The War That Changed the Destiny of Central Europe: Mohacs Before, after and its echo in Castille

Abstract

The political balance started to change in Central Europe after the armies of Louis II had been defeated by the forces led by Sultan Suleiman the Maginificent in Mohâcs in 1526. This defeat directly affected Charles. V, -Spanish King and the Habsburg Emperor-, who reigned on the other side of the continental Europe, and showed that thence he would have to work in a more serious collaboration with his own brother Ferdinand I, who stood as a guard on the Eastern borders of the empire. The news of the defeat that the Hungarians suffered soon reached the Castillian territories and here caused an echo which had never been seen before. When the news arrived Charles V, who was on honeymoon in Granada, started a many-sided and extended process of information and informed all the religious and political units in the kingdom, likewise in parallel with this he organized the issue of collecting the money conserved in churhes and monastries and sending it to this region to be used in the defense "Against the Turk". When the destiantions of these documents that are conserved in the Archivo General de Simancas and in which the Emperor emphasizes the anxiousness of the situation are taken into consideration, it is observed that they are extended to a very large area. The fact that the Spaniards, -who so far had openly refused to cooperate in the movement of defense in the cities which were within the borders of the Empire but far away from Castille,- united and cooperated against the Turkish menace that emerged in the remote territories belonging to the Empire is the best example of how the effects a battle won by the Ottomans in the Modern Age reach the other side of the Mediterranean.