Twenty-year-old Hungarian King Louis II eventually assembled an army, mostly reliant on old fashioned heavily armoured knights. So when Suleiman the Magnificent launched an invasion in 1526, the Ottomans met no resistance from the Hungarians and advanced almost unopposed towards Buda. In 1521, the Ottomans advanced up the Danube River, taking Nándorfehérvár (present-day Belgrade) and Szabács, leaving most of Hungary indefensible and open to further Turkish conquests. The medieval kingdom‘s defenses sagged as border-guards and castle garrisons went unpaid and fortresses fell into disrepair. Since the end of the 15th century, the Kingdom of Hungary had begun to experience severe financial difficulties as magnates dismantled the national administration systems and bureaucracy throughout the country.
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And by 1520, after Selim I had dramatically expanded the Empire’s eastern and southern frontiers by defeating the Shah of Safavid Iran, his son, Suleiman the Magnificent, began a series of new military conquests directed towards Hungary.
Throughout the 15th and 16th centuries, the Ottoman Empire continued to prosper under the rule of a line of committed and effective Sultans.
But the crusading Catholic armies of Hungary and Poland, led by King Władysław III of Poland, were repelled in 1444 at the Battle of Varna, widely regarded as the last major effort by the Christian powers to expel the Turks from Europe.Īfter the Battle of Varna, the Ottomans extended their control over the Greek rulers in the Peloponnese and, with now no threat from the west, the son of Murad II, Mehmed the Conqueror, proceeded to conquer Constantinople, which fell in 1453. Sultan Murad II began his reign by laying siege to the Byzantine capital in 1422, forcing the Emperor John VIII to cede away all the territory outside the city walls, before launching a series of campaigns to reassert the Ottomans’ control over the Balkans.įearing the rise of an expanding and powerful Islamic empire on the doorstep of Europe, Pope Eugene IV called for a new crusade. The rise of the Ottoman EmpireĪs the Turks expanded into Southern and Central Europe, the conquest of Constantinople became a crucial objective. They eventually established a foothold in the Balkans, even moving their capital to Adrianople, which they renamed Edirne. On September 11, 1683, the combined forces of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth led by John Sobieski defeated the Ottoman forces at the Battle of Vienna, shaking Ottoman hegemony in Central Europe and setting the stage for the reconquest of Hungary and the Balkans.īy the start of the 15th century, the Ottoman Turks, once just one of many Turkic tribes wandering the Anatolian steppe, had expanded steadily westward, mostly at the expense of the decaying Byzantine Empire.
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