Sultan Suleyman the Lawgiver (r. 1520–1566) led six invasions of Hungary during his reign. Although he failed to take Vienna (1529, 1532), by the conclusion of his last campaign in 1566, he had extended Ottoman rule up the Danube as far as Esztergom and beyond.Footnote 1 For his part, Ferdinand IFootnote 2 sought to consolidate his claim to HungaryFootnote 3 by sending armies against cities recently taken by the Ottomans on three occasions; none of these campaigns achieved its objective.Footnote 4 In the years between invasions from one side or the other, there were frequent truces and from 1547 a series of peace treaties. Nonetheless, Kleinkrieg remained the order of the day along the border. Convention dictated that a certain amount of raiding was tolerable, even in the relatively peaceful seventeenth century,Footnote 5 but sixteenth-century “raiding parties” (especially from the Ottoman side) were sometimes large enough to storm and capture important fortresses.Footnote 6 In the sixteenth century, castles on either side sent out bands of soldiers to force all peasants within reach to pay taxes to the “rightful” ruler.Footnote 7 In the seventeenth century, the Ottoman paşa of Buda would sometimes request the help of his Habsburg counterpart in collecting the sultan's taxes from border villages.Footnote 8
This essay deals with the turbulent sixteenth century, and in particular with the period between the Treaty of EdirneFootnote 9 (1547) and Sultan Suleyman's last campaign (1566), directed against the Habsburg fortress of Szigetvár. Hungary in these years was divided among three rulers, each of whom claimed rightful authority over the whole kingdom.Footnote 10 In Transylvania, where János Szapolyai (d. 1540) had governed as the sultan's vassal, he was succeeded by his widow, Isabella Jagellio, who ruled in the name of their young son.Footnote 11 In central Hungary, the sultans were from 1541 until 1689 represented by the paşa of Buda and the sançaks who reported to him.Footnote 12 The Kingdom of Hungary,Footnote 13 the Habsburg portion, had its capital at Posonia, modern Bratislava.Footnote 14 Ferdinand's decision to embark on the negotiations that had led to the Treaty of Edirne was forced upon him by his brother, Emperor Charles V (r. 1519–1556), who made it clear he would not commit major resources to a war in Hungary.Footnote 15 Terms of the agreement, negotiated by one of Charles's seasoned diplomats,Footnote 16 obliged Ferdinand to pay the sultan an annual “honorary gift” of 30,000 Hungarian florins for the right to hold what he de facto held in Hungary and Croatia.Footnote 17
As for Sultan Suleyman's last campaign, many readers of the Austrian History Yearbook will know that Szigetvár fell after a five-week siege on 30 September 1566, and that its commander, who died in a final sortie against the besiegers, has since been celebrated as a hero both in Hungary and in his native Croatia.Footnote 18 But the pre-history of these events is less well known: Why did this one fortress warrant a full-scale invasion, led in his own person by an aging sultan?Footnote 19 This essay uses diplomatic correspondence from the Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna,Footnote 20 together with published sources, to bring out the significance of the Szigetvár campaign by following three stories or sequences which, taken together, produced the events of 1566. These three pertinent contexts are first, Ferdinand's efforts to safeguard his west-Hungarian frontier by means of agreements with the Sublime Porte; second, the place of southwestern Hungary in the family strategy of Count Nicola IV Zrinski (or Miklós Zrinyi), commander of Szigetvár in 1566, and third, Szigetvár's role in the “forward” or aggressive strategy of border defense that Ferdinand adopted from the late 1550s (3).
Ferdinand's Reliance on Diplomacy after the 1547 Treaty of Edirne
Weaker powers cannot always afford the luxury of a coherent foreign policy. Vis-à-vis the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg monarchy was the weaker power,Footnote 21 at least until ca. 1576–1580, when the military frontier was at last provided with sufficient resources to make it a solid defensive line.Footnote 22 Not surprisingly, then, Ferdinand I's policy was marked by what the Ottomans not unreasonably saw as a contradiction. Even as he commanded his garrisons on the frontier with Ottoman Hungary to keep the peace, he sought to arrange, as it were out of earshot of the Porte, a transfer of power in Transylvania. This diplomatic incoherence was based on military logic. Ferdinand knew he could not challenge the elite Ottoman units stationed in Buda and other major towns of central Hungary, like Esztergom and Székesféhervár.Footnote 23 Transylvania seemed a softer target, in light of a 1538 treaty in which the then childless Janos Szapolyai had named Ferdinand his heir.Footnote 24
With Sultan Suleyman engaged in a distant campaign against Safavid Iran (1548–1549),Footnote 25 Ferdinand saw an opportunity to reopen secret discussions with Transylvania. By 1551, Isabella Jagellio and her estates had accepted an arrangement by which Transylvania would pass to the Habsburgs on the death of her son, János Sigismund. But the moment the Porte got word of this development, reaction was swift. Giovanni Maria Malvezzi, who had served as Ferdinand's ambassador since 1548, was thrown into prison. Ottoman troops occupied most of Transylvania's cities, and in what had been Habsburg territory, they made Temesvár the capital of a new paşaluk. By the time Ferdinand was able to reestablish contact with Malvezzi, a full year had passed.Footnote 26 But now, since Suleyman was setting off once more for Persia, Ferdinand saw what seemed another opportune moment for discussions with Isabella. These negotiations might have succeeded if Suleyman had encountered difficulty against Shah Tahmasp I, as Ferdinand hoped he would.Footnote 27 By the spring of 1554, however, news came that the sultan had achieved victory in PersiaFootnote 28 and threatened another invasion of Hungary in the next year.Footnote 29 The instructions for Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq,Footnote 30 sent as Ferdinand's new ambassador to the Porte in November 1554, show that he had not completely given up hope: He now asked for Transylvania as a gift from his gracious father, the sultan.Footnote 31 Only in March 1556, after his support in Transylvania had melted away, did Ferdinand finally agree to abandon his claim to Transylvania, as a pre-condition for discussions that might lead to a renewal of the Treaty of Edirne.Footnote 32 Busbecq would eventually bring back a new peace treaty, albeit not until 1562, after Grand Vezier Rüstem Paşa (d. 1561) was succeeded by the more flexible 'Ali Paşa.Footnote 33
What is important here is that Ferdinand's continuing efforts to gain possession of Transylvania gave Ottoman commanders in Hungary and Croatia good reason to increase their pressure on Habsburg lands. The Treaty of Edirne required peace along the border, but it did not specify where the border was. In lieu of an agreed-upon boundary,Footnote 34 two lines of fortresses faced each other across a contested space.Footnote 35 On both sides, garrison soldiers had motives for keeping the conflict active. Those classed as “volunteers”—Haiduks for the Habsburgs, Levend or Gönülü for the Ottomans—received a share of the booty but not always a salary. Men on the regular payroll could double their income from the proceeds of raiding.Footnote 36 Cattle- and sheep-stealing was too common to be noticed, and both sides held captured soldiers and civilians to ransom.Footnote 37 Turkish sources mention women held captive in Habsburg fortresses,Footnote 38 but the Ottomans had a more developed trade in slaves, due to slave markets in Sarajevo and Istanbul.Footnote 39
At the command level, the Habsburgs faced a problem of agency. While the sultan appointed and dismissed paşas and sançaks at will, most of the border fortresses on the Habsburg side were controlled by magnates: Ferenc Bebec at Fülek, Istvan Derffy at Kaposvar, András Bathory at Babocsa.Footnote 40 By the laws of Hungary, noble properties passed by escheat to the Crown in the absence of male heirs or in case of rebellion. Ferdinand took advantage of the law to gain possession of major castles (including Szigetvár),Footnote 41 but the state of royal financesFootnote 42 limited his ability to maintain and provision them. Vienna's preferred course was to hand the castle over to a loyal magnate, who was expected to use the castle's revenues to pay off whatever debts were assigned upon it.Footnote 43 The interests of these wealthy and powerful men accorded with those of the sovereign, but only up to a point. For example, Nikola IV Zrinski (1509–1566), representing the third generation of his family for whom war against the Turks was a lifelong pursuit, profited from raids into Ottoman territory that were a subject of continuous complaints at the Porte. At one point, Rüstem Paşa wanted Zrinski and his followers excluded from a truce under discussion because, he claimed, these men said openly “that their ancestors lived from banditry, and they intended to pass this manner of life on to their heirs.” If the Grand Vezier's comments are best interpreted as an effort to cast suspicion on an effective Habsburg commander, his description of Zrinski was not far off the mark.Footnote 44 It is not evident that Ferdinand could have reined in such men if he had wanted to, and in some cases he clearly did not want to.
At the southern end of the frontier, the Uskoks of Senj regularly plundered Ottoman shipping and Ottoman territory, with a wink and a nod from Vienna, which, faute die mieux, allowed these border warriors to support themselves.Footnote 45 Finally, the advice that Ferdinand received from his Council of Hungary, which from the 1540s met regularly in Posonia,Footnote 46 tended to favor a “forward” or aggressive defense of the border.Footnote 47 As its members were self-described “creatures” of Ferdinand, the council did not claim for itself the authority of the Hungarian Diet.Footnote 48 Yet these men—like Thomas Nadasdy, who was Lord Palatine from 1556 to 1562, and Nicholas Olah, the archbishop of Esztergom—were the dynasty's most influential supporters in Hungary, and their opinions were not to be taken lightly.
On the other hand, Ferdinand had good reason to try and bring his border commanders to heel. First and foremost, the Ottomans were better at Kleinkrieg, just as they were better at full-scale invasions. At a time when soldiers in the West found manual labor beneath their dignity,Footnote 49 the fact that the elite Janissary corps took responsibility for digging siege trenches shows the superior discipline of the Ottoman army.Footnote 50 This was certainly one reason for the effectiveness of their siege tactics.Footnote 51 Conversely, the ability of Ottoman units to practice the same stratagem again and again—challenging enemy garrison soldiers, and drawing them out into a prepared ambushFootnote 52—shows a lack of discipline on the Habsburg side. The Ottomans also worked from an overall plan, as may be inferred from the strategic location of the fortresses they seized. Szolnok (taken in 1552) provided a jumping-off point for raids up the Tisza toward Kascha, while Fülek (captured in 1554) opened the way for raids towards Nitra and other centers in what was called Upper Hungary.Footnote 53 The Hofkriegsrat in Vienna, established in 1556, concentrated on blocking Ottoman advance up the Danube by strengthening Györ and Komáron, just downstream from Vienna.Footnote 54 But in the so-called Cis-Danubian sector of the frontier, which will be of special concern here, Ottoman expansion continued.Footnote 55 By 1566, when both Szigetvár and Gyula were conquered, the Paşaluks of Buda and Temesvar occupied 40 percent of the old Kingdom of Hungary.Footnote 56
The preservation of royal authority was another reason for not letting border commanders do as they pleased. Ferdinand's Hofrat, which worked out instructions for envoys at the Porte, recruited men from the lesser nobility and the bourgeoisie.Footnote 57 Their legal training made them sensitive to questions of sovereignty, perhaps especially so in a composite monarchy whose basic units were themselves composites.Footnote 58 As Archduke of Austria, King of Bohemia, and King of Hungary, Ferdinand had the authority to command, and when Ferdinand signed a truce or a treaty, he, like the sultan, issued orders to have his border captains keep the peace. But officials at the Porte had little difficulty pointing to weak links in the Habsburg chain of command. For example, when the Bishop and Chapter of Zagreb refused a direct order to release a prominent Turkish prisoner, the Grand Vezier wondered whether “Your Majesty dares not coerce those priests, because he fears being cursed by them.”Footnote 59 While both sides understood the need for forbearance in regard to minor violations,Footnote 60 they also accepted the principle of pacta sunt servanda. Footnote 61 As Busbecq wrote, it “pertained to the honor and glory of a prince” to ensure that his promise of peace was kept inviolate.Footnote 62 He was speaking to the paşa of Buda and his entourage, but his words applied with greater force to his own sovereign.
Finally, Ferdinand was in some degree a prisoner of a diplomatic ploy he had tried repeatedly at the Porte. If he was truly a devoted “son” who expected from his “father” the sultan nothing less than the free gift of HungaryFootnote 63 (or at least Transylvania), was he not obliged to regard the sultan's “firm command” for peace as the best guarantee for the security of his frontier? In any case, did not everything that happened in the vast Ottoman Empire depend on the merum arbitrium of the sultan?Footnote 64 In fact, Ferdinand's advisers understood that Hungary's best protection was not the sultan's word, but the Shah of PersiaFootnote 65 drawing the Ottomans off to the east. But a strategy of professing trust in the sultan's word was no more dubious than a strategy of hoping the sultan would give away lands to demonstrate his magnanimity. If the former was to have any chance of success, it was incumbent on Ferdinand to make his border commanders behave.
For all these reasons, Ferdinand took measures to show the Ottomans he was serious about keeping his promises. Fortress commanders were forbidden to take on wandering haiduks. Those already serving in border castles were threatened with death by hanging if they committed infractions of the peace.Footnote 66 Officers who disobeyed orders to keep the peace might face loss of command, or even execution.Footnote 67 When a wealthy Muslim merchant was robbed while traveling from Székesféhervár, Ferdinand's envoys in Buda offered on his behalf to make good the losses.Footnote 68 At the same time, he kept in the forefront of discussion an issue that would show whether the Ottomans were serious about keeping the peace: the fixing of borders. Habsburg officials probably knew that the dividing line between Ottoman Bosnia and Venetian Dalmatia had on more than one occasion been marked out by joint commissions.Footnote 69 At least from 1545, Ferdinand's representatives at the Porte proposed that there be joint commissions to “place boundary markers (terminos) everywhere along the border.”Footnote 70 The Porte was not averse to the idea; in 1548 and in 1551, commissioners were appointed, but never met.Footnote 71
This tactic seemed to be paying off when Toygun Paşa was named paşa of Buda in 1553.Footnote 72 He acknowledged that infractions were committed by his men as well as Ferdinand's, and in September 1554 he invited Ferdinand to send “trustworthy persons” to investigate the “misdeeds” on both sides. Sent by Ferdinand, Paulus LitteratusFootnote 73 reported that Toygun Paşa had solemnly promised to “depute one of his men to accompany the said envoy, so as to perambulate together all the villages that have recently been taken over [by the Ottomans], and make sure they were at once restored” to their proper owners. Accordingly, when Busbecq reached Buda (December 1554), he brought Litteratus along to remind the paşa of his promise.Footnote 74 But Toygun Paşa changed his tune: “Even if I made a promise,” he said, “you yourselves can see from the expression on my face that I cannot keep it.”Footnote 75 This shift in direction was likely prompted by raids into Ottoman territory by Habsburg garrisons based in Cis-Danubian Hungary, at Szigetvár, Kaposvár, and Babosca. As will be seen below, Szigetvár was to be the focus of a cross-border battle for the next three years.
The climate for negotiations improved in 1559, when a succession struggle between Suleyman's two surviving sons—Bajazet and Selim—revived Ottoman interest in the possibility of peace in Hungary.Footnote 76 In February 1559, Busbecq reported that he and Rüstem Paşa had reached a tentative agreement on a draft treaty. The question of boundaries was not yet settled, but Busbecq had instructions to seek a joint commission to draw boundaries and to parcel out the taxes due from border villages.Footnote 77 At this point discussions stalled, in part because Ferdinand, in keeping with advice from the Council of Hungary, had sent troops to back up his claim to three fortress-towns controlled by Transylvania.Footnote 78 On this point, Ferdinand had to back down.Footnote 79 Then, in 1561, 'Ali Paşa's elevation to the Ottoman Empire's highest post opened the way to a settlement. The new Grand Vezier agreed to a joint border commission, and in March 1562 he proposed giving it more authority than Busbecq's instructions had envisioned: instead of allocating the taxes due from border villages, let the commission simply parcel out whole villages, so there would no longer be communities with obligations to both sides.Footnote 80 By 1 June, Vienna had a copy of the draft treaty, with the sultan's confirmation; one provision was that joint commissioners would “lay down definite boundaries.”Footnote 81 Yet from Busbecq's summary account of the negotiations [December 1562], it is clear that this clause was dropped from the final treaty at Vienna's behest.Footnote 82 Hence the question to be addressed here: Why did Ferdinand renounce a diplomatic objective he had pursued since 1545, just as it came within his grasp?
Southwestern Hungary in the Family Strategy of Count Nikola IV Zrinski
In the middle decades of the sixteenth century, the Austrian monarchy simply did not have the financial wherewithal to resist the advance of the Ottomans.Footnote 83 Ferdinand was thus dependent on the collaboration of magnate families whose own interests compelled them to invest in defending the border. For present purposes, the Zrinskis of Croatia were the most important of these local dynasties. Count Nikola III Zrinski (1489–1534) fought the Ottomans on many occasions, but he also safeguarded his lands by making truces with the sandçakbeg of Bosnia, a practice that made him seem, from Vienna's perspective, an unreliable partner.Footnote 84
Upon the death of Nikola III, his eldest son and chief heir, Count Nikola IV, had claims to lands concentrated in three parts of Croatia. On the Dalmatian coast, north and west of Senj, the small ports of Bacar and Bribir represented the oldest portion of the family inheritance.Footnote 85 To the east of Zagreb was a cluster of fortified towns formerly in the possession of the Ban of Croatia, Ivan Karlević (d. 1531), including Vrbovec and Lukavec. By a marriage contract between the families, the Karlević lands were to pass to Ban Ivan's only sister, Jelena Karlevića, the wife of Nikola III Zrinski and the mother of Nikola IV. But Hungarian law ruled out succession through the female line; thus despite support from the Croatian diet for the Zrinski claim, King Ferdinand had grounds for treating the Karlević inheritance as having escheated to the Crown. Not until 1541 did he recognize Nikola IV as the rightful possessor.Footnote 86 Finally, the Zrinskis held several castles near the Una, across from Bosnia, including Zrin (from which the family took its name) and Gvozdansko, where Nikola IV often resided. In 1527, Nikola III had boasted of an income of 30,000 Hungarian ducats from silver mines near Gvozdansko, opened with royal permission in 1463.Footnote 87 These mines were important for the Italian market, since the Ottoman conquest of Srebrenica (1512) had cut off the last channel by which Bosnian silver could be exported to the Mediterranean.Footnote 88
But this region was a hotbed of war. The Una, a tributary of the Sava, traced a route by which raiders from Bosnia could strike as far west as Zagreb or even Ljubljana.Footnote 89 Moreover, the Ottomans knew which of their foes had resources worth attacking. In the last decades of the fifteenth century, the sultan's raiders had targeted the estates of Croatia's leading magnate families, the Frankopani and the Kurjakovići.Footnote 90 Now they targeted the Zrinski estates. After attacks in 1540, in which an important castle and some silver mines in the Gvozdansko region were lost, Nikola IV petitioned Ferdinand to trade his endangered castles near the Una for lands of equivalent value in Istria or Gorizia. But Ferdinand had many such requests, and, as noted above, the royal fisc could only support a few truly critical fortresses.Footnote 91 The best Ferdinand could do was to promise Zrinski a small annual retainer, to be used in defending his castles.Footnote 92 Nonetheless, this arrangement (contemporaneous with settlement of the dispute over the Karlević lands) marked a thaw in relations with Vienna. From a strategic point of view, it made sense for a magnate with holdings in the critical Una region to assume larger responsibilities. At the end of 1542, Nikola IV accepted appointment by Ferdinand as Ban of Croatia.Footnote 93
As for a new territorial base,Footnote 94 an opening came in 1546, when Ferdinand ordered Ban Zrinski to expel Peter Keglević from lands that had escheated to the Crown, although Keglević claimed to have inherited them from his late-son-in-law, Gaspar Ernuth. Ernuth's possessions lay across the Drava, in the portion of Hungary's County Zala that formed a triangle bounded by the Mur and the Drava—a region that will here be referred to by its Croatian name, Međimurje. Once Zrinski had ejected Keglević, Ferdinand transferred the escheated lands in Međimurje to Zrinski, in settlement of 20,000 Hungarian florins owed by the Crown to Zrinski for unpaid salary and other debts. These new lands at once became the center of gravity for the family. At Čakovek, which Nikola IV now made his chief residence, he began construction of an “unconquerable” fortress in the new style, meant to support a sizable garrison.Footnote 95 In effect, he was withdrawing not just from central Croatia, but from the traditional Croatian way of dealing with Ottoman incursions, which was for the nobles to “rise up” (insurgere) and strike the attackers as they returned home encumbered by a train of booty.Footnote 96
Fortresses with regular garrisons, like Čakovek, depended on supplies from populated hinterlands. Southwestern Hungary, including Međimurje, had once been a grain-basket for a wider area, including Slavonia (northern Croatia), but the region was devastated and depopulated by Ottoman raids in the 1520s.Footnote 97 Zrinski accordingly took steps to make Međimurje a destination of choice for peasants fleeing from Croatia and other areas immediately affected by the fighting. Some of the royal taxes collected in County Zala were assigned to him in 1549; in 1550, he concluded with the Chapter of Zagreb a “perpetual farm” for the tithe in all of Međimurje, for the sum of 300 florins annually.Footnote 98 His petition for the right to collect all royal taxes due from peasants on his estates was initially rejected by the Hungarian Chamber of Accounts, but in 1561 Ferdinand granted him the privilege of offering all new settlers exemption from royal taxation for twelve years. Ottoman chroniclers record complaints that peasants in the sandçak of Požega (northern Croatia) were deserting their lands for better opportunities in Međimurje.Footnote 99 By 1555, Zrinski claimed 12,000 coloni; prior to a recent plague, he said, there had been twice as many. In 1556, Tamas Nadasdy, commander for the Cis-Danubian sector of the border, pointed to Zrinski as the one magnate who could victual Habsburg forces operating in the region: “His estates between the Drava and the Mur are still intact and populated.”Footnote 100
It was also in 1556 that Zrinski and his friend Peter Erdödy made a bargain. In conjunction with the marriage of Anna Erdödy, her father's heiress, and Juraj Zrinski, Nikola IV's eldest son, the two men traded properties. Erdödy received the former Karlević lands east of Zagreb, while Zrinski received Erdödy's holdings in County Vas (just north of County Zala), where the main fortified center was Monyorokerek. In keeping with this northward shift of his possessions, Zrinski subsequently divided his time between Čakovek and Monyorokerek. He also resigned his office as Ban of Croatia, whereupon Ferdinand appointed Peter Erdödy as his successor. As Nataša Stepanec points out in her fine study of the Zrinski family, the bargain exemplified two different strategies of territorial extension. While Erdödy chose to expand his bloc of holdings east of Zagreb, Zrinski created a chain of stepping-stones, from Lake Balaton to the Adriatic. Goods from Zrinski's Hungarian estates—notably oxen and cattle—traveled south via Međimurje, for shipment to ItalyFootnote 101— a trade that may have made up for lost profits at the family's endangered silver mines.Footnote 102
There remained the task of protecting Međimurje, now the central node of the family possessions, against the inevitable Ottoman attacks.Footnote 103 The lands acquired by Nikola IV included Kotoriba and other small castles defending the south bank of the Mur, and a major fortress at Legrad on the south side of the Drava, just west of where the Mur enters the Drava.Footnote 104 But a line of fortified sites depended on an anchor-fortress, with a large garrison and a good stock of supplies.Footnote 105 In southwestern Hungary, the anchor-fortress was Szigetvár, built in the second half of the fifteenth century on three islands connected by bridges: an un-walled town, a walled town, and a fortress surrounding a moated citadel.Footnote 106 Because Szigetvár had escheated to the Crown in 1550, it was under the supervision of the commander for the Cis-Danubian region, Tamas Nadasdy.Footnote 107
When Zrinski provided victuals in 1556, it was for a Habsburg army marching to relieve an Ottoman siege of Szigetvár.Footnote 108 In 1557, he was called upon to settle a quarrel among men serving under Markus Horvath, Szigetvár's captain. Zrinski sent word up the line about the fortress's wretched state of preparedness and was then asked to furnish victuals and peasant laborers for construction work.Footnote 109 When Horvath died in 1561, Zrinsky agreed to loan Ferdinand 10,000 thaler in cash and goods, to be repaid from royal taxes on his lands and from the captaincy of Szigetvár.Footnote 110 After Nadasdy's death in 1562, he was also named commander of the Cis-Danubian sector of the border.Footnote 111 The logic of his position was the same as it had been when he served as Ban of Croatia. By defending his own lands (in this case, Međimurje), he would also block Ottoman raids up the Drava (toward Varazdin, Ptuj, or Maribor) or up the Mur (toward Graz).
Szigetvár and the Strategy of a Forward Defense
In 1543, the Hungarian Diet identified Szigetvár as the key fortress for the Cis-Danubian region, between Lake Balaton and the Drava.Footnote 112 In 1548, while Balint Terek was lord of Szigetvár, officials at the Porte complained about raids and other infractions carried out by its garrison.Footnote 113 Under Wolfgang Derffy, the first commander appointed after Ferdinand had claimed Szigetvár for the Crown, the evil reputation of this fortress and its haiduks did not improve.Footnote 114 In the summer of 1555, Buda's Toygun Paşa requested and received permission to take action. Having marched southwest from Buda in July or August,Footnote 115 he first laid siege to and captured the castles of Kaposvár and Babosca. But as he dug in before Szigetvár, he received a letter from Ferdinand saying that he himself was lord of this fortress. The paşa not only raised his siege accordingly, but he also sent two envoys to Derffy, demanding an end to incursions into Ottoman territory from Szigetvár.Footnote 116 These envoys the garrison treated with shocking contempt: One man's head was cut off, the other was sent back minus his nose and ears.Footnote 117
During these events, Busbecq was back in Vienna, having been ordered by Rüstem Paşa to return and procure new instructions in which Ferdinand would definitively renounce Transylvania.Footnote 118 On his return to the Porte, he reached Buda on 23 November. On the day set for his audience, he found Toygun Paşa surrounded by his militares praefecti—the sandçakbegs who reported to him.Footnote 119 Pressed about Szigetvár, Busbecq responded that both sides had committed infractions; the only solution was for both sovereigns to issue firm commands to keep the peace. At this the militares praefecti “grumbled out loud: ‘Why has the sultan entrusted us with command, if not to protect his territory?’”Footnote 120 As Busbecq here seems to suggest, the paşa who failed to take Szigetvár had lost authority with his subordinates. He was also losing support at the Porte. By May or June 1556, 'Ali Paşa arrived to replace Toygun Paşa. From conversations with him at the Porte in April, Busbecq and his colleagues expected that the new governor would come to Buda with proposals for peace. Instead, he had orders to finish what Toygun Paşa had started.Footnote 121
Having captured Babocsa and Kaposvár, 'Ali Paşa began his siege of Szigetvár on 12 June. He proceeded as Sultan Suleyman's army would do ten years later, using timber and other materials to fill in the water-courses, so his men would have access to the walls of the citadel. Ferdinand, understanding “how important that citadel is for the preservation of our lands,” sent a relief army under Nadasdy; other forces were brought up from Lower Austria and Styria by Archduke Ferdinand, and from Croatia and Međimurje by Nikola Zrinsky. In council, the Habsburg commanders decided to draw 'Ali Paşa off from Szigetvár by investing Babocsa. The plan worked: 'Ali Paşa advanced on Babosca but was unable to prevent its recapture, and by the time he returned to Szigetvár, Markus Horvath's garrison had artillery in place for an effective bombardment of his camp. On 30 July he withdrew to Pécs.Footnote 122
Having failed to win Szigetvár, the Ottomans demanded it. Although Ferdinand had agreed to renounce Transylvania, officials at the Porte made it clear that he still could not have a new peace treaty unless he consented to raze the fortresses of Eger and Szigetvár.Footnote 123 Rüstem Paşa contended that these two strongholds belonged by right to the sultan. A few weeks later, as Busbecq's two colleagues were about to make their departure for Vienna (August 1557), the Grand Vezier reduced the conditions for peace to only one: Szigetvár must be “leveled to the ground.”Footnote 124
This unequivocal Ottoman demand prompted an exercise in the slow and cumbersome yet consensus-building process of consultation that was a hallmark of the sixteenth-century Habsburg monarchy. The Council of Hungary weighed in first, offering an opinion they said would be confirmed by the military men from Germany and Bohemia who had participated in the 1556 campaign: Szigetvár was as vital to the defense of what was left of Hungary as the fortress city of Belgrade had been for all of Hungary prior to its capture by the Turks in 1521. Moreover, if this position were lost, “it will not be possible for Styria, Austria, and even Vienna to remain safe from continuous and even daily incursion and devastation by the enemy.”Footnote 125 The reason the Ottomans wanted it torn down was that an invasion force headed for Styria or [Lower] Austria could not be secure so long as Szigetvár's strong garrison was in position to attack its supply lines from behind.Footnote 126 Bohemia, too, weighed in, urging Ferdinand not to conclude a peace, for the Turk never made or kept a treaty any longer than was useful to him, and more territory had been lost under conditions of “peace” than in time of war.Footnote 127 In December 1557, “some of His Majesty's councilors and noblemen from the province of Lower Austria” were given copies of all relevant documents, including the opinions from Hungary and Bohemia. The Austrians agreed that Szigetvár was more than just a Hungarian concern: The Ottomans could not advance into Styria or Austria and leave Szigetvár behind. Also, they said, it was not likely that the sultan himself would lead his army into Hungary merely for the sake of this one fortress.Footnote 128 Finally, since Ferdinand would, if a crisis arose, depend on help from the imperial princes and estates, there was one further step to be taken. By June 1558, he could report to Philip II that the Diet of Frankfurt was in agreement with his decision to continue pursuing peace with the Turks, but without giving up Szigetvár.Footnote 129 After almost a year, Ferdinand replied to Rüstem Paşa's demand: He would not raze Szigetvár.Footnote 130
If Szigetvár was by no means the only fortress from which incursions into the sultan's territory were reported,Footnote 131 it remained the focus of Ottoman complaints.Footnote 132 Rüstem Paşa's dragoman told Ferdinand's spy in 1559 the sultan would like his army to go to Hungary that year even if he could not, and that he would be satisfied if it did nothing but conquer Szigetvár.Footnote 133 In fact, more was involved than stopping raids into Ottoman territory. A number of references in the diplomatic correspondence point to Szigetvár's strategic importance. It must first be noted that the Habsburgs seem to have had an advantage in firepower on the Danube. When Ferdinand sent a diplomatic mission to the Porte in 1553, he chose as one of his two ambassadors Ferenc Zay, commander of the gunboat fleet based at Komáron. As Zay and his colleague traveled down the Danube, they noted that “the Turks do not at this time have much of a fleet.”Footnote 134 Late in 1565, on the eve of Suleyman's campaign into Hungary, the Ottomans were troubled by reports that the enemy had gathered “700 ships” at Komáron. In any case, both sides understood the importance of the link between Belgrade and Buda. In December 1554, Ferdinand's ambassadors at the Porte obtained a summary of Toygun Paşa's letter requesting permission to attack Szigetvár, Kaposvár, and Babocsa: “Know that the border entrusted to us will never be free of infestation from those fortresses, nor will navigation along the Danube be safe, until we take those fortresses from them.”Footnote 135 What was at stake was the Belgrade-to-Buda supply corridor on which the Ottomans' forward position in Hungary depended. Ottoman officials hoped to secure the river basin by re-colonizing arable lands along the Danube and the Lower Drava, but according to Nenad Moačanin, these efforts were not successful “until the 1560s,” because of raids from Habsburg fortresses, and especially Szigetvár. The fact that colonists sometimes rendered assistance to Szigetvár's marauding hayduks only made things worse.Footnote 136
Ottoman documents recently edited and translated by Gizela Prochaszka-Eisel and Claudia Römer provide further confirmation of this point.Footnote 137 In August 1554, Toygun Paşa complained that men from Szigetvár had captured “some Latin craftsmen” together with “other craftsmen from Belgrade,” for whom they were demanding a ransom of 2,000 to 3,000 florins each.Footnote 138 In May or June, 'Ali Paşa took office in Buda for a second time, after three years at the Porte. In July 1556 he wrote Ferdinand that in the period of his absence “your bands of robbers” from Veszprem and Szigetvár “have destroyed 927 ships on the Danube, belonging to Muslims.” Not long after his own departure from Belgrade, en route to Buda, he received word that “robbers from Szigetvár” had attacked fourteen more ships.Footnote 139 The disruption of Ottoman communications along the Danube was a logical pendant to Vienna's efforts to strengthen the fortresses guarding the Danube approaches to the capital.Footnote 140 By the 1560s if not sooner, raids of this kind were being carried out by other Habsburg garrisons within striking distance of the river,Footnote 141 and they certainly continued at Szigetvár under Zrinski's direct command. For example, the ağa of the azeb soldiers (naval infantry) in Buda was captured by men from Szigetvár near Osijek (Oezek) in 1565.Footnote 142
But Ottoman complaints about Szigetvár under Zrinski's captaincy refer more often to raids or attacks against Turkish strongholds in southwestern Hungary and northern Croatia. In 1559, Markus Horvath told Ferdinand's officials that the raids that brought complaints from the sandçakbeg of Pécs were carried out by men under Zrinski's command; his own troops, within the fortress of Szigetvár, had not been responsible.Footnote 143 As Zrinski explained to Nadasdy in February 1562, “the castles that the enemy keeps in these parts are almost in ruins,” as at Pécs and elsewhere; in context, he was arguing that adding a thousand men to Szigetvár's garrison could do more to thwart any invasion plans by the paşa of Buda than ten thousand men elsewhere. In March 1562, he prevented the sançakbeg of Požega from building a new fortress.Footnote 144 Zrinski also told Nadasdy that he hoped soon to have enough men to prevent the re-fortification of Pécs by its sandçakbeg, Qasim Paşa. This latter plan was apparently carried out. According to an Ottoman summary of Habsburg border infractions, Zrinski is accused of having brought “1200 cavalry, 800 arquebusiers, and 2 field guns near the fortress of Pécs, then prepar[ing] an ambush [in two nearby villages] in order to draw the late Qasim Paşa into a trap.”Footnote 145 At the Porte, 'Ali Paşa complained to Busbecq about the “large army” that Zrinski was directing toward Croatia—probably a reference to the action at Požega.Footnote 146 The Grand Vezier was incensed over reports of another battle in which two or more sandçakbegs had been “driven off” by Zrinski's men. Hitherto he had “closed one eye” to such matters, thinking that Ferdinand's war-making ambitions were limited to the Transylvanian frontier; what Zrinski was doing amounted to making war on the sultan.Footnote 147 On still another occasion Busbecq was upbraided about raids “into the bowels of the sultan's dominions”: Men from Szigetvár demanded tribute from villages under the authority of Ottoman castles at Mohács and Tolna.Footnote 148 In December 1565, when the sandçakbeg of Požega complained of continuing insults from Szigetvár, the sultan wrote back, promising a campaign in the coming spring in which the miscreants would be duly punished.Footnote 149 The strategy that may be inferred from Zrinski's attacks was a counterpart to the idea of defending Vienna by disrupting Ottoman shipping. The fortresses that would have served as staging areas for attacks up the Drava or the Mur were the ones targeted by strikes from Szigetvár.
Conclusion
Given the attention that has been devoted to him by scholars in recent years, it seems fair to say that Ferdinand has come to be better appreciated as a historical figure in his own right, not just as a prince who played second fiddle to a more famous brother. Yet his foreign policy remains largely in the shadows, not least in regard to the long eastern frontier where the very existence of his state was under threat. This essay has focused on a particular sector of that frontier, where the evolution of Habsburg policy over time gives one a fair sense of how Ferdinand and his advisers grappled with strategic problems. They by all means wanted a peace treaty with the Ottomans, so as to have some assurance that the sultan would not lead his main army into Hungary. But there came a turning point, possibly in 1559, when the Porte was preoccupied with internal problems (the struggle between Suleyman's two sons), but more likely late in 1558, after the Habsburg lands and the Imperial Diet had urged Ferdinand to maintain his position at Szigetvár. Earlier that year, the Porte denounced a re-fortification project that Archduke Maximilian was carrying out at Babocsa, describing it as a violation of the truce then in force. Archduke Maximilian agreed to suspend work.Footnote 150 In November 1558, Ferdinand sent word for his son to resume work, not at Babocsa, but at Szigetvár. At Maximilian's request, he also sent a list of places in Ottoman territory that would be “suitable for devastation.”Footnote 151 In other words, as elite opinion in the hereditary provinces and in Empire coalesced behind a firmer stance toward the Porte, Vienna opted for a frontier strategy that can only be seen as confrontational.
Turning down the realistic prospect of a joint commission to mark out the border, a goal that he had long sought, Ferdinand issued orders premised on the assumption that the border was best protected by keeping the enemy off balance. That such tactics suited the natural inclinations of frontier magnates on whose collaboration the dynasty depended—like Count Zrinski—may have also been a factor in the decision. As things turned out, Ottoman forces in the region do seem to have been put off balance as garrisons at Szigetvàr and elsewhere conducted repeated raids near enemy fortresses and along the Danube. But the Porte could not be expected to tolerate indefinitely attacks that threatened its capacity for offensive action in Hungary, and a “forward” policy along the border did nothing to change the existing balance of forces. By embarking on a path of limited aggression along the frontier, Ferdinand was taking a risk greater than he or his advisers appreciated. As Maximilian II would learn, after his father's death, this path turned out to be the road to Szigetvár.
