Hungary's Deathblow: Massacre At Mohács | Part 2

*Transcript is automatically generated any may contain errors*

It's late April, 1490, in the Hungarian capital of Buda, the city is in mourning.
At barely 40 years old, the raven king, Matthias Corvinus, is dead, victim of an overindulgent
lifestyle.
As the mourners shuffled through the red-bricked villas and cobbled streets, the atmosphere
of the city resembled more Florence or Milan than any central European city.
With sprawling palaces, stately universities and grand library, none could argue that Matthias
Corvinus had transformed Buda into a hub of sophistication and culture.
But as Shakespeare said, all that glitters is not gold.
Hungary was broke.
The dead king's council was a basket of vipers and the country's peasants were one tax increase
away from outright rebellion.
But it was outside the kingdom that was the real reason for concern.
The enormous Ottoman Empire that bordered Hungary had a brand new Sultan, and none knew
what to expect of him.
Dark times were on the horizon, and if the kingdom was to survive, it needed unity, a
strong ruler to bind everyone together.
Amidst the greedy nobles, the menacing Sultan, the wretched peasants and every king in Europe,
a question lingered, could a 17-year-old bastard steer Hungary through the impending storm?
Welcome back to the Anthology of Heroes podcast, the podcast sharing stories of heroism and
defiance from across the ages.
Anthology of Heroes is part of the Evergreen podcast network.
I'm your host, Elliot Gates, and this is part two, the conclusion into the downfall
of the medieval kingdom of Hungary.
In this episode, we're dropping into the middle of a very dire situation, the last
60 years of the kingdom's life when it was almost beyond saving.
So if you're just listening in to hear about the actual battle of Mulhatch, then go right
ahead.
But otherwise, I'd really recommend listening to part one first.
That will help get your head around what's happening in Europe, the key players, and
how Hungary got itself into such a difficult spot.
In part one, we skimmed over 300 or so years of Hungarian history.
Starting in the 13th century, we saw King Bela IV rebuild his kingdom after the devastating
Mongol invasion.
Over the next century, we saw Hungary flourish.
Under the watchful eyes of foreign-born kings, the country flexed its muscles as one of the
most powerful states in Europe.
The kingdom's strength was bolstered by its vast gold mines, securing its prominent position
on the European stage.
But by the mid-1400s, the Ottoman Empire had begun to creep into Europe.
Kingdoms crumbled before the Muslim army.
It seemed like nothing could stop them.
But then they met their match when they came up against a brilliant region of Hungary,
John Hunyadi.
Hunyadi was exactly what Hungary, hell, exactly what Europe needed at the time.
For decades, he pushed the Ottomans back, always outmanned and outgunned, which culminated
in his greatest victory, relieving the Siege of Belgrade in 1456.
After his death, his son, Matthias Corvinus, the so-called Raven King, carried on his
father's legacy.
While he did battle the Ottomans, his main focus was combating his eastern neighbour,
the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III.
Under Corvinus' rule, we saw the rise of his infamous Black Army, one of the continent's
first standing armies in almost a thousand years.
The king's obsession with learning and renaissance transformed Hungary into a cultural hotspot.
He built a vast library and invited scholars from across Europe to share knowledge and
foster innovation.
But his desires surpassed his means.
His heavy taxes had turned every class of society against another, and by the time of his death,
the kingdom was broke and drowning in debt.
Libraries and villas weren't cheap, nor were military campaigns or standing armies.
So now, as the king lay dead, his kingdom teeded on the brink of bankruptcy, with almost
nothing to fund its defence against external threats.
The nobles in particular seethed with discontent.
Prior to Corvinus, they'd enjoyed a long line of weak kings they could bully and manipulate.
John Hunyadi and his son, Matthias Corvinus, had bucked this trend.
They'd drained the swamp and forced the nobles to pay their share, well, probably a little
more than their fair share, to be honest.
And now that the old king was dead, they all probably breathed a sigh of relief.
The Raven King had flown the coop, and they were back in charge.
As soon as word got out of the king's passing, it was as if the country took a 180 degree
turn.
The first to denounce the dead king were the clergy, who labelled Matthias' interest
in classical literature as heretical, and condemned the pagan authors he admired as
sinful and wicked.
As that was happening, the nobles gathered in parliament, cracking their knuckles they
dusted off old tax ledgers and began meticulously picking apart the king's reforms.
Don't get me wrong, a few of these laws may have needed dialing back a bit, but these
guys went hell for leather.
In just 36 years, they passed more laws than in the previous 500 years combined.
First and foremost, the bastard kid had to go.
Corvinus had done all he could to ensure a stable transfer of power to his illegitimate
son, but the nobles weren't going to have it.
They'd endured two generations of Hunyadis and they weren't about to put up with a third.
Despite being their wealthiest landowner in Hungary due to his father's will, the 17-year-old
lad, John Corvin, was putty in the hands of these seasoned politicians.
Sweeping him away from state affairs, they gave him the meaningless title, King of Bosnia,
which later was downgraded to Lord of Croatia and Slavonia.
Like leeches, they drained him of every last coin, castle and title that his father had
left behind.
Deserted by what was left of his father's patron, John was cast aside.
The Hunyadi family that had dominated European politics for the last 90 years faded into
obscurity.
All the conquests, oaths and glory they'd secured, meaningless.
Wasting no time, the nobles found themselves a new king.
Vladislav II was a 34-year-old noble of Polish descent.
To the nobles, Vladislav was the perfect king, precisely because he would do as he was told.
When he was given a document or ledger that restricted his powers or reduced his lands,
he'd sign it.
Never protesting, never arguing, just muttering a monotonous, very well or okay.
Soon they nicknamed him Dobzilazlo, meaning very well lazlo or okay lazlo.
One historian summarised the king perfectly in two words, amiable, weakling.
Even looking at this guy's portrait, it just looks like he doesn't want to be there.
Curled hair, big mustache, orb in one hand, sceptre in the other, with his expression
on his face as if silently asking the painter, are we done, are you finished, I want to lie
down.
But there was one thing okay lazlo would not say okay to.
And that was the unwanted and frankly cringe-worthy advances of Matthias Corvinus' widow.
The ex-queen, Patrice, was about to find out that even he had his limits.
After the death of Corvinus, everyone just assumed Queen Patrice would head back to Italy.
I mean she had no children and the Hungarian people despised her.
Surely she wasn't going to be sticking around, right?
Well she did.
Perhaps remembering a flirtatious dance they'd shared two decades back, she pursued the new
king with fervour.
Thrusting her fated charms on him in a series of increasingly public affairs, she wouldn't
take no for an answer.
The king made it clear he was definitely not interested, but Patrice was insistent.
Leveraging her family's powerful string of alliances, she resorted to blackmail, threatening
to cut off funding for his kingdom if he refused to marry her.
Okay Lazlo's writings make his intentions very clear.
In perhaps the most strongly worded letter the mild-mannered king ever penned, he writes
to a friend quote, I declare to you that I have never desired nor do I desire to marry
Patrice, and that if I contract a marriage of form with her, I will always consider it
null.
Backed into a corner though, okay Lazlo was out of options.
If Patrice's family did cut him off, Hungary would be in even more trouble.
So he relented and married Patrice in a simple and very private ceremony.
The moment after, I do, was uttered, okay Lazlo hitched up his cloak and sprinted faster
than he'd ever run in his life, making a beeline for the chapel door.
He wanted everyone to know that the marriage was categorically, unequivocally not consummated.
Patrice in a sham marriage became the subject of pity and glances and muted laughter throughout
the courts of Europe.
The king and queen never saw each other, and while she bombarded him with letters addressed
to my husband, he rarely responded, and when he did his letters began with, to the queen.
Like Matthias' bastard son that she so disliked, Patrice faded into obscurity, far away from
the golden age that she and her husband had ushered in.
With the last remnants of the Hunyadis done away with, the nobles could finally get back
to what they did best, tax avoidance.
Actually, I should probably take a breath here.
I've spent most of these episodes ripping on the leading men in Matthias' kingdom,
and while it's true they were greedy, self-interested, and as you'll soon discover, petty, we do
have to acknowledge that Matthias left a very heavy burden for them.
Not just for them, either, the new king, the peasants, everyone, all of Hungary was in
a very tough spot now.
The country was two million ducats in debt, and no one felt it more than the peasants.
Corvinus had pushed the burden of taxation onto his nobles, and they'd pushed it down
onto the peasants.
Miserably unhappy, the peasantry were looking for an escape from their depressing lives.
Any escape.
So when a wandering preacher was sent by the Vatican to feel out attitudes for another
crusade, he found very receptive ears amongst them.
The peasantry answered his call with a resounding, yes, wherever you're going, whatever you're
doing, yes, just get me off this accursed land.
In just a few weeks, 40,000 men had been gathered for a crusade.
They received basic training, but they were pretty much a militia.
Recruiting was going really well, but when harvest time came around, the landlords demanded
the peasants return and pick their crops.
When they were refused, landlords sent bruises around to harass their wives and children.
But still, they refused to return.
Under pressure from the nobles, the archbishop who had originally called for the crusade
ordered the 40,000 men to stand down and return home, but they were well past that.
A man named, this is a tough Hungarian name, Gyorgy Dosa stepped up to lead them, and from
then on it was no longer a crusade, it was a class war.
Decades of overbearing taxation and eroded civil rights had finally boiled over.
Central Hungary went up in flames as the peasant armies slaughtered landlords, ransacked manor
houses, burned loan ledgers and crucified bishops.
No mercy was shown even to women and children, anyone wealthier than them met a gruesome
end.
Though, they had some initial victories, their downfall came swiftly once, okay, Laszlo's
heavy cavalry arrived.
Gyorgy Dosa, the leader, was captured and forced to sit on a red-hot iron throne with
a molten crown atop his head.
Mocking his ambitions to be king, the nobles held a kind of twisted coronation ceremony.
As Dozier's skin seared on the throne, his subjects, the rebellion's leaders, were forced
to peel off strips of his charred flesh and eat them.
The contrast between the overflowing libraries of Matthias Corvinus and the forced consumption
of human flesh is all you needed to know to realise times had changed.
The king lives in such poverty that whenever he wants to make a present to a throne delegation,
he has to borrow money.
This was how a shocked Venetian ambassador described the Hungarian court at the start
of the 1500s.
Dosa was appalled to see that once he opened the king's pantry, there was no food in there.
Others made mention that his clothes were shabby and cheaply made.
The Raven King's Great Library was pillaged on the daily, everyone was just snatching
books whenever they could, to sell or even just to keep as a memento, as if they sensed
that the golden age that had created these was long behind them.
The nobles now paid no tax, as in none at all, meanwhile the peasants were ground into
the dust.
As collective punishment for their rebellion, draconian methods to repress them were enshrined
in laws that wouldn't be repealed until 1858.
Now peasants couldn't hunt, peasants couldn't become judges, peasants couldn't testify
against nobles, peasants couldn't leave their land without asking their lord, and
any descendant of a peasant was tied to the plot of land his family owned, forever.
The Black Army, once Europe's prime fighting force had dwindled to a few companies holding
a couple of forts, a far cry from their former glory there was no money to keep them anymore.
In 1516, Ok Laszlo died, he was 60 years old and ruled hungry for 26 years.
During those years he not only failed to match the accomplishments of Matthias Corvinus and
his father, but he'd also sped up the downfall of the realm.
Whilst true to say he was left a bloated indebted kingdom by Corvinus, without a doubt he made
it worse.
Too spineless to stand up to his nobles, he had helped dismantle almost all the reforms
that made Hungary the power that it was.
In fact the only reason that the kingdom was still standing at all was because the Ottomans
were having so many troubles back home.
When the dust settled, a new man sat on the gilded Ottoman throne.
Unfortunately for Hungary, he was to be one of the best there ever was.
Right now he was Suleiman, just Suleiman, but history would later remember him as Suleiman
the Magnificent.
Ottoman succession was an absolute minefield.
A sultan usually had many wives, therefore had many sons.
Once he died it was just a free-for-all as to who would succeed him.
But Suleiman's rise to power had been relatively peaceful.
As the only son of his father, there was not really anyone to contest it.
Still, that didn't exactly mean everything was clear cut.
As the gangly, beardless, 25 year old sat on the throne, his subjects looked on cautiously.
No one really knew what to expect from their new sultan.
He was known to be patient and calm, but what did that mean for the Empire?
He'd only governed the province or two, but he was the great grandson of Mehmet the Conqueror.
When understood he had big shoes to fill, bloodline was one thing, but legitimacy?
That came from conquests.
To be loved like his great grandfather was, he needed glory, he needed triumph.
It was no secret that the Kingdom of Hungary was teetering, but Suleiman was cautious by
nature.
Over the centuries Hungary had repeatedly repelled Ottoman invasions, earning its reputation
as the bulwark of Christianity, the great kingdom had even rebuffed Mehmet the Conqueror.
Suleiman had no military achievements to fall back on.
If he invaded Hungary and didn't take it, he'd probably lose his head once he returned
home.
In 1515, Ok Laszlo's son, Louis II became the new King of Hungary after marrying Mary
of Austria.
The teenage king was nothing special, I mean the kid's dad was a guy called Ok Laszlo,
how much can you expect from the son?
Like the groom, the marriage ceremony was also nothing special, but it set off warning
bells at Suleiman's court.
Mary was a Habsburg.
She was a member of the dominant family of Central Europe and the rulers of the Holy
Roman Empire.
Matthias Corvinus had spent most of his reign quarrelling with his Habsburg neighbour, so
he had little time for any serious invasions into Ottoman lands, but with this marriage
the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary were bearing the hatchet.
If these two powers linked up and marched east, it had the potential to wind back the
clock.
A century of progress could be undone if the Ottomans were pushed out of Europe.
Suleiman had to act.
It was time to step into his destiny and accomplish what his ancestors never could.
Hungary had to fall.
A man of peaceful nature who would not turn against the Christians.
This was how Sultan Suleiman was described to the new King of Hungary, Louis II.
And when Suleiman's envoys arrived in the courts, the words seemed to ring true.
The envoys were there to reaffirm a peace treaty between the Ottomans and the Hungarians.
The Hungarian court interpreted this to mean the Sultan was scared of them.
And so King Louis II, goaded on by his nobles, made two huge blunders that collectively
signed the death warrant for his kingdom.
First he had the Sultan's envoys imprisoned.
His cocky nobles lived in this fantasy land where Hungary to them was this invincible,
unassailable world power.
So in response to the envoys' peace offer, they coached the boy king, quote,
No king of Hungary had ever made peace with the Turks, despite Matthias Corvinus literally
doing that.
The envoys were beheaded and their heads set back to the Sultan.
After they were done committing diplomatic sapuku, they went after the foreigners within
their kingdom.
Specifically, they targeted the Habsburgs, who they believed had too much influence in
their realm.
Despite the fact that their new queen was a Habsburg, the nobles just plain didn't
like them.
A man called Jacob Fuga was a Habsburg patron who leased a bunch of copper mines out in
the countryside.
The nobles decided that Fuga wasn't paying enough to lease a mine, so they cut his lease.
The miners out of work, rioted, and Fuga was humiliated.
But so what, right?
One pissed off mining magnet, who cares?
Well, Jacob Fuga was known by another name, Jacob the Rich.
And boy did he live up to that name.
Jacob was one of the richest people to ever exist.
He personally owned 2% of the entirety of Europe's wealth.
Europe and his money left Hungary high and dry, just when the nobles needed more loans.
The utter lack of any forward thinking by these nobles is just fascinating.
Hindsight is of course 2020, but I mean how could none of them see where this was heading?
The most likely answer is the Pope.
The Pope had the habit of promising crusades, money, men, he'd say whatever he had to
to whoever he could, just to get the ball rolling.
The money will come later, sure, just go rally the troops.
Hunyadi or Corvinus never put much word into anything the papacy promised, but Louis II
did.
Showing his naivety, he took these promises at face value.
But Pope Clement VII was more focused on the Protestant uprising throughout Europe.
The Ottomans were just an afterthought for him.
And so when Suleiman set off marching in 1521, it was the perfect storm for Hungary, a storm
that they'd summoned.
Suleiman's objective was a formidable gateway to the Balkans, the fortress of Belgrade.
Belgrade was where John Hunyadi transformed from man to legend, as he outfoxed Suleiman's
great-grandfather 70 years ago.
With 100,000 men carrying months of provisions, Suleiman was not about to make the same mistakes
his great-grandfather had.
The sultans marched towards the fortress was a bit of a mess.
River crossings and disobedient subordinates showed just how new Suleiman was to military
campaigns.
Once they'd arrived, though, it was a foregone conclusion.
Belgrade was virtually deserted.
Apart from a skeleton crew, it was barely garrisoned.
Louis II hadn't paid the guards, so they left.
With barely a shove, the sultan pushed down the rotten door to the dying kingdom of Hungary.
The most important fortress in the kingdom, and one of the most important in all of Europe,
was gone.
Once the news of this got out, Europe was reeling.
How could this happen?
Who was to blame?
But despite the outcry, there was no counterattack, nothing was done.
And there was time for one, because Suleiman pulled back.
After taking Belgrade, he retreated and gave the Hungarians five years to prepare.
And do you know what they did with those five years?
Nothing.
Scattering, squabbling, and infighting, nobles started more civil wars and fractured the
kingdom even further.
As the last few grains of sand in the hourglass counted down the final days for the kingdom,
the nobles spent their energy arguing over land grants and planning how to evict the
realm's Jews.
As everything was falling apart, something happened that I thought was quite noble.
John Corvin, Corvinus' bastard son who is now a minor lord with nothing but a villager
to his name, was petitioned by an Ottoman raiding party to let them pass into Venetian
lands.
Do you know what he said?
No.
There was no benefit to him denying them.
In fact, he was worse off for doing so.
But I like to think that maybe this was the last little shard of greatness of the Hunyadis.
Not long after, he died, putting an end to the family that had once been the defenders
of Europe's flank.
Perhaps this was a blessing that he wasn't around to see what was about to happen to
the country his father and grandfather had built.
In April 1526, Sultan Suleiman set out from Constantinople at the head of 80,000 soldiers.
Gone was the nervous, beardless adolescent that had marched on Belgrade five years ago.
The must-ashed 32-year-old sat atop a stallion with an air of confidence.
He was not quite Suleiman the Magnificent yet, but the lanky young Sultan had a number
of victories under his belt, just recently having wrestled away the island of Rhodes
from the Crusaders.
Suleiman knew the internal strife that Hungary was facing, but he still came prepared for
a long campaign.
His ancestors had underestimated the Hungarians, and it had almost cost him their throne.
As the Janusry Ban boomed behind him and the Mullahs blessed his entourage, he must have
wondered when and if he would return.
King Louis II's courtroom was in panic.
The moment the kingdom had been dreading for the past century was upon them.
Finally, the nobles pulled their fingers out and dug deep.
If the kingdom fell, who knew what would happen to their extensive farming estates?
Imagine if the Sultan forced them to pay taxes.
The terrified boy king sent messages all across Europe, and he didn't mince words.
Writing to the King of England, he told him, quote,
If help from your majesty does not arrive soon, my kingdom is lost.
He begged support from the Holy Roman Empire, from the Germans, even from the Shah in Persia.
But no one was listening.
A few Protestant rulers even murmured that if Hungary was to fall, it would be a just
punishment from God for their support of the Catholic Church.
They scrambled to gather an army, but who would lead it?
The nobles refused to rally behind any general they'd fought against in a civil war, and
the king was a joke, no one could expect anything of him.
They all agreed there was only one man for the job.
Pal Tamori was an archbishop turned warlord, who had been doing his very best to parry
Ottoman raids over the last few years.
Like John Hunyadi reincarnated, he worked independently of the Crown.
He had regarricent old forts, drilled his troops and organised raids into Ottoman territories.
Anything he could do to hold back the tide.
Slowly, the army of Hungary made its way down from Buda to the flat plains of Mohatch.
Fitting with his character, King Louis II didn't even want to go.
He kept a low profile at the capital, hoping his nobles would just forget about him.
But they decided that no matter how bad of a king he was, he was still the king, and
dragged a melancholy adolescent along with him.
At the field of Mohatch, in southern Hungary, the king's army began to assemble.
When the king arrived, it was a small force that greeted him, but there were three contingencies
marching to augment the forces.
There's one particularly interesting feature of the Hungarian army at this time, there weren't
too many infantry.
Infantry, you know, foot soldiers, were a vital part of an army, and were usually men
of the lower classes, the peasants.
Have you ever heard the saying, what if they threw a war and nobody came?
That's kinda what happened here.
Produced to chattel by their landlords, the peasants had absolutely no desire to serve
them in battle.
Many would have welcomed the death of their masters.
After decades of oppression, wouldn't you?
For this battle, I've scrounged up several Turkish, Hungarian and German sources.
These quotes are a real mixed bag, they give us a lot of different perspectives.
Some are fantastical, some are xenophobic, and some are probably baseless, but collectively
they paint a vivid picture of what this battle would have looked like.
A few were a little difficult to understand, so I've swapped out a word here or there.
I'll say quote before I reference each one.
As the Turks marched towards the Mohac Plain, Hungarians were still without a solid plan.
Were they staying, going, forming up, flanking?
Little King Louis's role was so redundant that his War Council argued in front of him
whether he should even go into battle, or should they just dress up a small man in his
armour and tell everyone it was him, lest the real king do something stupid like panic
the troops.
Three different Hungarian contingents were at that moment marching to meet them.
The king's message to them demonstrates that he understood the urgency of their predicament,
quote.
The enemy is covering the country in flames and several places before our eyes.
We are just waiting for you, and as soon as you arrive with God's help, we will meet
right away.
So hurry as quickly as possible.
Quick, quick, quick.
Pal Tamori, the battling bishop, was in overall command.
He had the most combat experience and had fought the Ottomans on numerous occasions.
But those were little border skirmishes, nothing like this.
Nobles' bickered, generals' exasperated, and bishops rushed through hasty communions
for the foot soldiers.
As holy water splashed on the faces of men, the camp went into overdrive as the boomy,
shrill sound of the Janissary Band cut across the plains.
They were here.
Everyone froze, as they watched 80,000 Turkish troops march through the shallow river onto
the plains of Mohac.
The Turkish sources seeing the Hungarians formed up described it as, quote, covering
the face of the earth an unfortunate army stood in battle order, which was dark and
black, like a cloud of punishment.
The sultan's eyes surveyed the battlefield.
Tamori had picked it well.
The troops were squashed up onto the more narrow side of the plains so they couldn't
make use of their superior numbers.
Even so, the sultan's numerical advantage was strong, at least two, possibly three to
one.
Suleiman was waiting for the Hungarians to pull back.
He was fully prepared for a siege, in fact he expected it.
Everyone expected this actually, because so far none of the three contingents had arrived
to reinforce the army.
Two, three, four days max, they would be here and the army would swell in size.
But Tamori, noticing the slow trickle of troops and cannons crossing the river, made a fatal
decision.
A decision that armchair historians still mull over 500 years later.
The Hungarian army was mostly made up of light cavalry, well-trained, manoeuvrable units
called Hussars.
Tamori decided that their best shot of victory was using their speed to break the Ottomans
before they were fully deployed.
In his mind, the advantage they would gain for waiting for the other armies would be
worthless if the Ottomans managed to deploy all their men.
Quote, Pal Tamori quickly hurried to the king with his companions and warned them not to
postpone the battle in any way, quoting Tamori speaking to the king now.
The danger is less now than if they have to face the whole army the next day.
There is no doubt that they will win.
At these words, the king immediately blew the horns, and together, with the sound of
trombone and the beating of the drums, a cry or rather a song rose from our lips.
They called the name of Jesus, our saviour.
The Sultan must have looked quizzically at his generals, the Hungarians were advancing.
He was so sure they were just retreat, he may have even second guessed his whole plan.
Did the Hungarians know something he didn't?
By now it was 3pm in the afternoon, the Hungarian troops had been standing in the baking sun
for 9 hours.
But Tamori had given the order, reluctantly the nobles squared up and prepared the 20
year old king, quote.
They finally put the helmet on the king's head, and at that moment, a deathly pallor
spread over his face, as if he had sensed his future doom in advance.
Fearlessly, Tamori's raiders were first out of the gate, they, quote, rushed like a dark
cloud or a lightning bolt advancing at the centre of the area.
The speed of this charge caught the Ottomans off guard.
As Tamori predicted the river crossing was slowing them down, Tamori's charges bowled
through the front lines, killing many.
If they could break them, their route back across the river would be a bloodbath.
But King Louis' central contingent was not having the same luck, quote, himself, meaning
the king, with his 100,000 devil loving army rushed straight at Sultan Suleiman's central
army like an iron mountain, the pagans came all around and rushed the centre, quoting
another Muslim source now.
From the army of Infidel's, three drunken men of Ebrahim's height in armour, with shining
spears in their hands broke through the ranks in front of them.
A zigzagging lightning used to split the clouds, and it came in a frightening way before the
Sultan.
However, the brave lion-catching warriors who were around him were waiting for a fight.
Wounding the legs of their reckless horses tired of life, they pushed the towering ones
to the ground and cut them to pieces with their swords.
As the king and his bodyguards lost momentum, the Ottoman secret weapons emerged from the
mud of the riverbed like enormous crocodiles.
The cast iron cannons were heaved from their casings and loaded up onto the side of the
battle, quote.
When the cannon battery came near, the brave men with rifles sent a cloud of smoke into
the sky and scattered the rifle balls as if hail had fallen.
The thunderous sounds of the cannons killing like lightning spread terror across the face
of the earth.
In this hellscape of smoke and noise, the Hungarians began to rout, quote.
Many took to running on that side, I think they were terrified by the cannonballs which
the enemy had just begun to engage.
Although the king's army was greatly confused and put him to flight, they still fought for
a long time afterwards, not on the wide plain anymore, but in front of the cannons which
were so close that they were no more than a step.
At last, however, not only fear but also smoke covered everything and obstructed the vision.
In this desperate moment, a Muslim source gives us an account of Paltamari who tried
to do the impossible and hold back the tide, quote.
Like cast iron, the more the battle struck him the more he steeped himself in it and
drew strength from it.
Like a viper or an elephant, he held his own against the claws of combat or the stones
cast in battle.
Covered with wounds like a mad dog he recovered himself.
When he rushed into the attack, impetus as the Nile, he added screams like the trumpeting
of elephants when tigers and lions flee before them, but it still wasn't enough.
The Hungarians had lost the planes, it was all over.
Running from the noise and death, the Hungarian army stampeded down the side of the valley.
Somewhere in the smoky mist they passed the frantic Paltamari who was grabbing men as they
ran past trying in vain to stop the rout.
He was never seen again.
At the bottom of the valley there were a bunch of fortified war wagons which could be used
as a last resort to hold out from.
A small group of elite German Lanknests set their rifles between the overturned carts
hoping to hold the ground and buy time for the routing army to reorganize.
One of them says what happens next, quote.
Everyone ran to the wagon camp which was not occupied and the Hungarians opened it and
tore it to pieces.
If the camp had remained intact we could have protected ourselves in it, the enemy could
not have harmed us.
But the many Hungarian villains thought neither of loyalty nor friendship, only of their ugly
escape.
Some even threw their belongings out of the carts to make it easier to escape and many
threw away their armor.
With the carts ransacked there was no hope of defence, quote.
And the warriors of the faith took the Christians to task and slaughtered so many Christians
up to their wagon forts that it is impossible to count.
And the king of Hungary having disappeared without a trace, it was impossible to know
what happened to him.
That Ottoman soldier who wrote that didn't know what happened to King Louis, but we do.
As night fell the defeated soldiers fled in any direction they could, whatever got them
away from the Mohatch massacre fasteth, quote.
A large group of fleeing Hungarians lost their way in the darkness of the night and rushing
towards the river they lost their horses together in the swamp.
Somewhere in the mass of panicked desperate people was a 20 year old king of Hungary, lost
or maybe abandoned by his personal guards who was utterly defenceless.
With the Ottomans fast approaching the boy king spurred his horse into the thick soupy
swamp.
Shoulder to shoulder with soldiers swimming for their lives his horse got nervous and
bucked him off.
In the chaos no one saw or maybe no one cared enough to pull him free.
His heavy gilded armor sunk him to the bottom of the swamp where he drowned.
A little over 90 minutes.
That was how long it took to undo the kingdom of Hungary.
According to a Hungarian bishop who survived the death toll was seven bishops who acted
as sergeants, 28 lords, 500 nobles, 4,000 cavalry, 10,000 foot soldiers, 5,000 wagons,
500 muskets, all 85 cannons, 200 ships and 15,000 horses.
The Ottomans lost less than 2,000 men.
It's such a weird thing as soon as the battle was over the sultan actually hung back a bit.
Almost like he thought to himself, wait, that was it?
That was hungry?
That can't be it.
The invincible kingdom that for a century had thwarted their plans for expansion was
no more.
Suleiman the skinny had become Suleiman the Magnificent.
He had vanquished the eternal enemy and smashed through the shield of Europe.
He had cemented his place not just in Ottoman history but world history.
He arrived soon at the Hungarian capital, Buda, where he was welcomed by leaders of the Jewish
community.
The Jews were the most senior officials round.
The entire place was a ghost town, everyone else had just left.
The sultan wandered through Matisse's empty palace with a sense of awe.
A Turkish historian writes quote, the sound of trumpets and the whistling of flying arrows
were replaced by the song of the flute, the sweet sound of the violin and the harp.
Suleiman, an obsessive reader would have taken great interest in the Raven King's library
or what was left of it.
Many of the beautiful books that Matisse had painstakingly collected had already been
torn apart for their silver bindings.
Suleiman's court historian tells us quote, from the beautiful palace of the evil king
he collected the valuable booty as the products of his victory.
Suleiman was so taken by Matisse's palace that he told an advisor he wished he could
have taken the whole thing home, but instead he took what he could.
Two enormous bronze candelabras were hauled back to Istanbul and set next to the main
Mirab in the Ayasofya Mosque, where they still remain to this day.
Three statues of Greek gods and goddesses were removed and set up in the old Roman
hippodrome in Istanbul.
Suleiman must have been particularly impressed with these.
As a strict Muslim he would have known these were idols and their presence in the Muslim
city caused quite a stir.
But most important of all, the greatest treasury could capture were the two enormous Ottoman
bombard cannons.
John Hunyadi had captured them from Suleiman's great grandfather Mehmet the Conqueror in
the golden era of Hungary that had long since passed.
In the subsequent years Hungary was fractured into three provinces.
The western portion was claimed by the Holy Roman Empire, the central portion was claimed
by a Hungarian noble and the eastern portion was annexed into the Ottoman Empire.
With Hungary gone the Habsburg Empire became the new buffer state of Europe.
As future wars raged between the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire, the now empty
Bibliotheca Corviana fell into disrepair and was eventually pulled down.
Likewise, the Raven King's gilded palace was torn apart and his university closed.
Just 50 years after Mohatch it was as if his enlightened rule had never happened at all.
In 1699 the Treaty of Karlowitz marked the end of Ottoman expansion, beginning a gradual
decline in their territory.
Under the treaty most of the Hungarian lands were returned, but to their new overlords,
the Habsburgs.
Under the thumb of Europe's most powerful family, ethnic Hungarians looked back to the
time of Hunyadi and Corvinus with rose-tinted glasses.
The Raven King's library particularly was raised up to, well, literally mythical levels.
It had 10,000 manuscripts, no 20,000, even numbers as high as 50,000 were thrown around
which was probably more books that were in Europe at the time.
By the 1700s the volumes which had once rested in the library were scattered all throughout
Europe.
Over time a book here or a crate of books there were located in a damp basement in some
non-descript town and all discoveries, great or small, saw huge excitement from ethnic Hungarians
as a kind of harbinger for a new golden age for them.
Of course this wasn't the case.
In summary, this was the state of affairs for the next 200 years.
Hungary was just another parcel of land, one little jigsaw piece in the Habsburg Empire.
This changed in the late 1800s when the Habsburg Empire began to falter.
The Habsburgs, desperate to hold on to Hungary, compromised.
They released Hungary as a fully fledged sovereign nation, something it had been since the Battle
of Mohatch.
A constitution was implemented and parliament was re-established, but this was short-lived
In World War I Hungary sided with the Italians and the Germans who lost the war.
And the Allies, Great Britain, Russia, France and all that, dictated the terms.
Hungary would keep its independence, but it would lose 72% of its territory, its sea access,
five of its biggest cities and all of its precious metal mines.
By the time the Inca dried over 3 million ethnic Hungarians found themselves outside
the boundaries of Hungary.
And that, more or less, is all she wrote.
If you look at a map of Hungary now, those are the borders you see.
A small landlocked country in central Europe with a trail of toppled dominoes that leads
back to a battle that lasted an hour and a half, 500 years ago.
Truly, as they say, more was lost at Mohatch.
Today I'll take us out with an extract of a 1950s novel written by a Hungarian writer
named Gez Ottlich.
In his book, School at the Frontier, he sheds a bit of light on the Hungarian Sarky and
the unique relationship they have with battles, but more specifically defeats.
Quote,
The 400th anniversary of the Battle of Mohatch was approaching.
It seems a remarkable thing to celebrate a defeat.
Yet the mighty Ottoman Empire, which could have celebrated its victory, no longer exists.
All traces of the Mongols have vanished, and indeed, almost in front of our very eyes,
have those of the tenacious Habsburg Empire.
We have therefore got used to celebrating our own great lost battles, which we've survived.
Perhaps we've also got used to regarding defeat as something exciting, made of more
solid material and more important than victory.
At any rate, we regard it as our true possession.
This has been Anthology of Heroes, thanks for tuning in.
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Oh also, I mentioned earlier about my examination of Corvinus' books.
I actually found out that these books were in London through the virtual Corviana Biblioteca.
The Great Library may be lost, but the internet has resurrected it.
The site, which is free to access, has the locations of the 150 or so books that still
exist today.
I've been lucky enough to handle and examine two of them.
It's an incredibly surreal feeling holding these ancient texts in your hand after reading
so much about the man who commissioned them.
I didn't really know what to expect exactly, the book was a Latin translation of the works
of Pliny the Younger, a Roman statesman from the late Republic.
As I delicately peeled back the cover of the 500-year-old book, the title page was full
of scrawlings and notes of people who had owned the book, dating back to the 1600s.
Some were written in old English, one was French, and one was too faded to see.
As I turned the first page, what I saw took my breath away.
I was expecting a gilded title page, but instead, faded as it was, was the unmistakable side
portrait of the Raven King.
Tucked away in a dark corner of the British Library's manuscript section with this forgotten
figure of history, once one of the most recognisable faces in all of Europe, I actually used a
restored version of this portrait for the cover art in episode one of this series.
As I can't read Latin, I couldn't read the book itself, but I noticed all the little
corrections in the margin and I couldn't help but imagine a scribe rushing through the translation.
First King Matthias Corvinus was on his back to get the book over to him by the end of
the week.
But anyway, I digress.
If anyone's listening from New York, there are five of the Raven King's books hidden
away somewhere in New York City.
If you managed to track them down, let me know what they're like.
The site is an absolute treasure trove of information on the Raven King, a real labour
of love.
They've scanned a ton of the surviving books, detailed the binding process, and uploaded
sketches and pictures of what the library may have looked like.
If you're interested, check it out, these sites only stay up as long as people keep
looking at them.
The address is Corvina.hu, that's C-O-R-V-I-N-A.hu, I'll put the link on our website.
Thanks again for listening guys, this one has been a fun one to learn about.
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I'd like to once again thank our very generous patrons, honestly all those backing tracks
and sound effects you hear in the background, that's thanks to you guys who pay for my
license to the sound bank, really genuinely can't thank you guys enough.
Claudia, Tom, Caleb, Malcolm, Alex, Seth, Angus, Phil, Lisa, Jim, and Alan.
Great job on that voice over Alan for poor old King Louis.
Thanks a lot guys, catch you on the next one.