Renaissance
During the 14th century, the Angevin kings from France established Buda as the royal seat of centralized power. They built a succession of palaces on the Várhegy or Castle Hill, reaching its zenith during the Renaissance under the reign of "Good King" Mátyás (1458–90) and his Italian-born wife, Queen Beatrice of Naples, with a golden age of prosperity and a flourishing of the arts. Hungary's catastrophic defeat in the Battle of Mohács in 1526 against the invading Turks led by Suleiman the Magnificent, paved the way for the Ottoman occupation of Hungary. Suleiman's siege of Buda (1541) was part of the Little War in Hungary between the Habsburgs and the Ottoman Empire. Three years after the Battle of Vienna, a pan-European multinational army besieged Buda Castle in the Battle of Buda (1686) for six weeks, finally recapturing it on the 12th attempt with heavy losses on both sides.
Read more about this topic: History Of Budapest
Famous quotes containing the word renaissance:
“People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It’s a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it’s the togetherness of modern technology.”
—J.G. (James Graham)