John Zápolya
John Zápolya was the voivode of Transylvania, the richest magnate in Hungary, whose army did not reach Mohács in August 1526 and who was elected king by the Hungarian diet three months later, in the kingdom the Ottomans had just broken, against the Habsburg Ferdinand whom another diet elected in December; beaten by Ferdinand in 1527, he did what no Christian king had done and put himself under Suleiman's protection in 1528, held eastern Hungary as the sultan's client for twelve years, and died in 1540 having agreed to leave the whole to Ferdinand and then produced a son two weeks before his death, which brought Suleiman to Buda and divided Hungary in three for a hundred and fifty years. He was the son of the palatine Stephen Zápolya, who had been Matthias Corvinus's general, and was made voivode of Transylvania in 1510. In 1514 he crushed the peasant rising of Dozsa and had its leader roasted on an iron throne, which made him the nobility's man. When Louis II marched against Suleiman in 1526 Zápolya was at Szeged with the Transylvanian army, whether too late or on purpose was argued for centuries, and the king and the flower of the nobility died on the field. The lesser nobles, who hated the Habsburgs and the magnates who dealt with them, elected him at Székesfehérvár in November and he was crowned with the holy crown. Ferdinand, Louis's brother-in-law, was elected at Pozsony in December by the magnates and marched on him the next summer, beating him at Tokaj and driving him to Poland. He came back with the sultan. Suleiman received him in the camp at Mohács in August 1529 as a vassal, took Buda for him, and went on to besiege Vienna; the sultan's campaigns of 1532 and after kept Ferdinand from the east, and the country settled into two kingdoms with a frontier of raids. In the secret treaty of Várad of February 1538 the two kings recognised each other's halves and agreed that Ferdinand would have all Hungary on John's death; John, fifty-two, then married Isabella Jagiellon, the Polish king's daughter, and their son, the future prince of Transylvania, was born on 7 July 1540. He died on the 22nd at Szászsebes, ordering his party to make the infant king, and Suleiman, invoked by the queen's advisers, took Buda in 1541 and kept it.
- Lived: 1487 CE – 1540 CE
- Nationality: Hungarian
- Roles: king, monarch
