From the Battle of Mohacs in 1526, when the Habsburgs laid claim to the Hungarian crown, to the demise of the Monarchy in 1918, relations between the Hungarians and the Habsburgs were frequently hostile and sometimes bloody. In this book, Georg Michels focuses on two of the more brutal Hungarian/Habsburg clashes, those of 1670 and 1672. It is an impressive piece of scholarship. The notes are 172 pages and the bibliography 34. The bulk of the archival sources are from various collections in Vienna and Budapest and a few from England and the Netherlands. The languages are German, French, Hungarian, Latin, Ukrainian, Dutch, and English. The salient questions are whether the Hungarians could throw off Habsburg rule in Royal Hungary and if the Ottoman Turks would help them do it.
Michels discusses various points of Hungarian/Habsburg tensions but emphasizes that far and away the most important was the clash between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, especially Calvinism. When the Habsburgs defeated the Calvinists in Bohemia earlier in the century, they confiscated Protestant land, expelled Protestant nobles, got rid of Calvinist preachers, destroyed Protestant churches, brought in Catholic settlers, and created what they considered a loyal, Catholic constituency. In Hungary they hoped to achieve the same success. The great landlords, the magnates of Hungary, were willing to accommodate themselves to Habsburg rule and to Roman Catholicism, but the lesser nobility were eager to take up arms to defend their faith, Calvinism to the greater degree, Lutheranism to the lesser.
In Hungary there was a player not present in Bohemia: the Ottoman Empire. In the sixteenth century Hungary was divided into Habsburg and Ottoman Hungary, and the two were rarely at peace since. Each side raided the other's border villages sometimes with the approval of the central governments and sometimes not. The Ottomans especially occupied villages in Habsburg Upper Hungary where they taxed the local population or hold it for ransom.
According to Michels, the uprisings of 1670 and 1672 threatened the very existence of the Habsburg Empire—hence the title of the book—because the statesman in charge of the Ottoman Empire at the time was someone whom he admires a great deal, Grand Vizier Ahmed Köprülü. For Michels Köprülü was one of the great men of the seventeenth century—brilliant administrator, skilled military strategist, shrewd foreign policy master, and a leader eager to expand the territory and influence of his sultan. The Hungarians saw in him the kind of man who would help them defeat the Habsburgs, allow Hungarian Protestants to practice their faith without interference, and establish an autonomous Hungarian kingdom under Ottoman protection.
In both uprisings Michels chronicles in detail the Hungarian appeals to Köprülü to help them either directly or through the agency of Ottoman officials who were sympathetic to the Hungarian cause. Each time Köprülü did nothing, usually expressing sympathy and saying the time was not right. In both cases Köprülü and the Ottomans were engaged in other foreign policy adventures that required considerable attention and resources. In 1669 Köprülü finally ended the long-running war with Venice (begun in 1645) over control of Crete and the Dalmatian coast. In 1672 he and the sultan personally led an army into Polish Ukraine, where warfare had been seething for some time among all sorts of participants. The treaty that ended that conflict in 1676 marked the greatest expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe in its long history.
Michels acknowledges the Ottoman success against Poland but argues that it would have been more profitable for Köprülü to take on the Habsburgs. He would have found ready allies among the Hungarians and an enemy weakened by its own incompetence and its wars with France. He speculates that, after the conclusion of peace with Poland in 1676, the Ottomans had an excellent opportunity to march into Hungary, but Köprülü died in that year and Ottoman initiative came to an end.
Most general narratives of the Habsburg/Ottoman rivalry at this time center on 1683, the second siege of Vienna, the crushing defeat of the Ottoman army before that city, and the subsequent Habsburg “liberation” of Ottoman Hungary in the ensuing war that ended in 1699. Michels talks about none of it. He has no use for Ahmed Köprülü's successor, Kara Mustapha, and little respect for the Habsburg army. Although I don't agree with all of the interpretations, this is an impressive piece of scholarship. I wish I had the author's language skills.
