The Bone of Empires

The Bone of Empires: A History of the Sieges of Buda

For seven centuries, the limestone plateau of Buda Castle above the Danube has been the most contested piece of ground in central Europe. From Béla IV's construction of the first fortifications in the aftermath of the 1241 Mongol invasion, through the Ottoman occupation of 1541, the three failed Habsburg sieges of the Long Turkish War, the Holy League's seventy-six-day campaign of 1686, the Hungarian revolutionary storm of 1849, and the catastrophic Soviet-German siege of 1944 to 1945, the hill above the Danube crossing has been the place where the argument about who owns the centre of Europe has been made most directly, most violently, and most consequentially.

The Bone of Empires traces this extraordinary military and political history in full, examining not only the sieges themselves, their logistics, their tactics, their commanders, and their human cost, but the deeper questions they illuminate: about the relationship between geography and power, about the use of the fortress as political symbol, about the persecution of civilian communities in the aftermath of military victory, and about the contested memorial landscape of a contemporary city still arguing, in monuments and counter-monuments, about what its layered and violent past means for its present. A comprehensive, narrative history of one of the great strategic fortresses of European civilisation.