Introduction

This book seeks to narrate one part of one of the longest wars in European history. Armed conflict between the Kingdom of Hungary and the nascent Otto- man Empire started in the late fourteenth century and only ended in the early eighteenth, or, in a sense, even later. By then, Hungary had been territorially dismembered for 150 years, with one part of the medieval kingdom integrated into the Habsburg Empire, another under direct Ottoman rule, and the third forming a semi-independent state under Ottoman suzerainty. It is the second half of this long period (1526–1686) that is traditionally examined under the rubric of “Hungary in the Ottoman era.” Yet the period explored in this study, ending with the battle of Mohács on 29 August 1526, deserves the adjective “Ottoman” no less, even if at that time it was a still independent and undivided Kingdom of Hungary that opposed an ever mightier Ottoman Empire. From the very first appearance of Turkish raiders on Hungarian soil, the menace rep- resented by the new conquerors loomed so large over Hungary as to gradually subsume all other aspects of foreign and domestic politics. Fighting against the Ottomans became the single most important aim of successive kings and gov- ernments, even if the ways and means they chose to do so varied constantly. Alongside narrating events, this book also seeks to explain their course and changing features in terms of the specific social and military structures of the rival powers. Warfare between the Ottomans and the Hungarians had nothing of the chivalric gallantry that saved the lives of kings John of France at Poitiers in 1356 and Francis i of France at Pavia in 1525. Two kings of Hungary fell in battle with the Ottomans, both of whom belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian dynasty of the Jagiellos, while a third, Albert of Habsburg, died from an ill- ness contracted while leading a campaign against the Turks. The consequences of these deaths are seldom emphasized. Suffice it to say that, had Wladislas i survived the battle of Varna (1444), János Hunyadi would probably never have become governor of Hungary and his son, Matthias, would have never as- cended the Hungarian throne. Mutual cruelty was a basic feature of Ottoman- Hungarian warfare, as the slaughter of Christian captives in the aftermath of both Nicopolis and Mohács shows as clearly as does the regular sending of sev- ered Turkish1 heads to Buda by the Hungarian border captains. The profoundly

1 I am perfectly aware of the fact that the term “Turkish” does not correspond to “Ottoman,” and that, moreover, the overwhelming majority of Ottoman subjects the Hungarians con- fronted in the Balkans were not ethnic Turks. I have nevertheless decided to occasionally use it as an alternative to Ottoman in order to avoid overuse of the latter word. The decision

2 Introduction

different character of this warfare is also indicated by the almost collective death of the Hungarian episcopate on the plain of Mohács at a time when prel- ates no longer regularly took to the field in person in the West. Although the assertion that the Ottoman Empire lived for war may indeed be “a damaging and misleading stereotype” and one that unduly privileges “a single aspect of a rich and varied world,” especially from a wider perspective encompassing the whole history of that Empire,2 it remains a fact that the Ot- tomans and their constantly expanding state were perceived by their Christian neighbours in the Balkans and beyond, right from the outset, as a predatory power that fed on the flesh of its victims. The fight against it was consequently seen as a struggle for survival, one which had necessarily to end with the fall of one of the contending parties – from the European perspective, that of the Ot- tomans, of course.3 Such an approach left little room for accommodation, least of all in Hungary, which was the first Christian power the Ottoman expansion encountered that had political and military institutions sufficiently developed to be termed a state in the limited medieval sense of the world.4 It also had a territorial cohesion that prevented its dismemberment for almost one and a half centuries. This was in marked contrast to the various Balkan polities such as Serbia or parts of Bosnia, which disintegrated fairly quickly under the first blows of the new Muslim enemy and thereafter lived in an uneasy mix of op- position to, and collaboration with, the conquerors. Thus, from the perspective of countries that, like Hungary, were forced to channel an ever-increasing part of their resources towards defence against the Ottomans, it is certainly not un- fair to assert that “waging war constituted the raison d’être of the (Ottoman) empire.”5 It is no wonder that, very shortly after the first clashes with the Hungar- ians, the Ottomans came to be identified as the “chief enemy” (inimicus capi- talis) of the Hungarian kingdom and, with reference to the religious divide, as

is to a certain extent warranted by the contemporaneous usage that invariably identified as “Turks” the subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and the sultan as “emperor of the Turks” (imperator Thurcorum). 2 Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2004), 1. 3 Pál Fodor, The Unbearable Weight of Empire. The Ottomans in Central Europe – A Failed At- tempt at Universal Monarchy (1390–1566) (Budapest: Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2016), 27, citing Hunyadi’s letter of 1448. 4 The only exception, Byzantium, was a mere shadow of its former self, its territory being re- stricted to the capital itself and some small coastal regions. 5 Géza Dávid, “Ottoman armies and warfare,” in Suraiya N. Faroqui and Kate Fleet (eds), The Cambridge History of Turley. Vol. 2. The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, 1453–1603 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 280.