Turks fight Christians at the Battle of Mohács. Some Turkish Heavy Cavalry in the lower right-hand corner (well, just above the lower right-hand corner, really) of the painting. Chaps wearing helmets and what looks to be maille (which most of the other Turkish Horse isn’t shown with), carrying lances and mounted on barded horses. Hard to know if the bardings are quilted cloth, or coverings for heavier armour, but it’s there never the less, and looks substantial.

The Ottomans, Mamluks, Mughuls and Safavids all had heavy cavalry, but their armour was nowhere near as heavy as European plate armour. It consisted of mail or mail-and-plate armour. In terms of the protection it offered it is probably equivalent to late 12th century European armour. You will notice all the Ottoman cavalry still have bowcases and quivers, so despite the armour, they were still horse archers. Mamluk tactics were to soften up the enemy with arrows, followed by a cavalry charge against an already weakened enemy. I think Ottoman sipahi cavalry tactics were probably similar.

You will notice that the Hungarian knights are already on the run, but they had probably already been softened up by artillery, musket fire and Turkish horse-archers.

The Ottoman Army, led by Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, arrived at Mohács, on the plains of Hungary, on an August morning in 1526. The Turkish force numbered about 100,000 men, and in its baggage were three hundred new long-range cannons. Facing them was a somewhat larger European force, clothed in heavy armor but armed with only one hundred older cannons.

The battle began at noon and was over in two hours. The flower of the Hungarian cavalry had been destroyed, and 20,000 foot soldiers had drowned in a nearby swamp. The Ottomans had lost fewer than two hundred men. Two weeks later, they seized the Hungarian capital at Buda and prepared to lay siege to the nearby Austrian city of Vienna. Europe was in a panic. It was to be the high point of Turkish expansion in Europe.

In launching their Age of Exploration, European rulers had hoped that by controlling global markets, they could cripple the power of Islam and reduce its threat to the security of Europe. But the Christian nations’ dream of expanding their influence around the globe at the expense of their great Muslim rival had not entirely been achieved. On the contrary, the Muslim world, which appeared to have entered a period of decline with the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate during the era of the Mongols, managed to revive in the shadow of Europe’s Age of Exploration, a period that also saw the rise of three great Muslim empires. These powerful Muslim states— those of the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals—dominated the Middle East and the South Asian subcontinent and brought a measure of stability to a region that had been in turmoil for centuries.