Hausner, Gábor Zrínyi-album (review)

Abstract

SEER, 96, 4, OCTOBER 2018 782 Hausner, Gábor (ed.). Zrínyi-album. Zrínyi Kiadó – Hadtörténeti Intézet és Múzeum, Budapest, 2016. 381 pp. Appendices. Index. Ft7500. In 2014 to mark the 350th anniversary of Count Miklós (Nicholas) Zrínyi’s death Zrínyi publishers of Budapest commissioned this bilingual, copiously illustrated album. It is an impressive and weighty tome in which the Hungarian text runs parallel with the English translation (by Bernadette Szabadkai) and is the result of cooperation between several Hungarian historians and literary historians each contributing individual chapters. The life and work of Count Miklós Zrínyi (1620–64) is inseparable from his great-grandfather of the same name, Miklós Zrínyi of Sziget (1509–66) who made his name in the Turkish Wars with the protracted defence of the Southern Hungarian fortress of Szigetvár (in its Anglicized form ‘Sigeth’) where, just days before the surrender of the fortress Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent also died. This commander’s seventeenth-century descendant was likewise a warrior but also a poet and the author of essays on warfare and military organization. The present collection covers all Count Miklós Zrínyi’s activities thanks to the leading experts on the life and afterlife of this notable poet-commander. Both Miklós Zrínyi and his brother Péter were already acknowledged as talented military commanders in their lifetime. For various reasons the former became a much-admired hero of Protestant Europe and France, hailed by over twenty English publications in the years 1663–65, all devoted to the Turkish Wars, at the same time highlighting Miklós Zrínyi’s role in the events. There was even a whole book on this Hungarian/Croat military commander in English entitled The Conduct and Character of Count Nicholas Serini, Protestant Generalissimo of the Auxiliaries of Hungary (Samuel Speed, London, 1664), a biographical compilation from German and Dutch sources. As for its reports of battles and campaigns this book is on the whole reliable, though it does contain (the deliberate or occasional) error. Zrínyi was a Roman Catholic, though a very tolerant one, believing that in a battle with the Turk the religious allegiance of Christian soldiers should not be questioned. The Zrínyi-album reproduces the title-page of The Conduct and Character on page 60, but the author of this chapter, the late Ágnes R. Várkonyi, still asks ‘who is the mysterious [figure] behind the monogram O.C.?’ This O.C. is the author of the book’s foreword, most likely its editor. The present reviewer actually offered a solution in his essay (in Hungarian) on English sources of the Turkish Wars (Korunk, 2015/6) claiming that ‘O.C.’ is in fact a monogram of ‘Ortelius Continuatus’ (Continuation of Ortelius), ‘Ortelius’ being an earlier popular chronicle of Europe’s struggle against the Ottoman Empire. As for Miklós Zrínyi’s great epic poem, Szigeti veszedelem, written between 1645 and 1648, Sándor Bene offers interesting information on the title: it could REVIEWS 783 be literally rendered as ‘peril’ of the castle of Sziget rather than the history of its siege, but the contents of the poem justify its translation as ‘siege’. This is indeed the title of the epic’s first English translation by László Kőrössy published by the Catholic University of America Press in 2011. As for the sources of this impressive epic poem, we learn from Zrínyi-album that although in his own foreword the author speaks of his adherence to Homer and Virgil, his principal modelwasOvid‘whosenamedoesnotevengetmentioned’(p.217). Zrínyimust have also found Marino closer to his taste than Tasso, though this ‘marinism’ informs more the Hungarian poet’s lyrical poems, quoted and rather clumsily translated by the translator of the rest of the album (pp. 233–39). Finally, the chapter on ‘Fame and Memory’ (pp. 282–379) could have been shorter. While some parts of it are helpful in the interpretation of Miklós Zrínyi’s survival in national and international memory, the last twenty pages could have been cut — for example, what the Habsburg Archduke Joseph thought about...