The Memory of Nicholas IV of Zrin and the Battle of Szigetvár in Croatia and the Balkans

The Memory of Nicholas IV of Zrin and the Battle of Szigetvár in Croatia and the Balkans Damir Karbić * Department of Historical Research, Institute of Historical and Social Sciences, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Zagreb [email protected] Count Nicholas IV of Zrin (Zrinski in Croatian and Zrínyi in Hungarian) was certainly one of the most important fĳigures of 16th-century Croatian and Hungarian common history. He especially excelled himself as one of the most important anti-Ottoman fĳighters, which fact helped him to rise to an excep- tional position among the aristocracy of the whole Kingdom of Hungary– Croatia and to become a member of the supranational aristocracy of the contemporaneous Habsburg Monarchy, as has been amply demonstrated by Géza Pálfffy in several recent studies.1 His life completely coincided with the period when the whole kingdom was engaged in a long-lasting struggle for survival against the Ottoman Empire and his role in that struggle was very much determined by the fact that his original estate, the castle of Zrin in the border region of the Croatian parts of the kingdom near Bosnia (which at the time of his birth had already been held by the Ottomans for about fĳifty years), was extremely endangered. Anti-Ottoman fĳighting was already “traditional” within the family. Count Nicholas’s ancestors had participated in that fĳighting * This work has been supported in part by the Croatian Science Foundation under the project “Sources, Manuals and Studies for Croatian History from the Middle Ages to the End of the Long Nineteenth Century” (IP-2014-09-6547). 1 See, for example, Géza Pálfffy, ‘Egy horvát–magyar főúri család a Habsburg Monarchia nemzetek feletti arisztokráciájában. A Zrínyiek határon átívelő kapcsolatai’, in Sándor Bene and Gábor Hausner (eds.), A Zrínyiek a magyar és a horvát históriában. Budapest, 2007, 39– 67; Idem, ‘Verschiedene Loyalitäten in einer Familie. Das kroatisch–ungarische Geschlecht Zrinski/Zrínyi in der “supranationalen” Aristokratie der Habsburgermonarchie im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert’, in Wilhelm Kühlmann, Gábor Tüskés and Sándor Bene (eds.), Militia et Lit- terae. Die beiden Nikolaus Zrínyi und Europa. Tübingen, 2009, 11–32; Idem, ‘A szigetvári Zrínyi Miklós a Magyar Királyság és a Habsburg Monarchia arisztokráciájában’, in Zoltán Varga (ed.), Zrínyi Miklós élete és öröksége. A 2008. november 7–8-án Zrínyi Miklós születésének 500. évfordulója alkalmából Szigetváron rendezett konferencia előadásainak sze- rkesztett szövege. Szigetvár, 2010, 28–48. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi 10.1163/9789004396234_026 510 damir karbiĆ since the very fĳirst incursions in the second decade of the 15th century, during which the Ottomans had just played a part in the internal struggles between King Sigismund of Luxemburg and Bosnian Duke Hrvoje.2 Count Nicholas’s grandfather, Count Peter II, and his uncle, Paul III, actively participated in the defence of their own estates and of the southern parts of the kingdom comprising both the territories of Slavonia (in which the castle of Zrin was situated) and the adjacent territories of the Kingdom of Croatia–Dalmatia. They both perished in another anti-Ottoman battle which would receive almost mythical character in Croatian history, that of Krbava in 1493,3 while Michael, son of Paul III (Nicholas’s older cousin), perished in the Battle of Mohács in 1526.4 Count Nicholas’s father, Count Nicholas III, also spent almost all his life in anti-Ottoman fĳighting,5 while Nicholas’s uncle on the maternal side, Count John Torquatus of Krbava, also a ban of Croatia, as his nephew would be later on, was a particularly celebrated hero and victim of these wars, whose career very much marked and helped the future development of Count Nicholas IV, as has been recently emphasised in the research of Szabolcs Varga.6 During his lifetime, Count Nicholas IV received, in these wars, both great fame and large estates in Croatia and Hungary, becoming in such manner one of the greatest landowners of the kingdom. These developments would subsequently greatly influence the development of the family. Among the acquisitions were two later major seats of the family, which would subsequently become cultural centres of almost legendary value for both Hungarian and Croatian history – Čakovec (Csáktornya) in Međimurje (Muraköz) in Zala County and Ozalj in Zagreb County.7 2 This is well illustrated by an episode when Count Peter I of Zrin, great-grandfather of Count Nicholas IV, sent an Ottoman prisoner to Emperor Sigismund in Constance in September 1417. For more details, see Szabolcs Varga, Europe’s Leonidas: Miklós Zrínyi, Defender of Szigetvár (1508–1566). Budapest, 2016, 51–52. 3 Varga, Europe’s Leonidas, 55–56. For the battle of Krbava as a landmark of Croatian history and previous scholarship on it, see Suzana Miljan and Hrvoje Kekez, ‘The Memory of the Battle of Krbava (1493) and the Collective Identity of the Croats’, Hungarian Historical Re- view 4:2 (2015) 283–313. 4 Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski, Zrin grad i njegovi gospodari. Zagreb, 1883, 57. 5 Ivan Jurković, ‘Nikola Stariji i Nikola Sigetski’, in Zoran Ladić and Đuro Vidmarović (eds.), Povijest obitelji Zrinski. Zbornik. Zagreb, 2007, 11–19; Varga, Europe’s Leonidas, 85–98. 6 Szabolcs Varga, ‘Adalékok a Zrínyi család felemelkedéséhez. A Karlovics-örökség’, in Varga (ed.), Zrínyi Miklós élete, 4–28; Croatian translation: ‘Prilozi povijesti uspona obitelji Zrinski ostavština Karlovićevih’, in Szabolcs Varga, Studije o povijesti Sigeta i obitelji Zrinski u 16. stol- jeću. Szigetvár, 2015, 9–37. 7 For more details on the life and agency of Count Nicholas IV of Zrin, see the aforementioned and most recent biographical study by Szabolcs Varga (Europe’s Leonidas). The book is an .

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