Battle of Buda (1686)

The Battle of Buda (1686) 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 took Buda after a long siege.

After the unsuccessful second siege of Vienna by the Turks in 1683, which started the Great Turkish War, an imperial counteroffensive started for the re-conquest of Hungary, so that the Hungarian capital Buda could be freed from the Turks.

Formation of the Holy League

In 1541 Buda was conquered by the Turks in the Siege of Buda, and was under Turkish rule for the next 145 years. Following the Turkish defeat at the Battle of Vienna in 1683, Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I saw the opportunity for a counterstrike. 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.

First siege, 1684

First Siege of Buda, 1684
Part of Great Turkish War
Siege of Buda 1686 by Frans Geffels
Date Spring of 1684 Location Buda, Ottoman Hungary Result Ottoman victory the siege lasted 108 days[1]
Belligerents
Ottoman Empire	Holy League
Commanders and leaders
Grand Vizier Kara İbrahim Pasha Abdurrahman Abdi Arnavut	Charles V, Duke of Lorraine Louis William, Margrave of Baden-Baden Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg
Strength
7,000 inside Buda 17,000 relief forces	40,000—43,000 troops[2]
Casualties and losses
Unknown	24,000[3]—30,000 [4]

In the spring of 1684 an army of about 80,000 men marched under Charles V, Duke of Lorraine to free the city of Buda from the Turks. After the main army crossed the Danube at Esztergom on 13 June, the front of the imperial army under the command of Maximilian Lorenz Starhemberg and the cavalry Gen. Louis William, Margrave of Baden-Baden arrived at the castle town of Visegrád on 15 June. On 16 June the town of Esztergom was taken by storm by imperial troops in spite of its strong walls, after a gate was destroyed by cannons. The majority of the Turkish occupation troops were killed and the city was plundered. Only a few Turks managed to withdraw to the castle on the rock above the city. After a siege of 1-1/2 days, the remaining Turkish garrison capitulated on 18 June.

On 27 June the imperial army met a strong Turkish force of 17,000 men at Vác under the command of Grand Vizier Kara İbrahim Pasha, who would eventually drive out the Habsburgs.^[5] Although the Turks had entrenched themselves in a favorable position, Karl V opened the fight with cannon fire. The center of the imperial troops was led by Maximilian Lorenz von Starhemberg, and after a rather short fight he knew that the Turkish troops were defeated. Vác fell to the imperial army the same day.

On 30 June the imperial main army entered the city of Pest, to which the Turks had set fire shortly before. After the army crossed the Danube at Vác, it began the siege of Buda, which was defended by approximately 7,000 Turks. The imperial army, consisting of 43,000 men, began the bombardment of Buda's fortress with 200 cannons on 14 July 1684, the anniversary of the beginning of the siege of Vienna. Field Marshal Graf Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg was assigned to conduct the siege.

On 19 July imperial forces took control of the lower part of the town of Buda. However, since too few troops were available to occupy it, Ernst Rüdiger ordered the houses in that part of the town burned down.

Drawing of the Siege of Buda in 1684

Throughout July and August the imperial army made several attempts to attack the fortress, but all were repelled by the Turkish defenders.

At the beginning of September, an imperial general reported that the number of soldiers fit for service had shrunk, and morale was low. On 11 September an imperial auxiliary corps reached Buda, providing new momentum to the campaign.

On 22 September a Turkish relief army arrived and immediately attacked the besieging forces. The imperial army managed to repel them but was unable to defeat them. The Turkish relief army then engaged imperial troops in repeated nuisance attacks which, coupled with losses caused by the Turkish city garrison, caused a plunge in morale. Ernst Rüdiger, who was severely wounded and facing sustained criticism from his army, had to be replaced. The final blow was a spell of poor weather conditions throughout October, and the decision was made to withdraw.

On 30 October the imperial army withdrew after a siege that had lasted 109 days. Several factors had caused the size of the allied force to shrink to about half its original size: battle losses, dysentery and a fever epidemic, poorly dug trenches and tactical errors in the siege. Capt. Paul Joseph Jakob von Starhemberg and the Christian allies after this failed enterprise had sustained losses of between 24,000^[3]—30,000 men.^[4] Ironically, the blame for the failure was laid on the man who had only led the army at the beginning of the siege: Ernst Ruediger von Starhemberg.

Second siege, 1686

Second Siege of Buda, 1686
Part of Great Turkish War
The Recapture of Buda Castle in 1686 by Gyula Benczúr
Date 1686 Location Buda, Ottoman Hungary Result Holy League victory, after 78 days of siege
Belligerents
Holy League	Ottoman Empire
Commanders and leaders
Charles V, Duke of Lorraine Louis William, Margrave of Baden-Baden Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg	Abdurrahman Abdi Arnavut † Grand Vizier Sarı Süleyman Paşa Pasha of Temeşvar Pasha of İstolni Belgrad Pasha of Osijek
Strength
65,000—100,000[3]	Garrison below 7,000 men inside Buda (including 3,000 Janissaries, 1,000 horses, 1,000 Jews and 2,000 inhabitants[6]
Casualties and losses
5,000 killed	3,000 killed 6,000 captured (including civilians)

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

In 1686, two years after the unsuccessful 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,^[3] including German, Hungarian, Croat, Dutch, English, Spanish, Czech, Italian, Catalan, 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".^[5]

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 143 years in Turkish possession.

Massacre of Jews and Muslims

After the conquest, the 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.^[7] As subjects of the Ottoman Empire, who enjoyed greater tolerance under the Ottomans compared to the Habsburgs,^[6] the Jews had fought side-by-side with the Turks^[8] and were considered their allies.^[6] After the conquest of the city, the Jewish community of Buda, which at its height had numbered 3,000 persons,^[9] was almost completely destroyed.^[6][10] Approximately half of the city's 1,000 Jews were massacred;^[11] hundreds of Jews and 6,000 Muslims were captured to be sold as slaves or held for ransom^[11][12] as a "punishment" for their loyalty to the Ottoman Turks, while the other half, a further several hundred Jews and 6,000 Muslims,^[11] were captured to be sold as slaves or held for ransom.^[13] The homes and properties of the Jews were looted and destroyed.^[13] The Reformation Hungarian Protestants advocated the complete removal of the Jewish population of Hungary.^[13] Most of the Jews remaining in Buda,^[10] as well as most of those in the rest of Hungary, left with the retreating Turks.^[10][14] The captured ones were sent to Vienna, Pozsony or Mikulov.^[6] 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.^[11]

The bloodiest events of the battle 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)."^[15]

The imperial troops buried their own dead and threw the dead bodies of the Turks and Jews into the Danube.^[8]

Consequences

The economic decline of the city during the Ottoman conquest characterized by the stagnation of population--the population of Buda was not larger in 1686 than it was two centuries earlier in the 15th century.^[16] The Ottomans allowed the Hungarian royal palace to fall into ruins.^[17] The amortized palace was later transformed into a gunpowder storage and magazine by the Ottomans,^[18] 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 over the next decades due to their fleeing to Habsburg-ruled Royal Hungary. Jewish and Gypsy immigrants became dominant during Ottoman rule.^[19] 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.

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.

References

1. ↑ A Military History of the Ottomans: From Osman to Atatürk, by Mesut Uyar, Edward J. Erickson, 2009, p.103
2. ↑ Hochedlinger, Michael (2003). Austria's Wars of Emergence: War, State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1683-1797. Pearson Education. p. 159. ISBN 9780582290846. 
3. 1 2 3 4 Young, William (2004). International Politics and Warfare in the Age of Louis XIV and Peter the Great: A Guide to the Historical Literature. iUniverse. p. 433. ISBN 9780595329922. 
4. 1 2 Banks, John (1742). The History of Francis-Eugene Prince of Savoy By an English Officer, who Served Under His Highness in the Last War with France. James Hodges, the British Library. pp. 11–12. 
5. 1 2 http://books.google.com.pk/books?id=3amnMPTPP5MC&pg=PR38&dq=battle+of+buda+1686&hl=en&sa=X&ei=m4efUO-QJcr7rAfC74D4CA&ved=0CEQQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=buda&f=false
6. 1 2 3 4 5 Urban Societies in East-Central Europe: 1500-1700, by Jaroslav Miller, 2008, p.89
7. ↑ Jewish Budapest: Memories, Rites, History, by Kinga Frojimovics, Géza Komoróczy, 1999, p.504-505
8. 1 2 The Dutch Intersection: The Jews and the Netherlands in Modern History, by Yosef Kaplan, 2008, p.214
9. ↑ The Myth of the Jewish Race, by Raphael Patai, Jennifer Patai, 1989, p.47
10. 1 2 3 A Travel Guide to Jewish Europe, Ben G. Frank, 2001, p.532
11. 1 2 3 4 The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation, by Jonathan Rose, 2008, p.268-270
12. ↑ Frommer's Budapest and the Best of Hungary, by Ryan James, 2010, p.174
13. 1 2 3 Masked Ball at the White Cross Café: the failure of Jewish assimilation, by Janet Elizabeth Kerekes, 2005, p.24-25
14. ↑ Christianity and the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry, by Moshe Y. Herczl, Charles Darwin, 1995, p.4-5
15. ↑ Jewish Budapest: Memories, Rites, History, by Kinga Frojimovics, Géza Komoróczy, 1999, p.505
16. ↑ András Gerő, János Poór (1997). Budapest: a history from its beginnings to 1998, Volume 86 van Atlantic studies on society in change , Volume 462 van East European monographs. Social Science Monographs. p. 3. ISBN 9780880333597. 
17. ↑ Andrew Wheatcroft (2010). ""royal+palace"+gunpowder+ottoman&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAmoVChMI5qSx1eCryAIVynEUCh2eiwNB#v=onepage&q=%22%22royal%20palace%22%20gunpowder%20ottoman&f=false The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe. Basic Books. p. 206. ISBN 9780465020812. 
18. ↑ Steve Fallon, Sally Schafer (2015). Lonely Planet Budapest. Lonely Planet. ISBN 9781743605059. 
19. ↑ Ga ́bor A ́goston, Bruce Alan Masters (2009). Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire Facts on File Library of World History Gale virtual reference library. Infobase Publishing. p. 96. ISBN 9781438110257.