Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)

The Medieval Sister Cities

a fortress with three towers, and granted the whole citizen population of Buda the status of nobility. The king and his councillors encouraged the development of Buda by other measures as well; in 1531 he restored freedom of movement to the peasants, an act which benefited the city, although of course his writ only ran in the part of the country under his control.

In 1540 King John died, and left an infant son, John Sigismund, only a few weeks old. Although his supporters elected the infant to the throne, Ferdinand regarded the time as ripe for the reconquest of Buda. In the autumn of 1540 he sent the Austrian General Fels to take the city. Fels succeeded in occupying Pest, but not Buda. In the spring of the following year, 1541, the Austrian General Roggendorf appeared before the walls of Buda with an even larger army. The councillors of the infant king turned for help to the Turks. But at the same time the Hungarian citizens of Buda, those who had fought so valiantly in the earlier sieges, now preferred to surrender the city to the Austrians. Péter Pálczán, the hero of the 1530 siege, who was then the Deputy Mayor of Buda, himself led the Germans in through the side-gate next to the Church of Our Lady, but the guard saw them and managed to hold them back until, afterwards, relieving Turkish troops arrived and Roggendorf’s army was destroyed. This was followed by the Turkish occupation of Buda. While the infant king and the state councillors were visiting Sultan Suleiman in his Óbuda encampment, Turkish soldiers on “sight-seeing” in the city streets, at a given signal occupied the bastions and the city. Suleiman dispatched the king and the royal court to Transylvania and placed a pasha in command of Buda. Thus began the Turkish occupation of Buda, which lasted 145 years.

In the first years the Turks maintained the City Council in place, leaving it its authority. In Buda, Pest and Óbuda the former city authorities functioned as usual, and issued decrees, confirmed by the medieval seals of the cities. In Buda, for instance, in the 1540s, one István Tétémi was mayor whose father had been mayor at the beginning of the century, and he himself had been a member of the Buda Council before 1541 and belonged to one of the city’s patrician families. True, his position as mayor was marred by the fact that he had become a Turkish spahi. But slowly the Hungarian population of the city left, as more and more Turks moved in and settled into the increasingly empty houses. The place of the emigrating Hungarians was taken by new settlers from the Balkans, Orthodox Serbs for the most part, but also Catholic Bosnians and Dalmatians, as well as a number of Jews. Most of the churches were transformed into mosques, but until the end of the sixteenth century the former parish church of the Hungarians, the Mary Magdalene Church in the Castle, remained in Christian hands. The Catholics and Protestants reached an amicable understanding and used it together. It was only after the sieges at the end of the sixteenth century that this church was also transformed into a mosque. After about 1630 there are no records concerning Hungarian inhabitants of Buda. They must have played a very subordinate role, but they did not disappear entirely, since there is further information about them dating from the period preceding the 1686 siege.

The Turks constructed little in Buda; in essence they only maintained the castle walls in a state of repair, and built mosques and baths. The Császár, Király, Rác and Rudas baths of today are of Turkish origin. This does not mean that no baths existed earlier around the foot of Gellért Hill: the Turks only remodelled the medieval baths to conform to the accustomed pattern of Turkish baths.

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