In 1686, during the siege of Buda by the Holy League, a wall of the church - used as a mosque by the Ottoman occupiers of the city - collapsed due to cannon fire.

[8][9] King Béla IV of Hungary after the Mongol invasion, between 1255 and 1269, replaced the older, smaller church with a towering three-nave basilica.

The group of masters consisted of the builders of the Cistercian Monastery of Tišnov, Czech Republic, who travelled to Hungary after the Mongol invasion probably at the behest of the cousin of king Béla IV, Agnes of Bohemia.

[4] The closest parallel to this representative two-door gate is the portal of St. Lorenz Church in Nuremberg, built fifteen years earlier.

During the reign of Louis, a complete redesign of the church basilica space was begun in the spirit of mature Gothic architecture.

[5] Apart from its destroyed helmet, the bell tower still retains its original form, although in the late 19th century a complete replacement of its stone material became inevitable.

Baroque transformations were conducted in many medieval elements; only the few windows of the Matthias Bell tower guarded the original character of the church's facade.

[5] Under the leadership of the king Franz Joseph I of Austria, between 1874 and 1896, a major rebuilding took place, under the architect Frigyes Schulek, which restored the original image of the building.

By also adding new motifs of his own (such as the diamond pattern roof tiles and gargoyles laden spire) Schulek ensured that the work, when finished, would be highly controversial.

Schulek freed the church, enclosed in former Jesuit buildings, at the expense of the demolition of adjacent parts, restoring its original, distinctive character.

[5] Bertalan Székely and Károly Lotz directed, together with Schulek, the interior decoration and furnishing, utilising the remains of the medieval wall paintings.

In 1898 the remains of Béla III of Hungary and his first wife, Agnes of Antioch, found their final burial place in the chapel of the northern nave of the church.

Reconstructed faithfully and, to a lesser extent, re-imagined in a worthy way, the church is the highest-quality example of Hungarian neo-Gothic architecture, and its interior decoration, one of the highest achievements of Eastern European Art Nouveau.

In 1936, on the 250th anniversary of the recapture of the Buda Castle, a Hungarian and Italian inscription commemorating the Baron Michele d'Aste was placed on the right-hand apse wall.

Around the altar there are five commemorative shields of noteworthy Chaplains of the Order, among them Cardinal Jusztinián György Serédi, and the martyr Bishop Blessed Vilmos Apor.

[5][14] In 1994, an unidentified terrorist detonated an IED at the gate of the building that opens towards the Fisherman's Bastion, damaging sixteen of the church's windows.

In 1279 had already held a national council here under the leadership of Lieutenant of the Pope Fülöp Fermói and the Archbishop of Esztergom Lodomer, where they were invited by King Ladislaus IV of Hungary.

In January 1412 King Sigismund for the first time suspended his victory flags on the walls of the church, which had been rebuilt by then, which he captured in the campaign against Republic of Venice.

This was abolished during the Turkish occupation, but the provost title of "Pest-újhegyi", named after the Virgin Mary, has been bestowed by the Hungarian apostolate and from 1920 to the Archbishop of Esztergom.

Therefore, Matthias, returning from his captivity in Prague, solemnly began his reign in the Church of Mary in the form of a "crown without crown": thanking God and Mary, the Grandmother of Hungary, whose inheritance was honored by her father; before the altar he promised to keep the sacred rights, then went to his palace and sat on his throne and began to deal with the affairs of the country.

The Palatine of Hungary István Werbőczy proclaimed here the covenant of the king John Zápolya with the French, the Pope, Venice and Florence.

[5] A few months later, at the feast of King St Stephen, the "counter-king", Habsburg Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor attended the Mass here.

[10] Legend has it that Gül Baba, a member of the Bektási Dervish Order in the temple, whose tomb (mausoleum) is still near Margaret Bridge, it is still the northernmost Islamic pilgrimage site in the world.

[5] The victory of the desperate struggle for Buda was attributed by contemporaries to the miracle of the church's statue of Mary, which was not destroyed by the Turks, but simply bricked up.

The Order (also in the wake of the Counter-Reformation) was strongly attached to the Habsburg Ruler, and there are hardly any Hungarians among their members, as was the newly settled citizenship, as in the Middle Ages, being German.

In front of the church, a plague memorial was erected in 1713, the Holy Trinity Column, which served as a model for many similar works in the country.

The Gothic Revival abat-voix, resembling a medieval tower, was carved of oak and the statue of the Good Shepherd on the top was made of linden.

The most interesting part of the structure is the sculptural decoration of the parapet with the statues of the four evangelists and the four Latin doctors of the church standing under the arches of a blind arcade.

The sequence of the figures is: The two bishops and the saintly pope are portrayed in the traditional attire of their office, and Jerome is wearing cardinal robes.

The gallery contains a number of sacred relics and medieval stone carvings, along with replicas of the Hungarian royal crown and coronation jewels.