Letters from Turkey

LETTERS FROM TURKEY Letters from Turkey, considered the best Hun,garian prose of the eighteenth century, is written by Kelemen Mikes, a Transylvanian nobleman who went into exile with Ferenc Rakoczi II, the Prince of Transylvania, after the War of Independence in 1704 - 1711 in which the Prince fought to preserve independent Transylvania. The Prince and his entourage spent some years in France, and were then invited to Turkey by Sultan Ahmed III, going there in 1717. Some of the party eventually left, but, like Rakoczi, Mikes spent the rest of life in exile in Turkey. This memoir had a considerable vogue in Transylvania at the time, and Mikes writes in a well-established tradition. The 207letters, never before translated from Hungarian, were addressed over some forty years to an aunt in Constantinople. In them, Mikes speaks of the Hungarians' daily life, their hopes and disappointments, and of current events in Turkey and beyond; he describes the deaths of some of the party including that of the Prince himself. He also gives an account of a military campaign along the Danube and an embassy to Moldova, ranging over religious, historical and philosophical topics and recounting numerous anecdotes. All the while his patriotic feelings never leave him, nor does his affection, not unblinkered, for his Prince. The last letter, written four years before his death, sees him become head of the Hungarian community in Turkey, last survivor of the original band of Transylvanian nobles exiled to a far country. Bernard Adams, the translator and editor of this volume studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was a Fellow of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London and specialises in the translation of Hungarian literature. 9780710306104 Letters From Turkey Kelemen Mikes Chamberlain Of The Last Prince Of Transylvania Size: 232 x 154mm Spine size: 19 mm Color pages: Binding: Hardback LETTERS FROM TURKEY KELEMEN MIKES CHAMBERLAIN OF THE LAST PRINCE OF TRANSYLVANIA Translated from the Hungarian and edited by BERNARD ADAMS First published 2000 by Kegan Paul International Limited Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third A venue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Bernard Adams, 2000 Transferred to Digital Printing 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-7103-0610-4 (hbk) Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. The publisher has made every effort to contact original copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ix GLOSSARY XV THE LETTERS 1 NOTES 259 ------~ 1• _; z • LETTERS FROM TURKEY INTRODUCTION More was lost at Mohacs' goes the proverbial Hungarian response to news of catastrophe, for it was at Mobacs, to the west of the Danube near the frontier with modem Croatia, that on 29th August 1526 an Ottoman army under Suleyman the Magnificent annihilated a Hungarian force led by Lajos II, who lost his life in the ensuing flight. The consequence for the Hungarians of this defeat was loss of independent statehood, with the division of the country into Turkish Hungary (occupied territory), Royal Hungary (ruled by the Austrian Hapsburg dynasty) and Transylvania. For Turkish Hungary the period of occupation was a wretched time, during which much damage was done by the conquerors' boundless exploitation of the country, large areas of which became virtually uninhabitable. The situation in Royal Hungary was little better. Not only was the new ruler foreign, claiming the crown through relationship to the deceased Lajos, but also the frontier was ill-defined and worse defended, with cross-border raids by the Turks a constant feature oflifu. In Transylvania, however, the extreme east of the country, things were rather better. The mountainous terrain was less vulnerable to military action than the plains to the west, and the Sultan remained content to have the Princes as vassals whose tribute ensured their semi-autonomous status. After Mohacs Transylvania, always a distinctive element of Greater Hungary by virtue of its separate constitution under a viceroy, became in effect an independent state. Refugees from Turkish Hungary went there rather than to Royal Hungary, and Transylvania attained international importance both as the defender of Hungarian liberties against the Hapsburgs, and as the bulwark of Protestantism in Eastern Europe. The R.ak6czi family was of princely Transylvanian stock, and when, following the death of Suleyman at Szigetvar in 1566, Ottoman power began slowly to wane, they and their kinsmen were at the fotefiont of opposition. Count Mild6s Zriny~ commander of Szigetvar, who led his remaining men in a sally to death when the month-long siege by prodigious odds had become hopeless, was an ancestor of Dona, wife of Prince Ferenc Rak6czi I and mother of Ferenc II; Zrinyi's great-grandson, IX LETTERS FROM TURKEY Viceroy of Croatia, strove by activity military, political and literary to liberate Hungary from the Turks. It was his hope that Gyorgy Rak6czi IT, Prince of Transylvania 1648-60, would emerge as leader of a united Hungary, but this was not to be, and Zrinyi spent his final years in unsuccessful endeavours to bring the Austrians into a war against the Turks. He died in 1664, killed in a hunting accident, and it was not until 1686 that Buda was taken by the international forces under the Duke of Lorraine. By the end of the century the Turks were almost completely expelled, and the Peace of Karlowitz (1699) formally ended their occupation ofHungary. Prince Ferenc ll, by far the best known internationally of his family, was born in 1676., the year of his father's death; his mother subsequently married the kuruc leader lmre Thokoly, who reigned briefly as Prince of Transylvania in 1690. Removed from parental care by the Austrian authorities in 1688, young Ferenc was educated in a Jesuit school in Bohemia and at the University of Prague, which instilled in him a profound religious sense and inculcated a much more pacific view of the world than his turbulent ancestors had held; he was even dissuaded from speaking Hungarian. On return in 1694 to the family estates at Sarospatak he became aware of the plight of his compatriots and almost by right of inheritance found himself a leading figure in the kuruc resistance to the Austrians, who had by this time replaced the Turks as oppressors of the Hungarians. In 1701, discovered in a plot to enlist fureign support, he was imprisoned by the Austrians and condemned to death but escaped with the aid of his wife, to spend two years in Poland. His leadership in the War of Independence from 1703 onward resulted in his election in 1704 and installation in 1707 as Prince of Transylvania; in 1705 he was elected leader of the Hungarian conflxlerated estates, and in 1707 the Hapsburgs were fonnally discrowned by the Hungarian Parliament. Initially he received support from Louis XIV, but when, as an eventual consequence of the French defeat at Blenheim, this support was withdrawn Rilk6czi was obliged to end the struggle, and with a number of followers left Hungary in February 1711, shortly before the signing of the Treaty of Szatmar that brought the war to a close. The party went to Poland, where Rilk6czi hoped in vain to find support from Augustus n or even from Peter I of Moscow, and stayed for more than a X LET1ERS FROM TURKEY year in Danzig. In 1712 he and three companions went to France\ where various of his adherents bad preceded him. There he remained, firstly as a guest of Louis XIV, then as a resident in the monastery of Grosbois, where he acquired strongly Jansenist views. In 1717, at the repeated invitation of Sultan Ahmet m, he moved to Turkey. The Turkish reason for extending hospitality to Rak6czi was that at the time Turkey was at war with Austria, and it was hoped that the presence of so influential and popular a figure would bring Transylvania, if not all Hungary, into the lists on the Turkish side. Even before Rak6czi's arrival, however, the Turks had suffered a serious defeat at Belgrade and the war was lost. The Hungarians, by now in many cases destitute and dependent on the charity of the Porte, had nowhere to go, and were obliged to remain in Turkey, being settled after some three years of various abodes at Tekirdag (called by its Greek name Rodost6 in the Letters) on the Marmara coast some eighty miles west of Istanbul. There Ferenc II died in 1735 and was succeeded by his son J6zsef, who died three years later. Some of the Hungarians contrived to leave Turkey over the years, but most died there of old age or disease. There was in Ferenc ll's retinue a young Szekely nobleman named Kelemen Mikes. Born in 1690 in the village of Zagon, to the east of Brasov in south- eastern Transylvania, and educated by the Jesuits in Kolozsvar, Mikes entered the Prince's service in 1707 as a member of the Society of Noble Youths and accompanied him into exile even though, under the provisions of the Treaty of Sz.at:mar, he could safely have remained in Hungary.

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