History

The magnates, who did not want another heavy-handed king, procured the accession of Vladislas II, king of Bohemia (Ulászló II in Hungarian history), precisely because of his notorious weakness: he was known as King Dobže, or Dobzse (meaning “Good” or, loosely, “OK”), from his habit of accepting with that word every paper laid before him. The emperor Maximilian contented himself with reoccupying his lost provinces and establishing a sort of paternal patronage over Hungary. This was consolidated in 1515 by an agreement under which Vladislas’s son, Louis, married Maximilian’s granddaughter Mary, while Louis’s sister, Anne, married Maximilian’s grandson Ferdinand, who was to succeed to Louis’s thrones if Louis died without an heir. The agreement was made without the consent of the Hungarian nobility and in violation of the resolution passed by the Diet in 1505 that it would never accept a foreigner as the king of Hungary. The candidate of the “national party” was János Zápolya (Szapolyai), voievod of Transylvania.

Meanwhile, the magnates permitted the Black Army to disintegrate (without replacing it) and allowed the country’s fortresses to fall into disrepair. Because they had not been paid, some of the Black Army’s fragments resorted to banditry and then had to be dispersed by one of Matthias’s generals, Pál Kinizsi, in 1494. Vladislas was the magnates’ helpless prisoner; he could make no decision without their consent, and his revenues were looted so ruthlessly that he was reduced to selling Matthias’s art and book collections. Nearly all of Matthias’s reforms were canceled, and the peasants were oppressed grievously. In 1514 there was a peasant uprising that, unlike those that had preceded it, spread nationwide. It was sparked by the call for a Crusade against the Ottomans by the papal legate of eastern Europe, Archbishop Tamás Bakócz. Some 20,000 men gathered near Buda in the spring and, led by a Szekler nobleman, György Dózsa, moved on the southern border. The rebellious, antilandlord sentiment of these “Crusaders” became apparent during their march across the Great Alföld, and Bakócz canceled the campaign. The peasant leaders not only refused to obey this order when it reached them in late May but also confronted and defeated the nobles’ army and went on a two-month rampage that came to be known as the Dózsa Rebellion. They burned nobles’ manor houses and captured several major towns and cities. By mid-July, however, the peasants had been defeated and Dózsa captured, tortured, and executed. The peasants were condemned to perpetual servitude, and their right to free migration was abolished. The Tripartitum legal code (1514), by jurist István Werbőczi, reinforced the power of the aristocracy against both the throne and the peasantry. Although this law was not immediately enforced, it served as the basis for the preservation of serfdom for centuries to come.

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When Vladislas died in 1516, his nine-year-old son was proclaimed king as Louis II. The defenses of the kingdom worsened, and in 1521 the new Ottoman sultan, Süleyman I (the Magnificent), demanded tribute from Louis. When the demand was rejected, Süleyman took Belgrade. Suddenly alive to the Turkish danger, the magnates voted to reestablish a standing army, but nothing was done to raise it, because each rival faction tried to put the burden of its upkeep on the others. Appeals for help from abroad met with little response. In 1526 the sultan advanced into Hungary. A general call to arms was proclaimed, but the most important forces—those from Transylvania and Croatia—were late in obeying it. Louis, with a force of 24,000 to 26,000 men, moved down the Danube in August and attacked the Turks at the Battle of Mohács. The Hungarian army, heavily outnumbered, was almost annihilated. Louis himself drowned during his flight. Unable to believe that the pitiful array that had met him was Hungary’s national army, the sultan advanced with extreme caution. He occupied Buda on September 10 but returned across the Danube by the end of October, taking with him more than 100,000 captives.