Georg B. Michels. The Habsburg Empire under Siege: Ottoman Expansion and Hungarian Revolt in the Age of Grand Vizier Ahmed Köprülü (1661–76).

Abstract

One of the most popular Hungarian novels is set in the first half of the sixteenth century. A little boy and girl are kidnapped by a one-eyed Turk, and while they are escaping, the boy’s mother is killed during a Turkish raid back in their village. The boy soon finds himself at the court of one of the most powerful Hungarian lords, when Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent captures the ancient Hungarian capital of Buda in 1541. The girl becomes a lady-in-waiting to Queen Isabella, who is forced into Transylvania. As the Kingdom of Hungary is being divided into three parts, the boy, the girl, and the one-eyed Turk meet again in 1552, when the heroic defenders of Eger castle repel the Ottoman Empire’s fearsome army. Géza Gárdonyi’s novel Eclipse of the Crescent Moon (1901) is still required reading in Hungarian schools today. In 2005 it was voted the most popular Hungarian book of all time with 400,000 votes, and most likely all Hungarian students have participated, at least once, in a school trip to visit Eger. Many Hungarian historians of the early modern period attribute their interest in history to this novel. The (one-eyed) Turk as the archenemy, the heroic Hungarians, the helpless but power-hungry Habsburgs, and the hatred between Catholics and Protestants are all represented on the pages of the novel. All of these long-established images are still with us today, even in scholarly works on early modern Hungarian history.Georg B. Michels’s new book puts a mirror to these longstanding approaches, promising to reveal an entirely new dimension of early modern Hungarian history. Already the choice of chronological boundaries is unusual in Hungarian historiography: he does not pursue his investigation according to the traditional periodization of Hungarian political history but focusses on the age of the Ottoman Grand Vizier Ahmed Köprülü (1661–76). He argues that this period, essentially the two decades preceding the siege of Vienna in 1683, brought significant changes in Ottoman-Hungarian-Habsburg relations. These developments, Michels claims, have hardly been taken into account in previous historiography. He sets out to explore these underresearched processes using microhistorical methods, following the work of László Benczédi, Zdenka Veselá, and Helena Markusková.The eight chapters of the book can be divided into three major sections. The first part explores the movement of the estates and their pro-Ottoman orientation after the Treaty of Vasvár in 1664, which culminated in an anti- Habsburg conspiracy and rebellion by the nobility in 1670 (chapters 1–3). The second section (chapters 4–7) deals with the ensuing military, political, and economic reprisals by the Habsburgs and the aggressive Counter-Reformation that unfolded in parallel. Together these led to a social explosion, which essentially dismantled the structures of Habsburg rule in the form of a popular revolt in 1672. Finally, the third part (chapter 8) shows the aftermath of the uprising, in the shadow of the ever-looming Ottoman threat. Michels has done an amazingly thorough job of exploring the most relevant Hungarian and Austrian sources, in addition to the vast, most relevant literature published in several languages. He also has consulted the reports of the Dutch, Venetian, and French envoys in Vienna as a control. At the same time, he acknowledges the lack of Ottoman- Turkish sources, but his book provides an excellent basis for their subsequent exploration.In the following I present the author’s very thorough research and archival findings through some of the key issues highlighted in his book. One of the most important topics explored in the book is the pro-Ottoman orientation of seventeenth-century Hungarian society. Michels argues that after the Peace of Vasvár, the Habsburgs were unable to contain the Ottoman pashas’ expansion of taxation, and this paralysis of central government, combined with misguided religious policies, gradually oriented society toward the Ottomans. The broad and growing social pressure also pushed the elite in this direction. He rightly points out that a fault line had long been drawn within the elite. The nobility in Lower Hungary tended to be French-oriented, while the power brokers in Upper Hungary were already moving toward an Ottoman orientation before 1664. It is worth noting that recently Péter Tusor discovered a peculiar plan of the Catholic prelates in 1665, which, in addition to the French and Ottoman orientation, also anticipated a possible papal protectorate in the event of the extinction of the Habsburg dynasty.1The Ottoman orientation of Upper-Hungary can be explained in no small part by the Ottoman occupation of the important Transylvanian fortress in Várad (Oradea) in 1660, which put increasing pressure on the neighboring Upper Hungarian territories. Precisely for this reason a more nuanced account of the Transylvanian background is really missing from the book: the disastrous Polish adventure of Prince György Rákóczi II, the Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry for Transylvania, and the destruction of the principality between 1657 and 1662. After 1662, Transylvania was no longer the strong principality of Gábor Bethlen or György Rákóczi I, which could effectively protect the Hungarian estates and Protestants against Vienna. This would also make it easier to understand the process, which Michels otherwise illustrates well, whereby Prince Mihály Apafi was able to support the anti-Habsburg movements in Hungary under much more modest conditions.The book however fails to mention that an Ottoman orientation was hardly a surprising novelty in the 1660s. The decade and a half of civil war between János Szapolyai and Ferdinand I, following the disastrous defeat at Mohács in 1526, inevitably made submission to the Ottoman Empire a realistic alternative in Hungary. In essence, this led to the formation of the Principality of Transylvania and its loose tributary vassalage. At the same time, a positive image of Ottomans prevailed for a long time during the spread of Protestantism in the sixteenth century. The rapid spread of the Reformation in Ottoman Hungary was seen as a positive development in the Holy Roman Empire, which was descending into religious war, and Philip Melanchthon also cited the situation in Hungary as exemplary. Melanchthon’s opinion was supported by letters from Hungarian preachers such as Imre Eszéki. Thus, the pro-Ottoman actions of Calvinist pastors around 1670, which Michels thoroughly explores, do not present an unusual picture either.The book demonstrates well the severe impact of the aggressive Counter-Reformation in Upper Hungary. Michels argues convincingly that Counter-Reformation measures of such density and depth had not been experienced on such a scale before. After converting to Catholicism, the Rákóczi princely family (Zsófia Báthori and her son Ferenc I Rákóczi) took a hard line against the Protestant church structures on their vast estates. This caused serious tensions in every social stratum, but it paled in comparison with the brutal Counter-Reformation of the 1670s, which was state-supported and led by the Hungarian bishops. However, this was not without precedent either, and the book fails to reflect on the early steps of the Counter-Reformation and Catholic reform. The main church in Kassa (Kosiče), for example, was first seized from the Lutherans in 1604, and attempts toward the Catholicization of the town councils had been ongoing since the 1620s. In Upper Hungary, in the bishopric of Eger, serious steps were taken to restore Catholic institutions as early as the 1640s. Under Bishop Benedek Kisdy, Kassa, the capital of Upper Hungary, was turned into a major Catholic center, with a seminary, Franciscan monastery, Jesuit college, academy, and printing press. After these early antecedents, the Protestant society of Upper Hungary could hardly have been surprised by the strong Catholic actions.But Michels makes a very good point that the brutal Counter- Reformation was already affecting all levels of society, exacerbated by the political, military, and economic reprisals after 1670. All this created the “powder keg” that fueled grassroots movements and popular revolts. The nature of this discontent ensured both the rapid success and, in the absence of a strong leader, the equally quick collapse of the uprising. Here the author attempts to capture the possible pro-Ottoman sentiments of the lower social classes. This is a difficult task, however, as these ordinary people suffered the Ottoman raids and taxation as well. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that they would flee at the mere news of a general Ottoman attack, and then later revolt against Habsburg rule on the basis of (false) Ottoman promises of imminent help. Perhaps this curious dichotomy of the boundary zone explains the fact that, contrary to Michels’s statement (e.g., 52), this period did not witness the breakdown of the condominium structure, as has been thoroughly explored in Antal Molnár’s latest book.2 Just as the Ottoman pashas spread their taxation northwards, so Hungarian landlord taxation did not stop deep in Ottoman Hungary. Soldiers from the Hungarian border fortresses in the north even led “tax-collecting” raids as far as Szabadka (Subotica, today in northern Serbia). The administration of Hungarian counties or even Catholic dioceses, which had penetrated into Ottoman territories, continued to function. The bishops of Eger continued to successfully lease their tithes from the Ottoman-conquered territories through the 1660s to 1670s, and appointed new priests in parishes located in the southern parts of their diocese under Ottoman rule.The author draws on rich archival materials to depict the brutality of the uprising. The analysis of local data gives a good sense of the scale and the “social embeddedness” of violence. Understandably, based on his earlier research, Michels compares this popular revolt to other Eastern European patterns (253, 295), but he mentions earlier popular Hungarian uprisings (the peasant war of György Dózsa in 1514 and the peasant rebellion of Péter Császár in 1631–32) only once (295). Surprisingly he fails to mention, for example, the anti-Habsburg campaign of Gábor Bethlen, which exhibited serious manifestations of popular, anti-Catholic violence, like the tragic fate of the Jesuit and other priest martyrs of 1619 in Kassa. (Of course, in another context, Michels is very aware of the anti-Habsburg campaigns led by Transylvanian princes in the early seventeenth century, see, e.g., 98.) As his focus is on the grand vizierate of Ahmed Köprülü, he states that after Köprülü’s death (in November 1676) the tensions in Hungary calmed down somewhat. From 1677–78, however, there was continued unrest in Upper Hungary, with increasing incursions from Transylvania. It was then that the young Imre Thököly’s star would begin to rise, and after 1682 he would at least partly fulfil the expectations of the early 1670s for a unified Hungarian state under Turkish rule. This partially undermines Michels’s conclusion that the successful Habsburg war of liberation after the siege of Vienna in 1683 would have overshadowed the pro-Ottoman movements of the early 1670s in historiography. Rather, it was the success of Thököly and his Ottoman alliance that stole the pages in the history books. After all, despite Köprülü’s constant promises, no effective Ottoman military aid finally arrived in the early 1670s, in contrast to the events of the early 1680s and the subsequent establishment of a short-lived Ottoman vassal principality in Upper Hungary.A few factual errors need to be pointed out. The small fortress of Gesztes was not on the Danube but situated among the Vértes hills (55). István Bocskai, the high sheriff of Zemplén county, was not the descendant of the Transylvanian Prince István Bocskai (who was childless) but only a distant relative from another branch of the family (94). Péter Zrínyi was not prince but a count and Ban of Croatia (123). The Uniate (Greek Catholic) prelate of Munkács was a bishop, not an archbishop (181). Not the mother of László Wesselényi but his stepmother (Mária Széchy, who was the second wife of the late Palatine Ferenc Wesselényi) was in captivity (184–85). Késmárk (Kežmarok), Leutschau (Lőcse, Levoča), and Eperjes (Prešov) were not imperial cities but free royal cities (234).Overall, Georg B. Michels’s extremely thorough work provides a new approach to the history of Hungary in the 1660s to 1670s. A closer examination of the Ottoman orientation reveals a number of phenomena that had previously received less attention. Increasing threats (existential, military, religious) caused growing tensions among broad sections of society, felt also by the Hungarian political elite. The Habsburg court’s misjudgments and insecurities exacerbated this, and only by making great sacrifices and redeploying considerable military forces was it able to stabilize its power. However, all this could not stem for long the almost constant Ottoman threat and the popular grassroots movements. One of the many strengths of Michels’s excellent book is that it generates further debate and research. In his conclusion, he identifies four additional directions that require further research: 1) the role of trans-imperial intermediaries in the border zone; 2) the survival of the initiatives of the 1670s in the movements of Thököly and Ferenc II Rákóczi; 3) a more thorough exploration of Ottoman sources for the period; and 4) an even more comprehensive placement of the events of the Köprülü era in Hungary within the global context of the Ottoman Empire. Whichever path future researchers take, Georg B. Michels’s book will be indispensable for their work.