Enlightenment · Europe · War

1686

Buda Reconquered from the Ottomans

1686

After a brutal siege lasting seventy-eight days, a multinational Habsburg army stormed the fortress of Buda, wresting Hungary's ancient capital from one hundred and forty-five years of Ottoman occupation. The city was gutted, its mosques demolished, its Muslim population expelled. The Ottoman tide in Europe was receding for good, and the Christian reconquest of the Balkans had begun in earnest.