Siege of Buda (1686)

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Battle of Buda (1686)
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Second siege of Buda, 1686
Part of the Great Turkish War

The recapture of Buda Castle in 1686 by Gyula Benczúr
Date18 June – 9 September 1686 (1686-06-18 – 1686-09-09)
(2 months, 3 weeks and 1 day)[1]
Location
Buda, Ottoman Hungary
Result Holy League victory
Belligerents
Holy League Ottoman Empire
Commanders and leaders
Jovan Popović Tekelija
Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg (WIA
)
Suleiman Pasha
Pasha of Temeşvar
Pasha of İstolni Belgrad
Pasha of Osijek
Strength
65,000–100,000[2] Garrison: below 7,000 men (including 3,000
Janissaries, 1,000 horses, 1,000 Jews and 2,000 inhabitants[3]
Relief army: 40,000[4]
Casualties and losses
20,000[1] 3,000 killed
6,000 captured
(including civilians)

The siege of Buda (1686) (Hungarian: Buda visszafoglalása, lit. 'Recapture of Buda') was fought between the Holy League and the Ottoman Empire, as part of the follow-up campaign in Hungary after the Battle of Vienna. The Holy League retook Buda (modern day Budapest) after 78 days, ending almost 150 years of Ottoman rule.

Background

Ottoman Buda

The Holy League took Buda after a long siege in 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

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.

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.

Siege

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

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,

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

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".[10]

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.

Massacre of Jews and Muslims

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

synagogues were burned, along with numerous valuable books, by the Army of the Holy Roman Empire.[15]

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).[19]

The imperial troops buried their own dead and threw the dead bodies of the Turks and Jews into the Danube.[12]

Consequences

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

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.

References

  1. ^ a b Bodart 1908, p. 107.
  2. ^
    ISBN 9780595329922
    .
  3. ^ a b c d e Urban Societies in East-Central Europe: 1500-1700, by Jaroslav Miller, 2008, p.89
  4. ^ Wheatcroft 2008, p. 221.
  5. ISBN 9780880333597
    .
  6. ISBN 9780465020812.[permanent dead link
    ]
  7. ISBN 9781743605059
    .
  8. ISBN 9781438110257
    .
  9. ISBN 9781438110257
    .
  10. ISBN 9780313335372
    .
  11. ^ Jewish Budapest: Memories, Rites, History, by Kinga Frojimovics, Géza Komoróczy, 1999, p.504-505
  12. ^ a b The Dutch Intersection: The Jews and the Netherlands in Modern History, by Yosef Kaplan, 2008, p.214
  13. ^ The Myth of the Jewish Race, by Raphael Patai, Jennifer Patai, 1989, p.47
  14. ^ a b c A Travel Guide to Jewish Europe, Ben G. Frank, 2001, p.532
  15. ^ a b c d The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation, by Jonathan Rose, 2008, p.268-270
  16. ^ Frommer's Budapest and the Best of Hungary, by Ryan James, 2010, p.174
  17. ^ a b c Masked Ball at the White Cross Café: the failure of Jewish assimilation, by Janet Elizabeth Kerekes, 2005, p.24-25
  18. ^ Christianity and the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry, by Moshe Y. Herczl, Charles Darwin, 1995, p.4-5
  19. ^ Jewish Budapest: Memories, Rites, History, by Kinga Frojimovics, Géza Komoróczy, 1999, p.505

Bibliography

  • Bodart, G. (1908). Militär-historisches Kriegs-Lexikon (1618-1905).
  • Wheatcroft, Andrew (2008). The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans and the Battle for Europe. New York: Basic Books.
    ISBN 978-0-465-01374-6
    .

External links
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