The good fortune of the house of Austria was no less conspicuous in another part of Europe. Solyman having invaded Hungary with an army, of three hundred thousand men, Lewis II, king of that country and of Bohemia, a weak and inexperienced prince, advanced rashly to meet him with a body of men which did not amount to thirty thousand. With an imprudence still more unpardonable, he gave the command of these troops to Paul Tomorri, a Franciscan monk, archbishop of Golocza. This awkward general, in the dress of his order, girt with its cord, marched at the head of the troops; and, hurried on by his own presumption, as well as by the impetuosity of nobles who despised danger, but were impatient of long service, he fought the battle of Mohacz [August 29, 1526], in which the king, the flower of the Hungarian nobility, and upwards of twenty thousand men, fell the victims of his folly and ill conduct. Solyman, after his victory, seized and kept possession of several towns of the greatest strength in the southern provinces of Hungary, and, overrunning the rest of the country, carried near two hundred thousand persons into captivity.

As Lewis was the last male of the royal family of Jagellon, the archduke Ferdinand claimed both his crowns. This claim was founded on a double title; the one derived from the ancient pretensions of the house of Austria to both kingdoms; the other from the right of his wife, the only sister of the deceased monarch. The feudal institutions, however, subsisted both in Hungary and Bohemia in such vigor, and the nobles possessed such extensive power, that the crowns were still elective, and Ferdinand’s rights, if they had not been powerfully supported, would have met with little regard. But his own personal merit; the respect due to the brother of the greatest monarch in Christendom; the necessity of choosing a prince able to afford his subjects some additional protection against the Turkish arms, which, as they had recently felt their power, they greatly dreaded together with the intrigues of his sister, who had been married to the fate king, overcame the prejudices which the Hungarians had conceived against the archduke as a foreigner; and though a considerable party voted for the Vaywode of Transylvania, at length secured Ferdinand the throne of that kingdom. The states of Bohemia imitated the example of their neighbor kingdom; but in order to ascertain and secure their own privileges, they obliged Ferdinand, before his coronation, to subscribe a deed which they termed a Reverse, declaring that he held that crown not by any previous right, but by their gratuitous and voluntary election. By such a vast accession of territories, time hereditary possession of which they secured in process of time to their family, the princes of the house of Austria attained that pre-eminence in power which had rendered them so formidable to the rest of Germany.

The dissensions between the pope and emperor proved extremely favorable to the progress of Lutheranism. Charles, exasperated by Clement’s conduct, and fully employed in opposing the league which he had formed against him, had little inclination and less leisure, to take any measures for suppressing the new opinions in Germany. In a diet of the empire held at Spires [June 25, 1526], the state of religion came to be considered; and all that the emperor required of the princes was, that they would wait patiently, and without encouraging innovations, for the meeting of a general council which he had demanded of the pope. They, in return, acknowledged the convocation of a council to be the proper and regular step towards reforming abuses in the church; but contended that a national council held in Germany would be more effectual for that purpose than what he had proposed. To his advice, concerning the discouragement of innovations, they paid so little regard, that even during the meeting of the diet at Spires, the divines who attended the elector of Saxony and landgrave of Hesse-Cassel thither, preached publicly, and administered the sacraments according to the rights of the reformed church. The emperor’s own example emboldened the Germans to treat the papal authority with little reverence. During the heat of his resentment against Clement, he had published a long reply to an angry brief, which the pope had intended as an apology for his own conduct. In this manifesto, the emperor, after having enumerated many instances of that pontiffs ingratitude, deceit, and ambition, all which he painted in the strongest and most aggravated colors, appealed from him to a general council. At the same time he wrote to the college of cardinals, complaining of Clement’s partiality and injustice; and requiring them, if he refused or delayed to call a council, to show their concern for the peace of the Christian church, so shamefully neglected by its chief pastor, by summoning that assembly in their own name. This manifesto, little inferior in virulence to the invectives of Luther himself, was dispersed over Germany with great industry, and being eagerly read by persons of every rank, did much more than counterbalance the effect of all Charles’s declarations against the new opinions.