J.C. Haffner's View of the 1686 Siege of Budapest.

Finely engraved view of the 1686 Siege of Budapest, engraved by Johann Christoph Haffner in Augsburg in 1687.

The view depicts the battle between the Ottoman Turks and the Holy League for control of Budapest.

The view is exceptionally rare, with only the example in the Bayerische Staatsbibliotech (Munich) located by OCLC.

The Battle of Buda

The Battle of Buda (1686) was fought between the Holy League and the Ottoman Empire, as part of the follow-up campaign in Hungary after the Battle of Vienna. The Holy League took Buda after a long siege.

In 1686, two years after the unsuccessful first siege of Buda, a renewed campaign was started to take Buda. This time, the Holy League's army was much larger, containing between 65,000-100,000 men, including German, Hungarian, Croat, Dutch, English, Spanish, Czech, Italian, Catalan, French, Burgundian, Danish and Swedish soldiers, and other Europeans as volunteers, artillerymen, and officers. The Turkish defenders consisted of 7,000 men.

By the middle of June 1686, the siege had begun. On July 27, the Holy League's army started a large-scale attack, which was repulsed by the Turkish defenders. A Turkish relief army arrived at Buda in the middle of August led by Grand Vizier Sarı Süleyman Paşa, but the besieged Ottoman forces led by commander Abdurrahman Abdi Arnavut Pasha was unable to mount any offensive and he was soon after killed in action.

As a consequence of the recapture of Buda and the success at the Battle of Mohács (1687), the Hungarian parliament recognized at Pressburg in November 1687, that the inheritance of the Hungarian crown had passed to the Habsburgs. In addition the Hungarian parliament committed itself to crown the Habsburg successor to the throne, still, during his father's lifetime as king of Hungary. Thus on December 9,1687 Joseph, the 9-year-old son of emperor Leopold, was crowned, as a first hereditary king with the Stephanskrone crown.