Following the Battle of Mohács, the Kingdom of Hungary became divided between the Ottoman Empire encroaching from the East and the Habsburg Monarchywhich had inherited the title of King of Hungary.

The Ottoman vassal John I of Hungary died in 1540, and his son John II, who was at that time a minor, was crowned king under the regency of his mother Isabella Jagiellon and bishop George Martinuzzi. This was accepted by the Ottoman ruler Suleiman the Magnificent under the condition that the Hungarians would continue to pay tribute to the Ottoman Sultan. The new King was however not accepted by the Habsburgs. Ferdinand I, Austrian Archduke and a Habsburg, sent an army of 50,000 composed of troops from Austria, German Principalities, Bohemia, and Habsburg Hungary and commanded by Wilhelm von Roggendorf to besiege Buda. The army besieged Buda in Summer 1541. The siege was badly managed and several attacks failed with very high number of casualties on the Habsburg side.

Suleiman the Magnificent took personal command of an Ottoman relief army which included 6,362 Janissaries. On 21 August, the Ottoman relief army reached Buda and engaged in battle with Roggendorf's army. The Habsburg army was defeated and 7,000 men were slaughtered or drowned in the river. Roggendorf was also wounded in the battle and died 2 days after of his injuries.

The Ottomans then occupied the city, which in its turn was celebrating the liberation, with a trick: Suleyman invited the infant John II Sigismund Zápolya with the Hungarian noblemen into his tent, meanwhile the Turkish troops began to slowly infiltrate into the fort as "tourists" seemingly in admiration of the architecture of the buildings. However, at a sudden alert they wielded their weapons and disarmed the guards and the whole garrison thereafter. At the same time, the Hungarian noblemen felt uncomfortable in the sultan's tent and wanted to leave. In that moment, on the outcry of the sultan "The black soup (coffee) is still to come!" (Hungarian: "Hátra van még a feketeleves!") the Turkish soldiers disarmed the Hungarian envoy. All of them were allowed to leave with one exception: Bálint Török, whom Suleyman considered a possible powerful opponent. He was taken into captivity and was transferred to Yedikule Fortress, where he spent his remaining life. The Royal Court, the noblemen and citizens of Buda were allowed to leave the city with their possessions unharmed.

The Habsburg army lost in all 16,000 men.

The siege of Buda was a crucial Ottoman victory against Ferdinand and the Habsburgs. The victory allowed the occupation of central Hungary by the Ottomans for around 150 years, and is therefore comparable in importance to the Battle of Mohács in 1526.

Charles V learned about the defeat of his brother Ferdinand upon his arrival in Genoa on 8 September 1541. Thirsty for revenge, he departed for an expedition against Algiers, which also ended in a sound defeat for the Habsburgs.

Ferdinand would attempt to recover the cities of Buda and Pest in 1542, but he was repulsed by the Ottomans.

Ottoman Buda

In 1541, Buda was conquered by the Turks in the Siege of Buda, and was under Ottoman rule for the next 145 years. The economic decline of Buda the capital city during the Ottoman conquest 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 didn't feel secure during the Ottoman conquest, their numbers significantly shrank in the next decades, due to their fleeing 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. Some of the churches in the city were rebuilt as mosques rather than being destroyed. Churches, mosques, schools, communal kitchens, bakeries and Turkish baths were built.

Earlier phases of the 1683 war

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 re-conquest of Hungary, so that the Hungarian capital Buda could be regained 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.

Reoccupation of Buda castel en 1686. Benczúr Gyula (1896), oil on canvas.

The Holy League took Buda after a long siege in 1686. "The Taking of Buda, 1686" in the Deutsches Historisches Museum.

Fireworks in Brussels in commemoration of the recapture of Buda from the Turks in 1686.

Ottoman Empire Soldiers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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 July 27 the Holy League's army started a large-scale attack, which was repulsed with a loss of 5,000 men. 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, was 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 Savoyand 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 143 years in Turkish possession.

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.”

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. As subjects of the Ottoman Empire, who enjoyed greater tolerance under the Ottomans compared to the Habsburgs, the Jews had fought side-by-side with the Turks 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. Approximately half of the city's 1,000 Jews were massacred; 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. The homes and properties of the Jews were looted and destroyed. The Reformation Hungarian Protestants advocated the complete removal of the Jewish population of Hungary. 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, Pozsony or Mikulov. 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.

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).” (Jewish Budapest: Memories, Rites, History, by Kinga Frojimovics, Géza Komoróczy, 1999, p.505)

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

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.