with the threefold partition of thecountry in 1541. The decades between these dates were decisivefor the crucial relationship between Hungary and the OttomanEmpire. In all likelihood the Ottomans originally did not intendto break up the country or to conquer it, but rather to use itas a buffer state between themselves and the Habsburg lands.Such intentions on the part of the sultan can be detected asearly as around 1520. Only when the Hungarian governmentrejected the collaboration proposed by the Porte in 1520 and onseveral occasions thereafter--to which I refer as "Suleyman'soffer',--did the Ottomans launch the decisive attack againstHungary in 1526.

Although after the battle of Mohacs Hungary was lying prostrateand defenseless at the feet of Sultan Suleyman, he did notincorporate it into his empire. In 1528 he even "returned" thecountry, which he considered his by right of conquest, to KingJohn (Szapolyai), who had been elected by the "Hungarian Party"in opposition to Ferdinand of Habsburg. The relationship betweenSuleyman and John was regulated by a treaty of alliance and ofmutual assistance. This alliance functioned more or less satisfactorilyuntil John's death in 1540; it helped consolidate Szapolyai'sreign and thus rescue the political integrity of the kingdom.Even if it did not succeed in putting an end to civil strife,the country enjoyed some peace. From the Ottoman point of view,Hungary's function as a buffer state, a "defensive bastion ofIslam", gave Suleyman considerable freedom of action against theHabsburgs along both offensive and defensive lines. When KingJohn died, Ferdinand I, who, until then ruled only the smallerportion of the country, obtained the support of a great numberof Hungarian magnates, including some who earlier had stood onSzapolyai's side, and launched an attack on Buda, the capital ofHungary. Suleyman had to realize that his strategy no longerworked; therefore, anticipating Ferdinand, his troops capturedBuda in 1541 and soon thereafter the central region of thecountry as well.

Thus at the end of the period under review Hungary's positionbetween two empires was decided for a century and a half tocome. The country was divided into three parts: the western andnorthern regions came under Habsburg rule, the central portionwas absorbed into the Ottoman Empire, and the eastern part,Transylvania, was on its way to become a semi-dependentprincipality under Ottoman suzerainty. The Ottomans foundthemselves in the possession of an area that was relatively poorand difficult to defend and thus, even though victors, wereplaced in an unfavorable political, economic, and militaryposition.

This interpretation of the age of "Mohacs"' when presented byme some ten years ago, was received with almost exclusivelynegative criticism by Hungarian historians. I cannot present allthe exchanges of the debate that ensued because its materialwould fill a separate volume, yet I shall discuss thosecounter-arguments that seem most important. Even so, many ofthese will have to be relegated to the notes so that they do notinterrupt the flow of the argument and destroy the structure ofthe presentation.

I cannot forego the opportunity to thank Professor Bela KKiraly, who offered to publish a revised version of my book inhis series on war and society in east central Europe. Iearnestly hope that this study, however controversial it may bein parts, fits the profile of the series and is consonant withthe mission undertaken by Professor Kiraly: to acquaint theworld with the history, so replete in tragic turns, of thenations of east central Europe.

Budapest, August, 1987

Geza Perjes

Preface to the Hungarian Edition (1977)

I wish to thank first of all Istvan Nemeskurty who thrust meinto the "Mohacs issue" with his book which begs rebuttal butwhich was written with true feeling and dedication. Seldom haveI experienced in my academic or scholarly work such a powerfulemotional and rational impetus to examine a problem than afterhaving read his thoughts about the years following Mohacs.

I must also thank the Institute of Military History for itsgenerous support. The prerequisite for reconstructing a battleis to become familiar with the terrain on which it was fought,and I would never have had this opportunity without theirsupport. I received immeasurable help from Lt Colonel LaszloCsendes, head of the Map Library of the Institute, who led theexpeditions to Mohacs, with relentless enthusiasm, and gaveinvaluable advice on matters of topography and cartography. Thediscussions with my colleagues, the military historians GyulaRazso and Endre Marosi, who participated in the survey of theterrain, were extremely fruitful.

The shots on location by the televised film on Mohacs, and thetopographical and geological investigation accompanying ithelped me considerably in my work. The film's editor, KatalinVikol, and its director, Istvan Szakaly, had the courage toincorporate the new interpretation of the battle into theirfilm. Adapting the results of research to the requirements oftelevision in itself promoted the study.

The exchanges with Laszlo Rapcsanyi in the program on Mohacsbroadcast over Radio Kossuth, Budapest, were also of great helpto me. His fresh insights as a reporter and his quick grasp ofbasic issues contributed greatly to the elucidation of theproblems. I must also thank Borderguards-Major Ferenc Vallai,and his detachment for their enthusiastic and tireless support.Thanks to his familiarity with the terrain, Major Vallai, as oneof the "managers" of the battlefield of Mohacs, was of uniquevalue for reconstructing the essential moments of the battle.The other "manager", Lajos Szentkiralyi, retired vice-presidentof the council of the village of Majs, as someone long familiarwith the area as well as a passionate explorer of the battle ofMohacs, contributed no less assistance. I take this occasion tothank the two geologists, Andras Galacz and Gyula Gabris, fortheir advice, their enthusiastic collaboration, and scientificobjectivity.

Last but not least, I thank my wife for her moral andintellectual support in the midst of the skirmishes surrounding the "Mohacsdebate." Practically no day passed without us discussing somerelevant problem, and these lively exchanges were a great helpto me in the final formulation of my ideas. She providedconsiderable assistance in organizing the manuscript,especially in improving its style. Writing this book amounted toa minor battle in itself. It felt good to find at my side, inthis struggle, a persevering comrade who was prepared for everysacrifice. That is why I dedicate this book to her.

The Fall of The Medieval Kingdom of Hungary: Mohacs 1526 - Buda 1541