Szeged

Szeged stands on the Tisza just below the mouth of the Maros, the river port where the salt of Transylvania was loaded and shipped. By the time of Louis the Great it was the most important town of southern Hungary, and as the Ottoman frontier crept north King Sigismund had a wall built around it. It became a free royal town at the Buda diet of 1498, paying the treasury 2,000 forints a year, more than any other free royal town; by 1522 about 7,000 people lived there. In 1514 the peasant army of György Dózsa passed it by.

The Ottomans plundered Szeged in 1526 and occupied it over the winter of 1542–43; Sultan Suleiman built a large brick fortress around the ruined castle, and the town became the seat of a sanjak. Imperial troops took the fortress on 22 October 1686, when only about 2,000 people lived here. Szeged regained its free royal rank in 1715, and on 21 May 1719 Charles III gave it a coat of arms. Piarist monks arrived in 1719 and opened a grammar school, while the salt office, plague, floods and fires marked the next decades. Between 1728 and 1744 the town tried witches, and twelve people were burned on a single day in July 1728. The first printing press opened in 1801.