For more than 150 years, the territory of Hungary was a battleground between the forces of the great powers. The military conflict was constant during the entire period of the Ottoman rule. Hungary endured a great number of Ottoman military campaigns and sieges from 1521 to 1568, at the same time when Hungary had an ongoing struggle between its two kings (Austrian
Habsburg family and the Hungarian noble
Zápolya family). From 1591, and between 1593 and 1606, during the
Long Turkish War, there were armed conflicts involving large military forces. From 1660 and between 1663 and 1664, during the
Austro-Turkish War, also between 1683 and 1699 during
Hungary's War of Liberation from the Ottoman occupation, the opposing sides fielded armies of about 50,000 soldiers in every year. The Hungarian journey of Evliya Çelebi, a Turkish traveller in 1660–1664: The economic decline of
Buda, the Hungarian capital at the time of the Ottoman conquest, was emblematic of its stagnated growth rate. The city's population was no larger in 1686 than it had been two centuries prior. The Ottomans allowed the Hungarian royal palace to fall into ruins. The Ottomans later transformed the palace into a gunpowder store and magazine, which caused its detonation during the siege in 1686. The Christian Hungarian population significantly shrank in the next decades, due to them fleeing to the Habsburg-ruled
Royal Hungary, especially by 1547 the number of the original Christian population of Buda was down to about a thousand, and by 1647 it had fallen to only about seventy. The number of Jewish and Gypsy immigrants became dominant during the Ottoman rule in Buda. took
Buda after a long
siege in 1686 The Hungarian inhabitants of cities moved to other places when they felt threatened by the Ottoman military presence. Without exception, in the cities that became Ottoman administrative centers the Christian population decreased. The Hungarian population remained only in some cities, where the Ottoman garrisons were not installed. From the early 17th century, Serbian refugees were the ethnic majority in large parts of Ottoman-controlled Hungary. That area included territories between the great rivers Sava, Drava, and the
Danube–Tisza Interfluve (the territory between the Danube and Tisza rivers). According to
estimates made by Hungarian historians, the proportion of Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin was around 75-80% at the end of the 15th century, and non-Hungarians were little more than 20 to 25% of the total population. The Hungarian population began to decrease at the time of the
Ottoman conquest. The decline of the Hungarians was due to the constant wars, Ottoman raids, famines, and plagues during the 150 years of Ottoman rule. The main zones of war were the territories inhabited by the Hungarians, so the death toll depleted them much faster than other nationalities. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Ottoman conquest turned
Kingdom of Hungary into a battlefield. According to Hungarian historiography, the ethnic pattern of Hungary changed significantly due to the centuries long wars. During the Ottoman occupation, the
Principality of Transylvania maintained the continuity of Hungarian statehood. The Habsburg–Wallachian military campaigns between 1599 and 1604, and Ottoman–Tatar military campaigns between 1657 and 1661 were destructive for the Hungarians living in the region and the Hungarian settlements connecting the Hungarian ethnic blocks of the
Partium and
Székely Land suffered the most extensive destruction. Between the
Battle of Mohács in 1526 and the suppression of
Rákóczi's War of Independence in 1711, the Hungarian and Catholic dominated population structure of the Late Medieval Kingdom of Hungary was broken up, in Transylvania the Romanians became majority and the Hungarians became a minority population, and in the more sheltered mountainous regions, the Romanian population steadily grew, benefiting from additional immigration from Wallachia and Moldavia. The three parts of Hungary, the
Habsburg Hungary, Ottoman Hungary and
Transylvania, experienced only minor differences in population increase in the 17th century. The South Slavic peoples (Serbs, Bosnian Muslims) expanded northward in the wake of the Ottoman conquest, while the Hungarian population that had survived it fled the area over the course of the 17th century. Throughout the 17th century, the newly settled Orthodox South Slavic population provided the Ottoman army in this region with military garrisons, logistical support, and food supplies. Consequently, the Hungarians derisively referred to the region of Ottoman conquest as "Rascia" (Serbia) thereafter. The
Magyarab people are a small Magyar (Hungarian) community living within
Nubia, along the
Nile in
Sudan and
Egypt. They have distant Hungarian ancestors who intermarried with locals. The
Ottoman Empire had to recruit troops from conquered Christian people, most notably through the
devşirme system, a special "tribute in blood", by which the
Janissary corps was primarily staffed. In this system, Christian youths were taken, or children were kidnapped during Ottoman raids, primarily from the Balkan provinces, then converted to Islam and drafted into Ottoman service. The Hungarian population was recruited under the Ottoman regime. The Hungarians who were relocated from Hungary to the banks of the Nile were soldiers in the
Ottoman army, brought there by Sultan Selim to serve as border guards. These groups of Hungarians ended up in Egypt and Sudan after retiring from military service, concluding their army careers there.
Immigration According to the most authoritative studies, the combined population of all three regions grew from about 3.5 million at the close of the 16th century to about 4 million at the close of the 17th century. The
Ottoman–Habsburg wars of the 17th century were fought intermittently and affected populations occupying a much narrower band of territory. Thus wartime dislocations in Hungary do not seem to have seriously affected mortality rates among the general civilian population. The breakdown of social order and other economic links between contiguous regions that is associated with prolonged warfare of the medieval pattern was largely absent in Ottoman warfare of the 17th century. The most severe destructions were experienced during the Hungarian time of troubles, when between 1604 and 1606 the worst effects of the controlled confrontation between Ottoman-Habsburg forces were magnified many times over by Hungary's descent into civil war during the
Bocskay rebellion. Hungary's population in the late 16th century was in Ottoman Hungary 900,000, in Habsburg Hungary 1,800,000 and 'free' (Transylvania) Hungary 800,000, making a total of 3,500,000 inhabitants for the whole of Hungary. The population growth in Ottoman Hungary during the 17th century was slight: from 900,000 to approximately 1,000,000 inhabitants, a rate similar to that experienced in Royal Hungary and Transylvania. ==Culture==