Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)
The Medieval Sister Cities
and ordinary workers, played an important part. Other nationalities were the various minorities of the multi-national Hungarian state, and the Jews, who lived under a separate administration. There is also a certain amount of earlier information about the presence of Armenians, who, like the Jews, had a street of their own. The name Olasz utca (Italian Street) for the later Országház utca (Houses of Parliament Street) in fact survived to Turkish times, although the street itself had lost its Italian character by the end of the fourteenth century. In the same period Pest had become entirely Magyarized, but after 1500—as a result of its commercial prosperity—German immigrants, practically all of them rich merchants, settled there. Óbuda remained entirely Hungarian. Buda and Pest under the Turkish Occupation Around the beginning of the sixteenth century the powers of feudalism gathered force all over the country, incidentally threatening the development of the cities as well. In 1498, for instance, there was an attempt to pass a law forcing city burghers—among whom the Buda burghers were mentioned by name—to pay the same rent as the serf—a ninth—for vineyards and arable land situated on estates outside the city lands. The class struggle also sharpened within the cities; social discontent became marked as early as 1500. In 1514, the majority of the inhabitants of the city sympathized with the rebels in the peasant war led by György Dózsa, and again in 1525 there was a movement of revolt in Buda, when the artisans and working folk attacked the house of the Royal Deputy Treasurer Imre Szerencsés (Fortunatus), the Buda offices of the wealthy Augsburg Fugger Bank. Early in the following year they attacked the Czech Chancellor. The Government could only restore order by calling in the military. The defeat of the peasant uprising of 1514 and the subsequent reduction of the peasants to serfdom, depriving them of all freedom of movement, reacted unfavourably on the prosperity of the city burghers, who needed the labour provided by new immigrants. The growing intensity of the Turkish attacks—with the consequent burden of increased taxation and the basement of the currency by royal order in 1521—impeded economic progress. In 1526 the Turks destroyed the army of Louis II at Mohács, where the king himself lost his life. After the battle, one of the most disastrous defeats in Hungarian history, most of the court and the citizens fled the town, and the Turkish Sultan Suleiman occupied and set fire to two almost empty cities. In the following years, although the inhabitants returned after the Turks had left and the rebuilding of the city began—the internecine struggle for the throne hampered developments. The two kings elected respectively by different groups of the estates, the Transylvanian Prince John Szapolyai and the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Hapsburg, went to war in support of their claims. Buda was controlled by John at the end of 1526, occupied by Ferdinand in 1527, and reconquered by John with the help of the Turks in 1529. It was then that he expelled the German burghers who had not yet fled from Buda. In 1530 only the heroic defence of Buda by the Hungarian citizens of the town saved John from falling into the hands of the Austrians. The abortive siege of 1530 was followed by the fortification of Buda, which was so effective that until 1686 all attempts to capture it were in vain. As a token of his gratitude King John granted Buda a number of privileges in the 1530s: he added a lion holding a red flag to the ancient arms of the city depicting 22
