Tolna

Tolna grew beside the Danube into a substantial market town of southern Hungary. In the later Middle Ages King Matthias stayed here and held an assembly in the town. Its river traffic, craftsmen and wine made it a significant centre before and during the first decades of Ottoman rule.

King Louis II reviewed his army at Tolna in August 1526 before the disastrous battle of Mohács. Under the Ottomans the town remained populous and diverse, and the Reformation took root among its Hungarian inhabitants. By the 1580s it had a noted Protestant school whose pupils went on to universities abroad. The long war beginning in 1593 devastated the district, and the town was almost deserted. German settlers arrived in the 1720s as Tolna recovered in the following century.