Download PDF | Andrew Wheatcroft - The Enemy at the Gate_ Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe-Basic Books (2010).
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Acknowledgements
The Enemy at the Gate has been slowly growing for almost the entirety of my writing life. In a sense, the idea for this book began with one conference and ended with another. In 1972, Geoffrey Best and I organised a meeting at the University of Edinburgh in the then-new field of War, Peace and Peoples. We had both switched from other interests to the study of war and society; Geoffrey has gone on to be much more productive in the field than I have been: his friendship has been a constant in all the years since then.
In the late 1990s I picked up the threads of this subject which had been in abeyance over fifteen years. By then I had written other works on the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, and felt confident enough to take up the main questions which are the subject of this book: why did they fight each other for so long — and why did they finally stop fighting? In 2007 I had almost finished the text and then attended another conference, at the University of Reading, on ‘Crossing the Divide: Continuity and Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern Warfare. Whereas at Edinburgh we had quite rapidly assembled a hand-picked group who met, talked and argued (sometimes fiercely) day and night for four days, Frank Tallett and David Trim had spent two years organising a much larger and more open meeting of experts: it was a huge success. The battlefield is not my preferred territory; descriptions of war and suffering can still cause me a very real sense of revulsion. Yet both Edinburgh in 1972 and Reading in 2007 demonstrated to me that war and conflict are central to our understanding of the past.
I want to thank those who have been both an inspiration and, like all good friends, a practical help. I have boldly dispensed with titles in listing them here.
John Keegan was in our Edinburgh group in 1972, and I have valuedboth his friendship and his work ever since. We have written books together and he was the first person to encourage my interest both in the Habsburgs and in the use of visual material in the study of history. For this book I have tried to apply some of the insights contained in his groundbreaking work, The Face of Battle.
John Brewer flits invisibly through these pages. He has been a trailblazer in almost every topic that I have covered. The Sinews of Power showed the economic consequences of war in developed societies; and the huge collective work, Consumption and the World of Goods, edited with Roy Porter, provided the superstructure for my work on images and networks of communication. Now, with the final chapter of his book A Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century, John has again introduced me to ideas and material I would never have found for myself. Over the decades — in Florence, Los Angeles, Oxford and London — John and Stella have been the best of friends; neither of them can know how much their constant support has meant to me.
Writing this book has created a new passion for Hungary. I only wish that I could read and understand the marvellous sinewy language beyond a few words and phrases; my colleague Diana Kali has assured me that it is now too late to begin. I am very grateful for her help by translating material from the Hungarian, including a marvellously spirited version of the last section of Miklés Zrinyi’s epic Szigeti veszedelem (The Peril of Sziget), published in 1651 and never translated into English.
I now can entirely understand the old Latin tag extra Hungariam non est vita, si est vita non est ita — there’s no life outside Hungary, and if there is, it’s not life. My guide in this discovery has been Stephen Palffy who, with the spirited support of Annamaria Almasy, has introduced me to the Hungarian way of life — from perfect food and wonderful wine to a sheer joy in life — and has provided often complex answers to my endless questions. I have benefited especially from Stephen's extraordinarily broad knowledge of the issues and the personalities I encountered in the course of writing this book. Since Palffys have appeared for generations on these battlefields, this has been invaluable.
Budapest has become for me a quintessence of scholarly excellence. Thanks to Gabor Agoston in Washington D.C., who smoothed my path, I met Pal Fodor and the group of erudite and immensely active Ottomanists at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Terza Oborni in turn introduced me to Agnes Salgo Wojtila at the National Széchényi Library, which houses the best researched collection of images I have encountered anywhere. Her kindness and expert knowledge have been a very great help. Opposite the Library, a Habsburg palace on the castle hill — the scene of so much bloodshed in this book — now contains the National Gallery of Art, a treasure house of nineteenth-century history paintings; next door to it, the City Museum is home to a huge collection of material on the siege of Buda in 1686. From their resources I have culled some of the paintings and images that appear in these pages.
Other parts of this book have been researched in Vienna, Graz, Edinburgh, London, Washington DC and Philadelphia. In Vienna, I consulted the Wien Bibliothek, the Osterreichische National Bibliothek and the Wien Museum; in Graz, the Joanneum; in Great Britain, the British Museum, the London Library, Cambridge University Library and the National Library of Scotland; in Washington, the Library of Congress and the Folger Library. In Stockholm Henrik Andersson showed me the unique printer's manuscript of Marsigli’s last work in the collection of the Livrustkammeren; in Philadelphia, Earle Spamer helped me with the volumes of the Lindsay manuscripts held by the American Philosophical Society. I especially appreciated the kindness of Peter Parshall, who introduced me to the extraordinarily rich collection of engravings and woodcuts in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
To Claudia Fabian at the Bayerische Staats Bibliothek in Munich, I owe a great debt of gratitude. She was the first person to understand how my pursuit of images in books could ‘add value’ to the great digitisation projects in European libraries. She joined in setting the direction of our research project — the Printed Images Research Consortium — by James Knowles, Gerald Maclean, Agnes Salgo Wojtila, Sylvia Matt] Wurm, and the project manager, Susanne Peters. No one has provided more input into this book than Susanne. She has read every word through endless drafts, tactfully suggested changes, more firmly excised some of its excesses, loaned me books, and provided a stream of ideas. I do not think a simple ‘thank you’ could ever express my gratitude. Gerald Maclean, both in writing and in conversation, has been the stimulus of much that finally appeared in these pages. He and Donna Landry have also helped me to understand much better a world that centred on the horse, and by implication its role n the eastern war. At times, they must have dreaded my simplistic interrogations.
I also want to thank Peter and Barbara Geymeyer for their extensive hospitality in Bavaria, and Peter for his exceptional knowledge of Austrian engraved images. His book collection, for example, provided in an instant the detail of where Bosnian regiments were stationed before 1914, turning a supposition into a historical fact. That Graz features repeatedly in these pages is partly because it should, for good historical reasons, but also because Peter and Greta Kocevar entertained me, and proved a wonderful source of arcane information about Styria: a magical region and the heart of old Austria.
Working on the text with Tessa Harvey has been thoroughly enjoyable and fruitful. Her unerring sense of what works on the page taught me a great deal; I can still hear her voice: ‘Don’t give the story away yet.’ I would like to thank Lara Heimart and her team at Basic Books, who have been effective, fun to work with, attentive to every detail, and above all, most wonderfully encouraging.
It may seem bizarre to acknowledge a place — Craigieburn. This book is about borders and boundaries: living in this very old house, writing at the top of a Scottish border tower first burned out by reivers in 1570, makes this history of raiding and border warfare along another, far distant frontier very real. It has always been a contested and debatable land, much like the territory fought over by Habsburgs and Ottomans. It was a land of war and skirmishing, but now it exemplifies amity.
My wife Janet is at the centre of this book and of everything else. She has found time to work with me on this project, with advice and recollections of places we had been to and which I had forgotten. Most valuable of all has been the half-expressed ‘no’, saving me from many fine messes.
Preface
I first set foot in Vienna in late August 1963 from the Belgrade train.’ The dingy ‘hotel’ that I found not far from the station was the worst I have ever stayed in, surpassing in awfulness even a workers’ hostel in Seville, with its bedbugs and cockroaches. But it was all I could afford. Other dejected occupants came and went carrying their cardboard suitcases strapped up with rough string, but none of them stayed long. I did, because there was a good local (Beisl) in the next street and I could live off soup and bread and sometimes, every few days or so, a redemptive glass of rough white wine.
In 1683, exactly 280 summers before, a vast Ottoman camp had occupied the same spot: the Turks were besieging Vienna, for the second time in history. They had been there before, during the first siege in the autumn of 1529. Of course, there was no sign or memory of either ferocious struggle and in 1963 I had barely heard of them. What you could see were traces of a much more recent assault. In 1945, the Soviet 3rd Ukrainian Front armies had fought for twelve days street by street with the Nazi Waffen SS, finally taking the city on 13 April. Eighteen years later, high up on the facade of a long apartment block, I could still see the tell-tale spatter of bullets.
Just a few months earlier I had seen those same marks on the park walls behind the Humanities Faculty (Facultad de Filosofia y Letras) in Madrid; within the buildings where we studied, in the early winter of 1936 the Republicans had fought desperately, retreating from floor to floor, but still successfully holding back General Franco’s Army of Africa. Seeing those pockmarks in Vienna produced an instant frisson: I knew what they meant. So from those first moments, submerged beneath the more normal responses to Vienna’s exuberant life of food, drink, art, music and culture, I also had an uneasy sense of war, violence and mortal struggle.
For an eighteen-year-old, fuelled with his Austro-Hungarian grandmother’s romantic pre-1908 memories, Vienna was both enticing and a little depressing. But those pitted walls, in some places like a huge, ugly rash, were what stayed in my mind. Next time I came, I at least knew about the Turks besieging the inner city in 1683. My guide was John Stoye’s then-new book The Siege of Vienna, published in 1964, and every day I traced an identical path through streets of the Inner City, trying to relate what had happened in 1683 to the buildings that now stood there. The street plan in most places had remained much the same, but there were then (before the days of ‘heritage’) no signs or plaques that suggested what had happened centuries before.
Nevertheless I soon created my own landmarks: a butcher serving wonderful fresh sausages with a plate of sauerkraut and a glistening potato salad; a seedy bar that had good cheap wine, best during September and October. I later found much better wine by taking the tram out to the wine villages like Grinzing or a local train to a Lokal in the shadow of the great abbey at Klosterneuburg. But through the subsequent decades, my old haunts began to vanish, although more slowly than in other European cities. The building of the Underground (U-Bahn) in the 1980s, Vienna’s most spectacular construction project since the demolition of the ancient walls and the building of the Ringstrasse a century before, was the end of the old pre-1914 world.
Or so it seemed. In fact, it promoted a rediscovery. The ancient walls and bastions, supposedly demolished, are still present, at least in their trace and foundations, just below the surface of the new nineteenth- and twentieth-century city. A few months before I finished this book, I told a friend of seeing some excavation work close to the National Theatre (Burgtheater). The builders were digging the foundations for a new office block, and had exposed what looked like some old vaults. The colour of the walls and rubble was odd, rather pale, and I was not sure whether it was brick or stone. He believed he knew what I had seen: the walls of Vienna. When the builders of the Ringstrasse removed the fortifications, stone by stone, from the 1850s onwards, they were only taken down to just below ground level, providing a solid foundation for the new buildings of the great project. So the walls of Vienna are still there, or at least the vestiges of them, just as the more recent marks of the Russian assault on the city were still there in 1963, if you knew where to look.”
Knowing where the events took place was important. Walking the ground was a good idea, but often the landscape had altered irrecoverably. Nevertheless, as the story took shape, and grew inexorably, there were more trips to battlefields and to other places we would now call sites of memory. In fact more often than not they were sites of oblivion. No one there knew or could even suggest where some long-forgotten battle had taken place. Sometimes I had more luck. Above the site of the Battle of St Gotthard, on the modern frontier between Austria and Hungary, near the village of Mogersdorf, there is a low hill overlooking the battlefield. On it a local enthusiast and the community have created a little memorial museum.’ That battle was the most historic thing that ever happened in Mogersdorf, and the people there have made, in effect, a war memorial.* But that memorial records only an instant in a long and complex history, out of context. It is just one disconnected element in a long story.
* * *
This, then, is not a straightforward history. With something so evanescent and imponderable as fear, my main topic, I had no idea what would be relevant or useful. Late on in my quest, one of the finest historians of Ottoman Hungary, Pal Fodor, gave me a clue why this should be. One day, walking out of the Academy of Sciences in Budapest, he told me that we know a great deal about many terrible incidents that had taken place in Ottoman Hungary. We might know where an outrage had occurred; we might even know who had suffered or what had happened to them. But none of these horror stories created a universal, a stereotype, that could be generalised for every similar occasion. Each event was sui generis, unique, unless we could realistically suggest otherwise.* History is messy, and usually manages to surprise us.
By chance I had stumbled into a huge and only partially cultivated field. A huge amount of fine work had been done on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, very much less on the seventeenth and almost nothing on the eighteenth.° For this reason, I have concentrated on this later period, with the Siege of Vienna in 1683 as its centre piece until the final period of conflict between the two imperial powers.’
To keep the book manageable, I have had to exclude other participants in the struggle with the Ottomans, discarding the material on the role of Venice and the campaigns in the Peloponnese, the islands and the Mediterranean. Then a huge tranche on the Crimea and Russia’s eventual expansion eastward into the khanates of Central Asia went the same way. I had to set aside, regretfully, my long excursus about China.*
On the later Ottoman—Habsburg military struggle the most recent sources were still those written in the nineteenth century. Plainly, the last phase of the Holy War had fallen off the historical map after occupying a central position for so long. In the years after my first coming to Vienna, my path had led not to seventeenth- but nineteenth- and twentieth-century military history. Work in the archives centred on the Austrian role in the international arms trade, and I spent weeks (happily) in the small town of Steyr with contemporary logbooks and inventories. From there I would make visits to the sanctum sanctorum of the Kriegsarchiv (War Archive) in Vienna. Yet all the time, and in many of the records, there was an underlying sense of fear: fear that competitors or rivals would overtake the Austro-Hungarian monarchy; of being unprepared, of being left behind technologically, outsmarted.? As, eventually, I moved on to other Habsburg topics, there was still evidence of this taint of anxiety more or less ever-present. Where could it have come from?
* * *
Most books require a number of preliminary explanations. First, a set of intellectual debts — a kind of paternity in the ideas. This book only became possible, although I had wanted to write it for a long time, with the publication of Rhoads Murphey’s Ottoman Warfare, 1500-1700 in 1999 and Caroline Finkel’s Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923 in 2005. I had never believed the ineradicably negative tone of contemporary publications on the “Turk’. Although I could explain how one negative idea after another proliferated in the West, through books, pamphlets, paintings, prints, even teacups and tiles, it was impossible to suggest what an alternative might be. Murphey and Finkel demolished some of the stereotypes, but, more important, they also diminished the pragmatic differences between the combatants. Because western polemicists took the ‘Turk’ out of the normal span of human behaviour — by being cruel, lustful and driven remorselessly by the power of blind faith — they presented, in effect, a race of psychopaths. Ottomans could almost never behave in any different manner: for example, humanely. This image simply did not match the evidence, which, when approached forensically, exhibits constant and disturbing ambiguities that undermine the stereotypes.
The other debt of origin was to an Austrian social anthropologist, Andre Gingrich. Most of the material and the deeper study of the events I was making did not fit any framework. Gingrich described what had developed to the east of Western Europe as ‘Frontier Orientalism’, which developed out of the peoples and cultures of the region. I tried and tested this concept against my material covering a much longer period than Andre Gingrich described. It worked. It has provided me with an underlying matrix into which the pieces of evidence can fit like a jigsaw puzzle. I think historians will find ‘Frontier Orientalism’ an immensely valuable idea in the future.
This book is not based on manuscript sources, except in one or two instances. It is written from contemporary published sources, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the material which must have informed people at the time, providing most of what they knew of these events. These are materials with which I have been working for more than twenty years; I am still making discoveries and also changing my mind about what I have researched already. It is impossible, now and then, to know how people form their opinions. But we can understand how the material comes before them. Things have not changed much since the fifteenth century. Like the book before you now, someone decided to publish it and hoped to make money from it. Some books and pamphlets were printed with other motives, but most of the material I have used was frankly commercial. They were products in a market, and printers (the publishers of their day) sought to make them as saleable as possible to the potential customers. One of the key ways to achieve this was to illustrate them with engravings and woodcuts. This was especially valuable in an era when full literacy was relatively limited.
One way of knowing if a text reached a broad audience was how many editions were printed, and over how long a period. Equally, if a book was translated and published into another language, it must have reached a new and different group of readers. Slowly, we are beginning to trace these networks. Some texts formed opinion across the whole European continent. Sir Paul Rycaut’s books were published in many editions, and translated into French (twice), Dutch, German, Italian, Polish and Russian; Johann Peter von Vaelckeren, the lawyer who lived through the siege in Vienna, wrote a short book that was published during 1684 in Brussels both in French and Latin editions; in Linz in a German edition; in Vienna, Venice and Naples in Italian; in Cracow in Polish; and in London in English. Some other books simply plagiarised the published texts and produced the same stories under different names. A handwritten manuscript was most common, quite a restricted form of communication, but a printed book, a printed woodcut or engraving, or a pamphlet, was something that existed to be bought and sold on a wide scale, a marketable commodity. In that sense what sits on the rare printed book collections is often more revealing of public attitudes and opinion than the contents of the great archives’ manuscripts.
How can we understand what actually happened? We could look at it in grandiose Clash (and Failure) of Civilisations terms. That falls apart at the first testing of the evidence. We could look at the Muslim Decline argument: a long spiral downwards from the grand triumphs of the early Middle Ages. I do not find that persuasive either. This book uses different terms. I talk about the [Ottoman] “Turks’ and not ‘Muslims’. Ottomans were good and faithful Muslims, but they also had a specific Turcic heritage in addition to Islam that suffused the empire which they created. These days historians do not use the word ‘Turk’ on the grounds that Ottomans considered a “Turk’ as a rustic fool, and were hence grossly insulted to be called a “Turk’. True enough: yet at the same time they gloried in their Turkish ancestry and origins. Ultimately, it was a Turcic identity that provided the ideology for Kemal Ataturk’s new nation, the Republic of Turkey.
The Habsburgs emerged by chance as the Ottomans’ principal longterm adversary in the west. There are different and equally significant Polish and Hungarian histories of conflict with the Ottomans separate from this Habsburg story. However, the confrontation between Ottomans and Habsburgs was between two empires, both claiming the same kind of power and authority. They had more in common. Both these old empires were decrepit (in the eyes of their competitors) long before their final demise after the First World War. This perception of their common decrepitude, their archaic ceremonials, the slightly amused tolerance of their senility in the late nineteenth century, was false in 1900, but it also falsified their past. This book begins at the start of their conjoined history and ends at the point that they stopped fighting each other. The test of war is a revealing kind of diagnosis, a refractive prism that breaks up complex intertwined issues into their essential elements. It has helped historians to ask (and answer) the question: why did the Ottoman state fail? Oddly, the same question has been asked less insistently about the Habsburgs’ failed state.'° This is not a military history but rather seeks to understand how societies meet this primal challenge. We need to know the Ottoman ‘face of battle’, to borrow Sir John Keegan’s transforming idea, if we are to understand what happened.
Finally, a problematical terminology. There are sometimes German, Turkish, Hungarian, Croat or Serb names for the same place or event. Using one or another version systematically inevitably suggests a particular sympathy. But there must be some consistency for the sake of the reader. I have mostly used the names (with a few exceptions) as they are today — Czech or Slovak for some, German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Croat, or Turkish for others. These modern names are also cross-referenced in the index to those used in the past. For internationally known events, like battles or treaties, and for places with English variants of the local name — Vienna and Munich, for example — I have used the English name. Hungarian names are written as first name followed by last name to avoid confusion for non-Hungarians. I have also used “Turk’ and ‘Ottoman’ in the unselfconscious way they were applied in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although the number of punctilious Ottomans still left alive must be quite small in number, I hope this will not cause any affront.
Introduction: The Terror in the East
In the fiftieth chapter of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon tells us: ‘After pursuing, above six hundred years, the fleeting Caesars of Constantinople and Germany, I now descend ... on the eastern borders of the Greek monarchy.’ He describes the ‘genius of the Arabian prophet’ and how the ‘spirit of his religion’ led to the decline and fall of the eastern empire. Gibbon concludes that ‘our eyes are curiously intent on one of the most memorable revolutions which have impressed a new and lasting character on the nations of the globe’.
Yet this Arab, Muslim dominion, which at its greatest extent stretched westwards from Arabia to the Atlantic and northwards into the deserts of Central Asia, lasted for roughly three and a half centuries." What replaced it came from much farther east. Both Christian and Muslim legend were agreed about its origins: a land ruled by two giant kings, Gog and Magog, a kingdom where the mountains were full of terrible and deadly warriors, ‘the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.” The universal hero Alexander the Great had preserved the civilised world from their ravages by building a great wall pierced by only two huge iron gates. This was all that saved the west from catastrophe.
This story appears both in the Qu’ran and in the Alexander Romance, written in Greek in the sixth century CE, and it is possible to sense historical roots for the myth. There really were great walls in China, designed to keep out the nomads, and there is ample justification for the successive waves of barbarian peoples migrating westwards. Alexander’s rampart and the Iron Gates was a plausible explanatory fiction.’ The terror from the east was nomadic Turks from the steppes. They first entered the world of Persian civilisation, then overwhelmed the Byzantine empire and finally pushed on into the south-east of Europe. The Turks were mysterious in a way that the Arabs were not. The Romans had known about Arabia, divided it into Arabia Felix and Arabia Deserta, and marked Arabia on the map. But the vast eastern world north of Parthia and Persia was an unknown.
For Rome these eastern peoples had all been ‘Scythians’, numberless, menacing riders mounted on shaggy ponies. Gibbon wrote of
the Turks or Turkmens, against whom the first crusade was principally directed. Their Scythian empire of the sixth century [BcE] had long since disappeared; but their name was still famous among the Greeks and Orientals; and the fragments of the Scythian nation, each a powerful and independent people, were scattered over the desert from China to the Oxus and the Danube: the colony of Hungarians was admitted into the republic of Europe and the thrones of Asia were occupied by slaves and soldiers of Turkish extraction ... a swarm of these northern shepherds overspread the kingdoms of Persia: their princes of the race of Seljuk erected a splendid and solid empire from Samarcand to the confines of Greece and Egypt; and the Turks have maintained their dominion in Asia Minor till the victorious crescent
has been planted on the dome of St Sophia [in Constantinople].4
* * *
In the summer of 2005, an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London depicted Turks. It was A Journal of a Thousand Years from the sixth to the seventeenth centuries.» Looking at the extraordinary objects displayed — carvings, painting, friezes, ornaments, bronze doors, it was immediately clear that these many tribes of Turcic-speaking peoples had a culture in common. This was not solely an Islamic culture — it was the tenth century before the Turkmen tribes began to accept Islam — and they carried into their new faith many remnants of the old folk beliefs. We regard, perhaps following Gibbon, the Arab world as sempiternal, the powerhouse and the heart of Islam. Yet by the eleventh century, Arabs were no longer the dominant and dynamic force. Arab scholarship certainly remained a powerful intellectual force, notably in science, mathematics and invention, but the power that sustained Muslim culture was now Turkish.
The impact of Islam upon the Turcic peoples was both dramatic and profound, but it did not obliterate all the social and cultural patterns that had survived among the Turks from earlier times. Islam, in practice rather than theology, displayed many local variations. The Turks, like all the Central Asian peoples, grew up on the edge of the Chinese cultural zone, something that is evident in many of their earliest artefacts; Arab culture by contrast had grown up on the fringes of the Hellenistic world, and there were numerous Christian and Jewish Christian settlements in Arabia before the coming of Islam. Turks were latecomers into Western Asia, and had little in common with the cultures that bordered the Mediterranean — Arab, Greek, Roman. The Turks who entered the Middle East possessed a distinct, double heritage: first, by their origins which they traced back to the mythical Oghuz Khan, and beyond him to Noah; and, second, to their rebirth as Muslims, from the eleventh century. We need to understand this complex double nature, if the Ottomans are to become intelligible.
* * *
This book is first of all about Europe’s fear of the Turks and then, by the end, about fear itself. To understand this process, it is important to know that the Turks did not suddenly appear out of nowhere in 1453. The point that Turks entered the European memory was almost four centuries earlier: we can place it exactly — after the Battle of Manzikert in eastern Anatolia, close to Lake Van, on 19 August 1071. Carole Hillenbrand, who has already transformed our view of the crusading period, has now identified the true significance of Manzikert and its echoes through history.° The shock of the battle was captured by an eyewitness, the historian Michael Attaleiates:
It was like an earthquake: the shouting, the sweat, the swift rushes of fear, the clouds of dust, and not least the hordes of Turks riding all around us. It was a tragic sight, beyond all mourning or lamenting ... the entire imperial army in flight ... the whole Roman state
overturned.’
The Turks’ entry into Western Asia came in phases. First it was as slaves or mercenaries. The Seljuk Turks, victors at Manzikert, went on to capture Jerusalem, which prompted Pope Urban II's call for the First Crusade in 1096. Other Turks, the slave soldiers of Arab rulers, rebelled against their masters and founded the Mamluk sultanate that ruled Egypt from 1250 to 1517, only to be replaced by still another set of Turks, the Ottomans. With the rise to power of the Ottomans, a kind of state organisation which was at the same time both uniquely Turcic and distinctly Islamic eventually ruled a territory equivalent in scale to that of the Roman empire; and proved almost as enduring.
The sense of the Turk as the enemy of Christendom antedates the arrival of the Ottoman Turks in Europe in 1354. One channel of communication was through Hungary. In the twelfth century the kings of Hungary already had close connections with the politics of Constantinople. They were closely allied with the Byzantines by marriage and common interests. The stories of Manzikert and of another Byzantine defeat almost a century later at Myriocephalon (1176) in western Anatolia were transmitted to the west via Hungary: Bela III, King of Hungary, had been educated at Constantinople and sent his own troops to the failed campaign of 1176. There had even been plans for the union of Byzantine and Hungarian kingdoms. In March 1180, the ten-year-old Alexius, the son of the Emperor Manuel Comnenus, was married by proxy to the daughter of King Louis of France, so there was a second channel of communications to the west.®
From Manzikert onwards, Western Europe was aware of the rising Turkish power in the east. Four centuries after the battle was fought, one of the miniatures painted by the French artist the Maitre de Rohan for Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (On the Fates of Famous Men) showed the moment that the Byzantine Emperor Diogenes Romanus was taken prisoner by the Seljuk Turk leader Alp Arslan. Although he painted the Turks wearing western plate armour — having had no notion what Turkish armour would look like — he did at least know that the Turks carried curved sabres quite unlike the straight European broadswords. The bottom half of the image shows the Byzantine emperor on all fours, being used by Alp Arslan as a footstool to mount his horse.
The Ottomans, meaning the sons of Osman, were one of the minor Turkish tribes that had followed the Seljuks into Anatolia.’ In 1324, Orhan, Osman’s son, was a client of the Seljuks, and granted land in the far west of their domain, close to Constantinople. Being in close proximity to a dangerous enemy made this a perilous frontier posting.
But the Ottomans thrived as border warriors, gazi, sparring with the Byzantines, and slowly increasing their territory, as well as impressing their enemy with their military prowess. The connections between Orthodox Byzantines and Muslim Ottomans soon became more direct. By 1346, Orhan had married the daughter of Emperor John VI and in 1352 the Ottomans were invited to garrison Gallipoli, on the European side of the Sea of Marmara, for the Emperor. By 1360, the Ottomans held more land on the European shore than they did in Asia. In that year their capital was moved to the city of Hadrianopolis, which they renamed Edirne.
Within forty years of their first settlement in north-west Anatolia, still overshadowed by Byzantine might, the Ottomans had turned the tables. Now Constantinople was in fear of its belligerent Turkish neighbours. So, too, were the Christian principalities inland like Bosnia, Albania and Serbia; many Christians accepted the new Ottoman Sultan Murad [as their overlord instead of the decrepit and enfeebled Byzantines. In 1389 Murad and his Christian vassals defeated Lazar, the Prince of Serbia, in an epic battle on the field of Kosovo Polje. But while the battle was in progress the Sultan was murdered by a Christian pretending to be a renegade and when the Serbs were defeated, Lazar was executed as a reprisal. Western Europeans were quickly informed as to the rise of a new power in the mountainous regions (Balkan in Ottoman Turkish) of the south-east.’ Two years after Kosovo, the Turks reached the Danube and captured the fortress of Nicopolis; Europe reacted by launching a crusade.
The Crusade of Nicopolis in 1396 was disorganised and badly led: the result was a catastrophic defeat. However, it was the aftermath of the battle which produced the greatest impact in Europe. Jean de Froissart described in Book 4 of his Chronicle how, after the battle, the Sultan ordered the execution of many of his noble prisoners, harsh recompense for the slaughter of Ottoman prisoners by the French. A miniature in one edition of Froissart shows the bodies of the decapitated men beginning to pile up before the Sultan, who wished to make an example that his enemies would not forget. The watercolour in Loqman’s sixteenth-century Ottoman court history, like Froissart, shows the Turk as a fearsome enemy. By the time the Ottomans finally captured Constantinople in 1453, the image of their implacable cruelty had been formed and reinforced over almost three generations. The fear had its roots even farther back in time, on the field of Manzikert in the summer of 1071, so far back indeed that it was in time out of mind. Yet it had not been forgotten.
* * *
An old Roman military road ran from Constantinople through the Balkan mountains to Belgrade (Singidunum) on the Danube. Upriver was Buda (Aquincum), and still farther upstream Vienna (Vindebona). The sense of ‘being Roman’ remained long after the empire had vanished, but the visible evidence of Rome’s long presence — like the remaining pillars of “Trajan’s Bridge’ across the Danube near the Iron Gates — was a reminder of the empire. The Christian states of the Balkans and Hungary and the Ottomans all regarded themselves as the inheritors of the Roman past. For the Ottomans as for the Seljuks, the Roman empire belonged to them by right of conquest, and had, they believed, become their patrimony. In Europe: A History Norman Davies points to the ‘daring’ of Murad in claiming the title Sultan i-Rum, which his successors bore until the end of the Ottoman Empire in the twentieth-century." In conquering Constantinople in 1453, Murad’s descendant Sultan Mehmed II ‘the Conqueror’ believed that he was restoring the former unity of the eastern Roman empire, Rum in Ottoman Turkish, in both Asia and in Europe.
Ottomans regarded the Holy Roman Emperors of the west as usurpers to a title which belonged by right to them. They would refer to the Habsburgs as mere dukes of Austria, or, at best, as a petty king. This curious mirror image — of two rival claimants to the same estate — underpinned the developing rivalry between the two dynasties. The Habsburgs believed that their duty lay in restoring ‘Rome’ eastwards, for one of their proudly borne titles was King of Jerusalem; the Ottomans believed that it was their destiny to reclaim the Roman empire westwards, from Constantinople. This gave an added potency (or virulence) to the contest.
This definitive struggle between East and West was rooted in the claim to be the heir to a long defunct empire. Explanations based on realpolitik, economic rivalry, or competing ideologies (religious faith) might seem a lot more intelligible, but in the context of the fifteenth century, which is where it began, it was a significant issue. Both Ottomans and Habsburgs were new to power, and both claimed authority from their ancient origins. Their carefully constructed genealogies both led back to Noah, and beyond: they were necessary fictions. The Habsburgs only began their long continuous tenure of the imperial title when Frederick IV, Archduke of Austria, was crowned Frederick III], Holy Roman Emperor, in Rome by Pope Nicholas V, with the crown of Charlemagne. That was on 16 March 1452. Just over a year later, on 24 May 1453, the young Sultan Mehmed II took Constantinople by storm. At that point, despite his imperial title, Frederick was a powerless nonentity while the Ottomans were rapidly becoming a dominant military power in the east.
The contest was delayed because at the time that the Habsburg Frederick III and the Ottoman Mehmed II both assumed the supreme title of Roman Emperor, a powerful state still separated them. Between Vienna and Constantinople was the Kingdom of Hungary, ruled by one of the most skilful generals of the age, a Transylvanian noble named John Hunyadi, but known as the ‘White Knight’ because of his highly polished armour that gleamed like silver. When Mehmed advanced to attack Belgrade three years after the capture of Constantinople, it was Hunyadi’s well-led army that threw him back in disarray in July 1456. However, the White Knight died of plague three weeks after the battle, and his second son, Matthias Corvinus (his eventual successor), was only twelve years old.
It was 1458 before Matthias was elected King of Hungary and for thirty-two years under his leadership Hungary expanded its territory in both east and west: both Habsburgs and Ottomans were cowed by him. But after his death in 1490, the power of Hungary crumbled and in the second decade of the sixteenth century the Habsburgs and Ottomans for the first time faced each other directly. Two young and supremely ambitious rulers committed themselves to the struggle.
In January 1519 the old Emperor Maximilian I had died and was succeeded by his grandson, Charles of Habsburg, already ruler of Spain in succession to his other grandfather, Ferdinand of Aragon, and beneficiary of the rich lands of Burgundy and the Low Countries. With Maximilian’s death Charles also inherited the Habsburg lands in Austria and Germany. In the following year, Sultan Selim I, who had conquered the Levant, Egypt and the Arab lands for the Ottomans, died, leaving his only son Suleiman I to succeed him.”
Selim had already proclaimed himself ‘the conqueror of the world’ and his son intended to make good that claim. Suleiman was six years older than Charles, but they shared an imperious sense of destiny. In a letter to Sigismund I, King of Poland and Lithuania, Suleiman described himself as the ruler of a vast domain
Padishah [King of Kings] of the White [Mediterranean] and the Black Sea, of Rumeli [the ‘Land of the Romans], Anatolia, Karaman, the provinces of Dulkadir, Diabakir, Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, Persia, Damascus, Aleppo, Egypt, Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and all the lands of Arabia, of Yemen, and of the many lands conquered with overwhelming power by my noble father and magnificent grandfathers.”
Charles V had stated his own claim a few years earlier:
Roman King, future Emperor, semper augustus, King of Spain, Sicily, Jerusalem, the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, the Indies and the mainland on the far shore of the Atlantic, Archduke of Austria, Duke of Burgundy, Brabant, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Luxembourg, Limburg, Athens, and Patras, Count of Habsburg, Flanders and Tyrol, Count Palatine of Burgundy, Hainault, Pfirt, Roussillon, Landgrave of Alsace, Count of Swabia, Lord of Asia and Africa.
At least three of these — Jerusalem, Athens and Patras — were firmly in the possession of Suleiman. The obvious areas of conflict would be the Mediterranean, and in the huge Hungarian kingdom, overripe for takeover. Its young king Louis, King of Bohemia and Moravia, elected ruler of Croatia and Dalmatia, lacked the resources of his powerful neighbours to both west and east. No crusade would be mounted to save Hungary from an Ottoman assault.
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In a secular age there is perhaps a temptation to diminish the religious dimension of the struggle between Christendom and Islam, as Suleiman I (with some anxiety) prepared to launch his war of conquest. Yet the Habsburg—Ottoman contest was a clash of faiths: Charles V was the leader of the Christian world (eventually sanctified by papal coronation). Suleiman was the leader of most of the Muslim world, protector of the holy shrines of Mecca and Medina, possessor of the emblematic treasures of the Prophet Mohammad. Late in his life he would have the following inscribed upon the mosque that bore his name in Istanbul-Constantinople:
Sultan Suleiman has drawn near to God, the Lord of Majesty and Omnipotence, the Creator of the World of Dominion and Sovereignty
. who is His slave, made mighty with Divine Power, the Caliph, resplendent with Divine Glory, who performs the Command of the Hidden Book and executes its decrees in all regions of the inhabited Quarter: Conqueror of the Orient and the Occident with the Help of Almighty God and his Victorious Army, Possessor of the Kingdoms of the World...
There was no possibility for compromise. Charles V advised his son Philip Il of Spain never to surrender any Habsburg territory: ‘If your predecessors with the Grace of God held on. . . you should trust that He will assist you to keep what is inherited.’®
In 1521, a year after he had succeeded his father, Suleiman reopened Selim’s wars of conquest.”° But instead of striking in the east he took up where his great-grandfather, Mehmed II ‘the Conqueror’, had failed in 1456. The young Sultan marshalled his forces outside his capital Constantinople-Istanbul and then marched north to the Danube and the White Fortress of Belgrade. This time there would be no salvation from Hungary, and on 29 August 1521 the fortress — the advance rampart of Christendom -— fell to Suleiman’s army. Five years later, in 1526, the Sultan slaughtered the army of Hungary on the battlefield of Mohacs and in the late summer of 1529 his soldiers would stand before the walls of Vienna. The struggle between Ottoman and Habsburg continued for two and a half centuries. Its resonance lasts into the present.
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