The Road to Szigetvár: Ferdinand I's Defense of His Hungarian Border, 1548–1566

Abstract

Sultan Suleyman the Lawgiver (r. 1520–1566) led six invasions of Hungary during his reign. Although he failed to take Vienna (1529, 1532), by the conclusion of his last campaign in 1566, he had extended Ottoman rule up the Danube as far as Esztergom and beyond. For his part, Ferdinand I sought to consolidate his claim to Hungary by sending armies against cities recently taken by the Ottomans on three occasions; none of these campaigns achieved its objective. In the years between invasions from one side or the other, there were frequent truces and from 1547 a series of peace treaties. Nonetheless,Kleinkriegremained the order of the day along the border. Convention dictated that a certain amount of raiding was tolerable, even in the relatively peaceful seventeenth century, but sixteenth-century “raiding parties” (especially from the Ottoman side) were sometimes large enough to storm and capture important fortresses. In the sixteenth century, castles on either side sent out bands of soldiers to force all peasants within reach to pay taxes to the “rightful” ruler. In the seventeenth century, the Ottomanpaşaof Buda would sometimes request the help of his Habsburg counterpart in collecting the sultan's taxes from border villages.