The siege of Buda (1686) () was a military engagement during the

Great Turkish War The Great Turkish War () or The Last Crusade, also called in Ottoman sources The Disaster Years (), was a series of conflicts between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League (1684), Holy League consisting of the Holy Roman Empire, Polish–Lith ...

, in which forces of the Holy League, led by the

Habsburg Monarchy The Habsburg monarchy, also known as Habsburg Empire, or Habsburg Realm (), was the collection of empires, kingdoms, duchies, counties and other polities (composite monarchy) that were ruled by the House of Habsburg. From the 18th century it is ...

, recaptured the fortified city of Buda (now part of modern-day Budapest) from the Ottoman Empire. The siege took place between 18 June and 9 September 1686, ending nearly 150 years of Ottoman control over the former Hungarian capital. The campaign followed the failed Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683 and was part of a broader counteroffensive launched by the Holy League. The multinational Christian coalition fielded an army of up to 100,000 men, while the Ottoman defenders, under Abdurrahman Abdi Arnavut Pasha, resisted for over two months before the city was stormed. The fall of Buda paved the way for Habsburg consolidation over central Hungary and led to the establishment of hereditary Habsburg monarchy in the Kingdom of Hungary.

Background

Ottoman Buda

In 1541,

Buda Buda (, ) is the part of Budapest, the capital city of Hungary, that lies on the western bank of the Danube. Historically, “Buda” referred only to the royal walled city on Castle Hill (), which was constructed by Béla IV between 1247 and ...

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

, 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. The Ottomans allowed the Hungarian royal palace to fall into ruins. The amortized palace was later transformed into a gunpowder storage and magazine by the Ottomans, 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. It became an Ottoman cultural and commercial center.

Earlier phases of the 1683 war

Following the Ottoman failure in the second siege of Vienna, which started the

, Emperor Leopold I saw the opportunity for a counter-strike and the conquest of Hungary, so that the Hungarian capital

could be gained from the Ottomans. With the aid of

Pope Innocent XI Pope Innocent XI (; ; 16 May 1611 – 12 August 1689), born Benedetto Odescalchi, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 21 September 1676 until his death on 12 August 1689. Political and religious tensions with ...

, the Holy League was formed on 5 March 1684, with King Jan Sobieski of Poland, Emperor Leopold I and the

Republic of Venice The Republic of Venice, officially the Most Serene Republic of Venice and traditionally known as La Serenissima, was a sovereign state and Maritime republics, maritime republic with its capital in Venice. Founded, according to tradition, in 697 ...

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.

Siege

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, 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 27 July 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. A Turkish relief army arrived at Buda in the middle of August led by

Grand Vizier Grand vizier (; ; ) was the title of the effective head of government of many sovereign states in the Islamic world. It was first held by officials in the later Abbasid Caliphate. It was then held in the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire, the Soko ...

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".

Prince Eugene of Savoy Prince Eugene Francis of Savoy-Carignano (18 October 1663 – 21 April 1736), better known as Prince Eugene, was a distinguished Generalfeldmarschall, field marshal in the Army of the Holy Roman Empire and of the Austrian Habsburg dynasty durin ...

and his

dragoon Dragoons were originally a class of mounted infantry, who used horses for mobility, but dismounted to fight on foot. From the early 17th century onward, dragoons were increasingly also employed as conventional cavalry and trained for combat wi ...

s 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.

Massacre of Jews and Muslims

The Turks rejected several offers to surrender. After the conquest, the Christian Western European victorious soldiers, enraged by the high number of casualties, took out their fury on the hated "s". 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 The following is a list of monarchs during the history of Bavaria. Bavaria was ruled by several dukes and kings, partitioned and reunited, under several dynasties. Since 1918, Bavaria has been under a republican form of government, and from 19 ...
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.

Over 3,000 Turks were killed in the slaughter perpetrated by imperial troops, and the violence was directed not only against the

Muslims Muslims () are people who adhere to Islam, a Monotheism, monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God ...

, but likewise against the Jewish population of Buda.Jewish Budapest: Memories, Rites, History, by Kinga Frojimovics, Géza Komoróczy, 1999, p.504-505 As subjects of the

Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire (), also called the Turkish Empire, was an empire, imperial realm that controlled much of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and North Africa from the 14th to early 20th centuries; it also controlled parts of southeastern Centr ...

, who enjoyed greater tolerance under the Ottomans compared to the Habsburgs, the Jews had fought side-by-side with the TurksThe Dutch Intersection: The Jews and the Netherlands in Modern History, by Yosef Kaplan, 2008, p.214 and were considered their allies. After the conquest of the city, the Jewish community of Buda, which at its height had numbered 3,000 persons, was almost completely destroyed.A Travel Guide to Jewish Europe, Ben G. Frank, 2001, p.532 Approximately half of the city's 1,000 Jews were massacred;The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation, by Jonathan Rose, 2008, p.268-270 hundreds of Jews and 6,000 Muslims were captured to be sold as slaves or held for ransom as a "punishment" for their loyalty to the Ottoman Turks.Masked Ball at the White Cross Café: the failure of Jewish assimilation, by Janet Elizabeth Kerekes, 2005, p.24-25 The homes and properties of the Jews were looted and destroyed. The

Reformation The Reformation, also known as the Protestant Reformation or the European Reformation, was a time of major Theology, theological movement in Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the p ...

Hungarian Protestants advocated the complete removal of the Jewish population of

Hungary Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ...

. Most of the Jews remaining in Buda, as well as most of those in the rest of Hungary, left with the retreating Turks. The captured ones were sent to

Vienna Vienna ( ; ; ) is the capital city, capital, List of largest cities in Austria, most populous city, and one of Federal states of Austria, nine federal states of Austria. It is Austria's primate city, with just over two million inhabitants. ...

, Pozsony or

Mikulov Mikulov (; ) is a town in Břeclav District in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 7,600 inhabitants. From the 16th to the 19th century, it was the cultural centre of the Jewish community of Moravia. The historic centr ...

. The mosques and

minaret A minaret is a type of tower typically built into or adjacent to mosques. Minarets are generally used to project the Muslim call to prayer (''adhan'') from a muezzin, but they also served as landmarks and symbols of Islam's presence. They can h ...

s of

were destroyed and three

synagogues A synagogue, also called a shul or a temple, is a place of worship for Jews and Samaritans. It is a place for prayer (the main sanctuary and sometimes smaller chapels) where Jews attend religious services or special ceremonies such as wed ...

were burned, along with numerous valuable books, by the Army of the Holy Roman Empire. 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).

The imperial troops buried their own dead and threw the dead bodies of the Turks and Jews into the

Danube The Danube ( ; see also #Names and etymology, other names) is the List of rivers of Europe#Longest rivers, second-longest river in Europe, after the Volga in Russia. It flows through Central and Southeastern Europe, from the Black Forest sou ...

Consequences

Fireworks in brussel 1686 in conmemoration of the liberation of hungary

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

Habsburg The House of Habsburg (; ), also known as the House of Austria, was one of the most powerful dynasties in the history of Europe and Western civilization. They were best known for their inbreeding and for ruling vast realms throughout Europe d ...

s, 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.

Legacy

Today, a monument in

Budapest Budapest is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns of Hungary, most populous city of Hungary. It is the List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, tenth-largest city in the European Union by popul ...

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.

References

Bibliography

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Buda 1686 Buda, 1686 1686 in the Habsburg monarchy Buda, 1686 Buda 1686

Sieges of Budapest Ethnic cleansing in Europe Military scandals Persecution of Ottoman Muslims Persecution of Muslims by Christians History of the Jews in Europe 17th century in Hungary 1686 in the Ottoman Empire Anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe Massacres in Hungary Attacks on religious buildings and structures in Europe Looting in Europe