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POD is sometime before the Battle of Mohacs in 1526. Szapolyai Janos, a magnate in Hungary with no great love of the Hapburgophile king Louis (Lajos) II, has a healthy son or two and his ambition is marginally greater. Before the battle of Mohacs (which he never made it to in OTL for some reason), he sees the writing on the wall and sends a messenger to Sultan Suleiman offering allegiance against the Hapsburg empire and tribute in return for not wrecking the place once Louis goes down. Seeing the long term benefit of an intact vassal and buffer, Suleiman gets his officers to back off after a Hungarian rout as bad as OTL and a bit of looting in the Baranya region.

By the expedient of seizing the more pro-Hapsburg estates, the money was passed to the Sultan shortly after Janos I was elected and crowned. He managed to get most of the nobles cooperating more or less, but what truly forged the matter was the full-scale invasion that Ferdinand of Austria launched to claim the throne of his late brother in law. Suleiman waited long enough to make the Hungarians worry about the destruction of their country by their coreligionists, then launched a counterattack that cut off the Hapsburg forces. In the 1529 battle of Pannohalma Ferdinand managed to escape back to Austria, but his army and the Hungarian exiles who sided with his were pretty much destroyed. The following treaty of Pest established Hungarian control north of the Danube/Sava line (outside of a few Ottoman garrisons in the west with a status not unfamiliar to the United States Army Europe) in return for some tribute.

The situation of the Hungarians improved, as it became both a refuge from the Counter-reformation in the southern H.R.E. and a discreet dumping ground for Anatolian Shiites. By 1568 the Edict of Torda established effective freedom of worship for Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Orthodox Christians. Sunni Muslims were technically barred from settling in Hungary as they were in the Danubian principalities, but the Qadi of the western garrisons had his primary residence across the river from Buda and a printing press producing a considerable amount of literature in German, Hungarian, and Slovak. A surprising amount of information and a few settlers came via Hungary to the Ottoman Empire proper as well, it was a major center of translation from the European languages to Ottoman Turkish and Persian, while enough Calvinists filtered down to establish a small settlement in Palestine and a Church in Constantinople by 1650.

Long term ramifications?

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