The spring rains that are characteristic of south-eastern Europe and the Balkans were particularly heavy that year, causing flooding in Bulgaria and rendering parts of the route used by the army barely passable. Suleiman launched his campaign on and faced numerous obstacles from the onset. Suleiman acted as the commander-in-chief (as well as personally leading his force), and in April he appointed his Grand Vizier (the highest Ottoman minister), a former Greek slave called Ibrahim Pasha, as Serasker, a commander with powers to give orders in the sultan's name. As well as numerous units of Sipahi, the elite mounted force of the Ottoman cavalry, and thousands of janissaries, the Ottoman army incorporated a contingent of Moldavia and the Serbs. There is some tendency by later, 18th-century European historians to exaggerate these figures to overstate the bravery of the outnumbered defenders of Vienna. Estimates of Suleiman's army vary widely from 120,000 to more than 300,000 men mentioned by various chroniclers. In the spring of 1529, Suleiman mustered a great army in Ottoman Bulgaria, with the aim of securing control over all of Hungary and reducing the threat posed at his new borders by Ferdinand I and the Holy Roman Empire. Ferdinand set out to enforce his claim on Hungary and captured Buda in 1527, only to relinquish his hold on it in 1529 when an Ottoman counter-attack stripped Ferdinand of all his territorial gains. Thus Hungary became divided into Royal Hungary and Ottoman Hungary up until 1700.įollowing the Diet of Pozsony (modern Bratislava) on 26 October, Ferdinand was declared King of Royal Hungary due to his marriage to Louis' sister and his own sister being the widow of Louis, who perished at Mohács. Ferdinand won recognition only in western Hungary while a noble called John Zápolya, from a power-base in Transylvania, challenged him for the crown and was recognised as king by Suleiman in return for accepting vassal status within the Ottoman Empire. The Archduke of Austria, Ferdinand I of Habsburg, who was the brother of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, claimed the vacant Hungarian throne in right of his wife, Anna of Bohemia and Hungary, sister to the childless (and thus heirless) Louis. In August 1526, Sultan Suleiman I decisively defeated the forces of King Louis II of Hungary at the Battle of Mohács, paving the way for the Ottomans to gain control of south-eastern Hungary Louis was killed. Main article in Battle of Mohács and Campaign of Ferdinand I Other scholars theorise that the suppression of Hungary simply marked the prologue to a later, premeditated invasion of Europe. The decision to attack Vienna after such a long interval in Suleiman's European campaign is viewed as an opportunistic manoeuvre after his decisive victory in Hungary. There is speculation by some historians that Suleiman's main objective in 1529 was actually to assert Ottoman control over the whole of Hungary, the western part of which (known as Royal Hungary) was under Habsburg control. According to Toynbee, "The failure of the first brought to a standstill the tide of Ottoman conquest which had been flooding up the Danube Valley for a century past." The Ottoman Empire had previously annexed Central Hungary and established a vassal state in Transylvania in the wake of the Battle of Mohács. The inability of the Ottomans to capture Vienna in 1529 turned the tide against almost a century of conquest throughout eastern and central Europe. Thereafter, 150 years of bitter military tension and reciprocal attacks ensued, culminating in the Battle of Vienna of 1683, which marked the start of the 15-year long Great Turkish War. The siege signalled the pinnacle of the Ottoman Empire's power and the maximum extent of Ottoman expansion in central Europe. The Siege of Vienna in 1529 was the first attempt by the Ottoman Empire, led by Suleiman the Magnificent, to capture the city of Vienna, Austria.
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