Palla Ákos szerk.: Az Országos Orvostörténeti Könyvtár közleményei 24. (Budapest, 1962)

The deads of the battle of Mohács

In the two mass-graves no objects belonging to the dead were found. In about the center of the second grave another lump of coins was found, 7 silver groats from the years 1516, 1520, 1522, 1523. These too are fixing the date of the graves, though their having been found in the given circumstances, between the skeletons, precludes any doubt on this matter. Near the skeletons' neck and between the bones small, red hooks were found, very much like the modern ones, for fixing the shirtlike upper garment; in some instances even small bits of thread remained on the hooks. The fact that the skeletons lay around in the utmost disorder, that only at two instances did we find money on the soldiers, maybe their last pay received on the day before the battle, - as well as the small garmenthooks lead to the supposition that the corpses were already more or less decayed at the time of the burial. They surely were robbed much earlier; most of them were left in their shirts fastened by the above mentioned hooks. The corpses must have presented an horrible sight, those who had to bury them certainly handled them gingerly. This may be the explanation of the coins found near the warriors. We must now put the question: what did these two mass-graves reveal? Without any doubt both graves contain the remnants of soldiers of the Hungarian army in which, however, a great number of foreigners were fighting too, Bohemians, Poles, Germans and others. This is proved by the extreme disorder in the graves and the fact that the corpses had been looted. The remains are not those of soldiers buried the day after the battle but of decomposed corpses. These were gathered and interred at high speed without much caring for the proper rituals. The form and the position of these trenches suggests that they had been dug in the first instance for other purposes and served probably as gun-emplacements. On the day before the battle trenches were dug, or rather mounds were erected for the protection of the camp and eventually the dead were put into these. At present we still can make only suppositions.