Esztergom

Esztergom stands on the right bank of the Danube at the bend where the river leaves the hills for the plain, under a castle hill that was the first capital of the kingdom and the seat of Hungary's primate. Its archbishops were the first churchmen of the realm, and in the fifteenth century, especially under Archbishop János Vitéz, the court on the hill drew royal guests, scholars and artists from across Europe. Tamás Bakócz, who held the see until 1521, had Italian architects build the Bakócz Chapel in 1507, the earliest important Renaissance building to survive in Hungary.

After Mohács in 1526, where the archbishop died, Esztergom was besieged six times in seventeen years as Ferdinand I and Zápolya fought for the crown. Ferdinand took the castle in 1530 and sent the chapter and archive to Nagyszombat and Pozsony. In 1543 Suleiman the Magnificent captured it, and as Estergon it became the seat of an Ottoman sanjak on the northwestern border, shielding the mining towns of the highlands, Vienna and Buda. The poet Bálint Balassa died in the siege of 1594, and a force under Mansfeld retook the castle in 1595, but the Ottomans regained it in 1605. John III Sobieski finally freed the town in 1683. Crafts and winemaking revived in the eighteenth century; in 1761 the archbishop recovered the castle hill; in 1820 the see returned to a town that planned a new basilica.