The Ottoman Past and the Politics of Memory (2025)

On 29 August 1526, the Christian army of Louis II of Hungary (reigned 1516-1526) was crushingly defeated on the battlefield at Mohács by the Ottoman forces led by Sultan Suleiman I (aka ‘Suleiman the Magnificent’ r. 1520-1566). In the following decades, the medieval Kingdom of Hungary was divided into two, and later three, parts – Royal Hungary under Habsburg rule, Ottoman Hungary directly under the sultan’s suzerainty, and Transylvania which was turned into a polity semi-independent from the Ottoman Empire. *

The Ottoman Past and the Politics of Memory (1)

‘Mohács’ is a major episode in Hungarian popular memory hence the idiom, ‘More was lost at Mohács’ – a rough equivalent to the English ‘worse things happen at sea’. It has become a lieu de mémoire, a site and container of memory, as defined by the French historian Pierre Nora. This concept in the field of memory studies refers to an event, place, object, monument, symbol, or notion loaded with historical significance in popular collective memory.

Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister since 2010, likes to depict Hungary’s place in the world, and his own rule, within a ‘long view’: contextualising current events with reference to historical markers. In his speeches, and through Fidesz-controlled media, Orbán portrays himself as the defender of the Christian faith amidst the ‘decay of the West’, caused by ‘LGBTQ+ propaganda’, ‘pro-war lobbying’ (a reference to other countries’ support provided for Ukraine), and the intense othering of Muslim immigrants to Europe. The PM’s approach to Hungary’s own Islamic heritage, however, is far more complicated.

On 27 July 2024, Orbán gave a long speech at the Bálványos ‘Free Summer University’. This event is held annually in Băile Tușnad (Hungarian: Tusnádfürdő), a small town in Romania with a Székely Hungarian majority. This ‘free university’ has become an important gathering for Fidesz members and sympathisers. Here, Orbán traditionally evaluates the past year and announces his goals for the next one – usually with a strong foreign policy twist. Last month’s talk (title: “The war is our red pill”) was dedicated to the EU’s “self-destruction” and “intellectual solitude” after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It also surveyed European geopolitics and balance of power.

Surprisingly, Orbán scolded Poland for “backing out” of the Visegrád countries’ (HU, PL, CZ, SK) strategy of accepting and supporting the French-German leadership of the EU, especially under Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel. The PM labelled Polish politics as “the most sanctimonious and hypocritical policy in the whole of Europe” while talking in a slightly more conciliatory way about France:

They lecture us on moral grounds, they criticise us for our economic relations with Russia, and at the same time they are blithely doing business with the Russians, buying their oil – albeit via indirect routes – and running the Polish economy with it. The French are better than that: last month, incidentally, they overtook us in gas purchases from Russia – but at least they do not lecture us on moral grounds. The Poles are both doing business and lecturing us. I have not seen a policy of such rank hypocrisy in Europe in the last ten years.

Building out from the last sentence also made other complimentary comments about France (and French foreign policy): naming President Emmanuel Macron, as an important ally. Orbán’s amicable attitude towards Macron is not unprecedented. In fact, it chimes with some deep, but usually overlooked historic trends.

Those familiar with sixteenth-century European diplomacy might be reminded of a similar scenario. In 1528-1529, Francis I of France (r. 1515-1547), and John I of Hungary (aka János Szapolyai, r. 1526-1540), established an alliance against the Habsburg’s increasing political and military hegemony in the Mediterranean and Central Europe. Their main enemies were Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (r. 1519-1556) and his brother Ferdinand I of Hungary (r. 1526-1564). The latter was John’s rival, for the Hungarian throne – the two being elected by the nobility in parallel processes in the same year.

The Ottoman Past and the Politics of Memory (2)

The French and Hungarian kings were supported by Suleiman. Francis established an alliance based on commercial agreements (capitulations) with Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1536, while John became the sultan’s vassal – one who enjoyed Ottoman support in his power struggle. Hungary was a warzone between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. It proved to be the limit of territorial expansion for both: the kingdom remained partitioned until the end of the seventeenth century.

Traditionally historians have linked the defeat at Mohács to a supposed alliance between the French and the Ottomans in the 1520s. In 2013 Attila Györkös challenged this view. He described it as “the myth of the ‘treason of the West’”: an account which blamed the Ottoman victory over the Hungarian (and Christian) army at Mohács on European great power politics – especially France’s conspiracy with the sultan. This framing presents Hungary as the ‘bastion of Christendom’, which fell prey to Muslim power due to the ‘West’s’ ignorance and internal strife’. French diplomacy was thought to have encouraged the Ottomans to attack Hungary in order to divert the Habsburgs’ attention from the Italian peninsula – their main theatre of war with France. Counter to this, Györkös asserted that:

The connection between the Battle of Mohács and the Ottoman-French alliance is a myth of historical memory that is deeply ingrained in the public consciousness – and neither the “reticence” of sources, nor the logic of international relations, nor the nuances of academic evaluations have been able to change it so far.

To illustrate the relevance of this scholarly debate in the public sphere, it’s worth recalling an episode of the political talk show ‘Publi Cafe’ aired on Hír TV, a Fidesz-aligned TV channel, on 3 March 2021. During the show political scientist Zoltán Kiszelly compared today’s ‘globalist elite’ to Francis and Suleiman in the sixteenth century:

The French asked for help from the Turks, and the Battle of Mohács was a part of this process, namely that while they [the French] were expanding in the West, the Turks were to distract the forces of the emperor [Charles V] here in the East, so that the Habsburgs could send fewer soldiers to Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere.

The Ottoman Past and the Politics of Memory (3)

This statement evokes the narrative of Hungary as a victim of great power gambling and Western betrayal frequently voiced by Viktor Orbán and his acolytes – but it lacks historical evidence. Moreover, the supposed parallel with contemporary ‘globalist endeavours’ is opaque even according to its own logic – in what way can Hungary be said to be being surrendered to protect the direct material interests of another state? This is left unexplained.

Orbán has reflected on Christian-Muslim encounters in Hungary in diverse ways. When asked about the acceptance of Muslim refugees in an interview with German newspaper Bild in early 2018, the PM said “We consider them to be Muslim invaders...” later adding that “Christian and Muslim societies will never merge into one. Multiculturalism is an illusion”.

Yet, on 9 October, Orbán and Türkiye’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, inaugurated the Tomb of Gül Baba in Budapest. Gül Baba was a Bektashi dervish (member of an Islamic Sufi mystic order) and Ottoman warrior who arrived in Hungary in 1541 when Sultan Suleiman decided to invade Buda and formalise Hungary’s status within his empire. The renovations of the world’s northernmost Islamic pilgrimage site were mainly financed by the Hungarian government with the support of the Turkish government. In a slightly romanticised picture, Orbán said that Gül Baba was born in a “dashing” age “when the great sons of our nations fought each other.”

The Ottoman Past and the Politics of Memory (4)

Despite Orbán’s stress on Hungary’s commitment to Christian values and its fear of Islamisation, the Fidesz government has not seemed entirely consistent when it comes to religious and cultural ethos. Hungary has been an Observer Member in the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) since 2018: the only predominantly Christian member state. As the PM claimed in his speech at the organisation’s2018 summit:

We have always closely followed the cooperation between countries of Turkic identity. Among you we are the people who have moved farthest West, and who also converted to Christianity. So we are a Christian people living in the West, standing on foundations of Hun-Turkic origins; the Hungarians see themselves as the late descendants of Attila.

Most recently, Orbán re-contextualised the 1526 battle and its aftermath when opening the new Danube Bridge at Kalocsa-Paks. He evoked Pál Tomori (c.1475-1526), Archbishop of Kalocsa (and commander-in-chief of the Hungarian army) who died in the battle of Mohács – connecting his heroism to Fidesz’s fight in 2024’s European Parliament election:

The life and heroic death of Pál Tomori at the Battle of Mohács is an enduring example of what happens when we Hungarians do not stand together. If we do not, we become the playground of foreign powers, our country is senselessly destroyed, and – because control over our destiny is taken out of our hands – we are written out of history for a long time. This warning is timely once again today, when Europe is in a state of preparation for war. We must preserve our unity. Unity can be preserved by declaring it again and again. This is why, in the name of national unity, this Sunday, 9 June, we must vote only for peace.

Orbán’s historical rhetoric is very flexible – it shifts blame according to context and audience. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is usually presented, ultimately as the USA’s and NATO’s responsibility: the quote above reframes the Ottoman invasion in such a way that the Ottomans nearly disappear as protagonists. The vague reference to ‘foreign powers’ aims to convince Hungarians that if they don’t vote for Fidesz EP candidates, the Mohács disaster could reoccur due to the European countries’ ‘preparation for war’ in Ukraine.

The Ottoman Past and the Politics of Memory (5)

Selective, distorted, and arbitrary representations of the past aren’t specific to Viktor Orbán or Hungarian politics. Cherry-picking sources, events, or figures in storytelling always aims to strengthen the agenda of the narrator. It’s often found in nation-building projects. The commemoration of victories and defeats is a popular tool for reinforcing the legitimacy of a political party or the collective identity of a group whose sympathy the party is cultivating. Naturally, the more nuanced debates of professional historians won’t interest everyone but maintaining a sense of perpetual victimhood and creating scapegoats doesn’t tend to foster either a healthy self-image or good diplomatic relations. Hungary’s Ottoman past however is a notably valuable resource for political communication.

For a start, sixteenth-century events offer something that twentieth-century ones cannot: distance and, with it, unity. Mohács doesn’t affect people as personally (and thus divergently) as the losses of WW1, the Red Terror, the White Terror, WW2, and state socialism. Collective recollections of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ events divide people much less than those of our parents’, grandparents’, and great-grandparents’ lives.

This makes Hungary’s Ottoman era-experience a helpful resource with which to bolster the sort of unitary conception of ‘the people’ on which populist politics thrives. Mohács (and the wider Ottoman conquest) serves as a tool to build Hungary’s claim as the bastion of Christian Europe – and Orbán’s image, both at home and abroad, as its protector. Reference to the (supposed) historic betrayal by West European allies can be used to justify apparent indifference to the criticism of EU partners today.

Yet, ‘Mohács’ can also be used in subtly variegated ways: ones that reflect attention to audience segmentation. For example, the staged tripartite division of Hungary in the sixteenth century can be invoked as a prefiguration of the country’s later breaking in the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, following WW1 – a connection more typical of distinctive far-right discourse. Orbán and his government’s communication apparatus frame the Ottomans’ impact on Hungarian history in multiple, even conflicting, ways depending on the target audience and intended message.

The fast-approaching 500th anniversary of the Battle of Mohács makes this complex rhetoric all the more important to observe and analyse. It is probably not misleading to predict that the next two years will witness increasing references to Mohács as an object lesson which proves the need to defend Hungary’s sovereignty, guard against ‘Western treachery’, and seek strongmen allies abroad. A forthcoming, officially sponsored, Mohács movie can be expected to take the government’s interpretive agenda outside of the realm of politics and into that of mass culture. The results will be interesting to behold.

Elvira Tamus is based at the University of Cambridge as a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of History. She is also a Research Assistant at the university’s Centre for Geopolitics, and a Teaching Fellow at its Global History Lab. See: https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/people/elvira-tamus

*For more on the historical events mentioned in this article see Pál Fodor and Teréz Oborni, ‘Between two great powers – the Hungarian Kingdom of the Szapolyai family’ in Pál Fodor and Szabolcs Varga (eds.), A Forgotten Hungarian Royal Dynasty: The Szapolyais (Budapest: MTA Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont, 2020), pp. 127-161, and Christine Isom-Verhaaren, Allies with the Infidel: The Ottoman and French Alliance in the Sixteenth Century (London: LB. Tauris, 2011).

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The Ottoman Past and the Politics of Memory (2025)
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