Download PDF | Tamás Pálosfalvi - From Nicopolis to Mohács_ A History of Ottoman-Hungarian Warfare, 1389-1526-Brill (2018).
508 Pages
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 Ottoman 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 represented 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 governments, 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 illness 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 ascended the Hungarian throne. Mutual cruelty was a basic feature of OttomanHungarian warfare, as the slaughter of Christian captives in the aftermath of both Nicopolis and Mohács shows as clearly as does the regular sending of severed Turkish1 heads to Buda by the Hungarian border captains. The profoundly 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 prelates 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 Ottomans 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 Ottomans, 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 opposition 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 unfair 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 Hungarians, the Ottomans came to be identified as the “chief enemy” (inimicus capitalis) of the Hungarian kingdom and, with reference to the religious divide, as “persecutors of Christ’s Cross” (persecutores Crucis Christi).
Their destructive raids spread fear reminiscent of the terrors once caused by the Mongols, the last of the nomadic conquerors to have reached Hungary, in the mid-thirteenth century.6 Whereas the terrible devastations of the Mongols affected Hungary for less than two years, however, it soon became evident that the Ottoman threat would be a much longer-lasting one. The most important consequences of this perception were the determination of the Hungarian ruling elite to halt the invaders by force of arms and the emergence of the anti-Ottoman struggle as the chief moral obligation of both king and nobility, in defence not only of their country but also of the Catholic faith in general, which the Turks threatened “to supplant and completely extinguish.”7 In the course of the fifteenth century, further Ottoman expansion in the Balkans, the serious defeats suffered by the Hungarian armies in the 1440s, and the fact that Hungary had become a direct neighbour of the Ottoman Empire along a border that was becoming longer with every new conquest, only reinforced in the minds of the Hungarian political community the idea of a fight to the death against an aggressor whose aim was not only victory over the enemy on the battlefield but also its political annihilation.8 The long-term consequences of constant warfare with the Ottomans were manifold. The most obvious was the immense devastation that Ottoman raiding caused in the southern regions of Hungary, from Croatia and Slavonia to that of the Szerémség (an area south of the Danube now shared by Croatia and Serbia). The economic and social effects of a significant loss of the population, and of the profound transformation of its ethnic structure, are evident.9
Less evident, however, and much less explored, is the role that the Ottoman military pressure played in setting off local social and political processes that ultimately led to the secession of Slavonia from Hungary and to the “Sonderweg” of Transylvania. On a political level, Ottoman warfare was as instrumental in the emergence of the Hungarian diet as a truly consultative body as were the French wars of the fourteenth century in the development of the English parliament.10 After sporadic beginnings under Sigismund of Luxemburg and constant development during the reign of Matthias, it was in the period of the two Jagiellonian kings (Wladislas ii, r. 1490–1516, and Louis ii, r. 1516–26) that the defence against the Ottomans, the maintenance of border forts, and the consequent necessity of raising the funds to finance them emerged as the three most important points on the agenda of diets then regularly held with the participation of elected county delegates. Likewise closely connected to the Ottoman threat was the establishment in Hungary of one of the earliest permanent armies in Europe, as well as the last real appearance of the medieval crusading idea. Most of these crucial aspects of Ottoman-Hungarian warfare could not be extensively explored in the present book. In writing it, I had two chief goals. The first was to offer a sound chronology of events, based as much as possible on the sources, both published and unpublished.
Despite its evident importance not only for Hungary but also for the Ottoman Empire,11 the story of this long conflict has never before been told in its entirety. The major part of the book is consequently a narrative, complemented by one chapter on the transformation of Hungarian military structures in the period between the late fourteenth century and 1526 and on the fiscal and military aspects that, in my view, ultimately led to the fall of the medieval Hungarian kingdom. My other aim was to publicize in English at least some of the results of the latest Hungarian scholarship not only on Ottoman-Hungarian warfare but also on its politico-military background in Hungary, which is generally the least-known aspect of the whole problem for readers unable to access a predominantly Hungarian scholarly literature. It was partly for this second reason that considerably more attention has been paid to the period of the Jagiellonians. Despite their evident importance, the 36 years of the reigns of Wladislas ii and Louis ii are still very incompletely known, with views being dominated by old stereotypes that, until recently, had obstinately refused any effort at reassessment – and continue to do so in popular thinking. The image of the Jagiellonian kings as basically unfit to rule and whose main “achievement” was to destroy the formidable achievements of the great Matthias, while utterly false, still haunts not only popularizing works but also some of the specialist literature.12
Another justification for more emphasis than usual being put on the period of the Jagiello rulers is the explosion in the number of sources and, even more, their growing diversification during that period. Private letters, royal and seigneurial accounts, inventories, and other similar documents made their first appearance en masse at that time, shedding much more light on the military and financial structures of warfare than ever before. Even so, however, significant aspects would remain in darkness if the only sources available were of Hungarian provenance. As such, even the relatively abundant charter evidence would be insufficient for a reconstruction of the wars of 1501–2 without the addition of the reports by the ambassadors of various Italian states.
The verbosity of foreign observers is a mixed blessing, however; in this respect, it is probably enough to call attention to the no doubt colourful yet extremely unbalanced view that the letters of the papal emissary, Antonio Burgio, project about Hungarian domestic affairs in the two years before Mohács. Filtered through the book of the eminent Hungarian historian Vilmos Fraknói,13 the heavily biased observations of Burgio still serve as the chief basis for judgements made on many of the key political actors of the period.14
Ottoman-Hungarian conflict before 1490 is enlightened, to varying degrees, by the source material. In the reign of Sigismund, the extensive narratives inserted into the royal charters furnish fairly detailed evidence to permit at least a general reconstruction of the events and the identification of participants in various military operations.
Under Matthias, the king’s own letters and the reports of successive Venetian ambassadors tell us much about both military events and the composition and size of the armed forces that took part in them. Their information is conveniently supplemented by the work of Bonfini, Matthias’s Italian chronicler, whose narrative becomes increasingly rich in trustworthy detail as he entered the reign of his royal patron. Unfortunately, the least sufficiently documented period is that of János Hunyadi, at first governor and later captain-general of Hungary (1446–56), which, as we shall see, decisively influenced the subsequent course of Ottoman-Hungarian warfare. Deprived of the means of royal patronage, the governor’s charters lack even the limited narrative eloquence that at least occasionally characterizes the grants issued by his royal successors while his letters, for the most part written by János, Bishop of Várad, despite revealing Hunyadi’s ideas about the war against the Ottomans, are almost completely silent about his campaigns and the structure of his armies. Ottoman sources do not add much to our knowledge in this respect, for, with the sole exception of the Anonymous author who narrated the Ottoman-Hungarian wars of 1443–44, Turkish chronicles before the early sixteenth century are even less informative than the Hungarian sources.
The relative paucity of the source material and the uneven documentary coverage of individual periods and events make most reconstructions highly dubious and the overall picture full of blank spots. As such, my aim was not to fill these lacunae but rather to concentrate on what can be known with a measure of certainty and to offer credible hypotheses when only conjectures were possible. This is especially the case when reconstructing battles, the most fascinating, but at the same time the most incompletely documented, episodes of Ottoman-Hungarian warfare. War against the Ottomans was never waged by the Hungarians alone (figure 1.). Czechs, Poles, and Germans all fought in the armies fielded by Hungarian rulers from Sigismund to Louis ii, and crusaders of various nationalities took up arms in defence of their religion in 1456, when Belgrade was besieged by Mehmed ii.
The army that Sigismund led to Nicopolis was a truly international force, as was that of Louis ii which opposed Süleyman’s mighty host on the battlefield of Mohács. Refugee Serbian lords with lands in Hungary played a leading role in fending off Turkish raids and devastating Ottoman territories in retaliation, and the rulers of the two Romanian principalities also regularly supported the kings of Hungary in their struggle against the Ottomans. Yet much of the political, military, and financial infrastructure of warfare was provided by the Kingdom of Hungary. Alongside the history of OttomanHungarian warfare itself, it was this infrastructure and its painful adaptation to the requirements of constant military pressure that I have tried to explore and present to the reader. For it was her solid foundations, in the form of territorial cohesion and centralized administration, that enabled Hungary to play the role of the “bulwark of Christianity” for nearly one and a half centuries. During this time, tens of thousands of Hungarian and non-Hungarian soldiers lost their lives on battlefields from Croatia to Bulgaria. Only a handful among them are known by name, but their heroic resistance to an enemy that, whatever the viewpoint one takes now, threatened their very existence, deserves to be commemorated.
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