[1] For most of its duration, Ottoman Hungary covered Southern Transdanubia and almost the entire region of the Great Hungarian Plain.

The Sultan launched an attack against the weakened kingdom, whose smaller army was defeated in 1526 at the Battle of Mohács and King Louis II of Hungary died.

The Habsburgs tried several times to unite all Hungary under their rule, but the Ottoman Empire prevented that by supporting the Eastern Hungarian Kingdom.

King John I died in 1540, the Habsburg forces besieged Buda the Hungarian capital in 1541, Sultan Suleiman led a relief force and defeated the Habsburgs, the Ottomans captured the city by a trick during the Siege of Buda and the south central and central areas of the kingdom came under the authority of the Ottoman Empire, therefore Hungary was divided into three parts.

Eventually, the territory of present-day Hungary became a drain on the Ottoman Empire, swallowing much of its revenue into the maintenance of a long chain of border forts.

[6] The defeat of Ottoman forces led by Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha at the Second Siege of Vienna in 1683, at the hands of the combined armies of Poland and the Holy Roman Empire under John III Sobieski swung the balance of power in the region.

In 1699, under the terms of the Treaty of Karlowitz, which ended the Great Turkish War, the Ottomans ceded to Habsburgs much of the territory they had previously taken from the medieval Kingdom of Hungary.

[9] In 1640 when the front remained relatively quiet, 8,000 Janissary supported by an undocumented number of local recruits was sufficient to garrison the whole of the Eyalet of Budin.

The Sublime Porte (Ottoman rulers) became the sole landowner and managed about 20 percent of the land for its own benefit, apportioning the rest among soldiers and civil servants.

[11] Between 1522 and 1717, Tatars, soldiers from the Crimean Khanate, often participated in the Ottoman campaigns in the Hungarian border zones, and during these campaigns the tatars often captured slaves in Hungary and Austria; the long way back to the Crimea did provide opportunity for prisoners to escape, but many were abducted to Crimea, where they were either ransomed (if they were rich), or (if they were poor) sold on the Crimean slave trade.

However, the Ottomans practiced relative religious tolerance and allowed the various ethnicities living within the empire significant autonomy in internal affairs.

The raids were daily, primarily intended for tax collection and plundering, which caused significant damage in the Hungarian settlement areas: material destruction, population displacement, kidnapping and killing people.

[2] As a consequence of the 150 years of constant warfare between the Christian states and Ottomans, population growth was stunted, and the network of ethnic Hungarian medieval settlements, with their urbanized bourgeois inhabitants, perished.

When they arrived on the plain, the Tartars turned back at once and engaged the enemy [the local inhabitants] with the border warriors; some of them were put to the sword, all their possessions, as well as the children and women were taken and captured, and on the seventh day they returned to the camp with much booty and twenty thousand prisoners.

In the meantime, due to the large number of prisoners, fear arose in the Islamic camp, and by order of the chief serdar, the children, girls and young women were kept, and nine thousand of the men fit to wield swords were killed on the shore of the Szamos river... With the blessing of Lord Melek Ahmed Pasha, on the eighth day of the Feast Eid al-Adha in the year 1071 [1662], with twenty thousand selected Tatar soldiers who started with forty or fifty thousand wind-speed horses... trusting in Allah, we went out of the Islamic camp and that day and night in the Transylvanian part of the Tisza river, burning and destroying a few hundred villages and towns, we reached Belső-Szolnok county.

While we were here, we wandered without fear, destroying the western part to the right and then to the left, and came here between eating and drinking.The economic decline of Buda, the Hungarian capital at the time of the Ottoman conquest, was emblematic of its stagnated growth rate.

[25][26][29] The main zones of war were the territories inhabited by the Hungarians, so the death toll depleted them much faster than other nationalities.

Throughout the 17th century, the newly settled Orthodox South Slavic population ensured the military garrisons, logistical support, and food supply of the Ottoman army in this region.

Consequently, the Hungarians derisively referred to the region of Ottoman conquest as "Rascia" (Serbia) from that period onward.

[32] Despite the continuous warfare with the Habsburgs, several Muslim cultural centres sprang up in this far northern corner of the Empire.

Examples of Ottoman architecture of the classical period, seen in the famous centres of Constantinople and Edirne, were also seen in the territory of present-day southern Hungary, where mosques, bridges, fountains, baths and schools were built.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, there were at least five Bektashi convents or dervish lodges established across Hungary: two in Buda, one in Eğri, another in Székesfehérvár, and a fifth one in Lippa.

[33] In the 17th century, 165 elementary (mekteb) and 77 secondary and academic theological schools (medrese) were operating in 39 of the major towns of the region.

[citation needed] The elementary schools taught writing, basic arithmetics, and the reading of the Koran and of the most important prayers.

[citation needed] The most famous medrese in Ottoman-controlled territory of present-day Hungary was that of Budin (Buda), commissioned by the Sokollu Mustafa Pasha during his twelve years of governing (1566–1578).

[citation needed] There were numerous elementary and secondary schools besides the mosques, and the monasteries of the Dervish orders also served as centers of culture and education.

The mosque complex and türbe of Sokollu Mustafa Pasha in Budin (Buda) was built by Ottoman chief architect Mimar Sinan and contained a school and library offering Muslim religious sciences, literature, works on oratory, poetry, astronomy, music, architecture, and medical sciences.

For the Turk, it is true, at the present time compels no country by violence to apostatise; but he uses other means whereby imperceptibly he roots out Christianity...[37]The relative religious tolerance of the Ottomans enabled Protestantism in Hungary (such as the Reformed Church in Hungary) to survive against the oppression of the Catholic Habsburg-ruled Hungarian domains.

There were approximately 80,000 Muslim settlers in the Ottoman-controlled territory of present-day Hungary; being mainly administrators, soldiers, artisans, and merchants of Crimean Tatar origin.

Situated close to the janissaries camp, it was built by Jahjapasazáde Mehmed Pasha, the third begler bey (governor) of Budin.