18. A Terrible Peasant Uprising
As the Hungarian nobility shirked its obligations to aid Pope Leo X’s Crusade, the gathered throng of lower-class volunteers began to voice its collective grievances against the exploitative nobles. By harvest time, the peasants’ resentment had reached a boil, and they refused to return and reap their lords’ fields. The nobles tried to seize the peasants by force and compel them to toil, but that did not sit well with Gheorghe Doja. He sided with the serfs against his own class and led the Hungarian peasants in a violent rebellion that morphed into a war of extermination against the landlords.
Hundreds of castles and aristocratic manors were put to the torch, while thousands of the privileged nobles and gentry were killed. Many of the privileged class were tortured to death or executed in a variety of macabre and gruesome ways, such as crucifixion or impalement. The rebellion was finally crushed, and the peasantry was crushed with it. Hungary’s peasants were subjected to a reign of terror and a wave of retaliatory vengeance by the nobles, in which more than 70,000 were tortured to death.