The Turks carefully built out a strong belt of castles around Buda (like Esztergom or Székesfehérvár) and established a chain of forts towards Vienna. In peaceful times, the garrison of Buda numbered two thousand soldiers, mostly Janissaries.
When the Turks seized the old royal city of Buda in 1541, they robbed the famous library of King Matthias and systematically destroyed the frescoes and sculptures of the most beautiful gothic cathedral in the center. A traveler who worked for the Fuggers, Hans Dernschwam, described the poor conditions in 1555. The environment hadn't become any better by 1630. He wrote of it as: "The houses are collapsing one by one. There is no trace of a new construction, except some shads where one could take shelter from rain and snow. There had been great halls and stalls that now are divided into hundreds of makeshift cells made of stone, wood and clay."
"The Turks don't need wine-cellars so they had filled them with garbage. The houses look as they had no owner…they made a mosque from the Catholic church and threw the altar and the tombstones out…many rooms are walled in. The houses look like pigsties and they are so much built around that you couldn't recognize the wagon-entrances because they fabricated stalls and a bazaar in front of the houses where the Turkish craftsmen sit and work according to their habits."
Pest
This was situated across the Danube river from Buda. It was not a well-fortified settlement, but was protected by just a simple stone wall with many towers and bastions on it. Yet its defenders' number was not small, usually between one thousand and fifteen hundred soldiers.
Castle of Szigetvár
https://www.google.hu/maps/place/Szigetv%C3%A1r,+7900/@46.0519442,17.7539145,17274m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x47680752985296b9:0x400c4290c1e1c90
This was an important sanjak center, the southern gate of Hungary.
It was defended by Miklós (Nicholas) Zrínyi in 1566 against the army of Sultan Suleiman the Great and his one hundred thousand soldiers. Zrínyi, the great-grandfather of the Miklós (Nicholas) Zrínyi who was eleven years old at the time of the Ring of Fire, had only twenty-five hundred men but was able to hold the small castle for thirty-four days. When even the inner castle was in flames, Zrínyi led his remaining three hundred men out of the castle and died attacking the Turks. His heroic example became a legend in Hungary. It was the last siege for old Suleiman, too; he died at the castle and allegedly his heart was buried there.
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There were other castles in the Occupied Lands that were of significance:
Zsámbék, Hollókő, Hatvan, Jászberény,Fenlak, Érd, Fok, Földvár, Simontornya, Kalocsa, Szekszárd, Pécs, Kaposvár, Segesd, Babócsa, and Valpó.
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Notes from The Buffer Zone: History and Its Alternates by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
My mind has always worked in "what-ifs." Sometimes that makes me a science fiction writer. Often, it makes me an alternate history writer. Once in a while, it makes me a pure historical writer.
I tend to view current events through two prisms: the prism of my real life, with all its needs, opinions, and limitations, and the prism of my imaginary life, which knows no real bounds. Sometimes, when current events overwhelm my real life, I take solace in my imaginary life. I have lists of what-ifs, some of which I wrote after a big event, like 9/11, and some of which I wrote after a big personal event of the kind I will not go into here.
When I write historical fiction—alternate or not—I do my best to be as accurate as possible. I research everything. I read newspapers from the day. I read letters and diaries. I watch videos of the time period. I study photographs. If the time I'm writing about was before the advent of photography, I study art of all kinds.
When I can, I try to visit historical sites to get a feel for them. Sometimes the feel is gone. American cities, in particular, tend to tear down their history. European cities have lost some of their historical districts to war or time. Some cities in the Middle East are experiencing the same loss right now.
I do my best, as a writer, to recreate the feel of the past. Sometimes that's easy. With the right research, I can figure out what a place smelled like or exactly what it looked like. For the most part, I can figure out how my characters will react to that place.
But I know, as a historian, that what I'm doing is guessing. In fact, when I taught a class in writing historicals (including alternate history and time travel) this past fall, I kept reminding the professional writers who attended that no one knows what really happened in the time period they're writing in—not even someone who lived through it.
I mean, do you know what's going on right now across whatever nation you live in? Do you know how your leaders feel? Do you know who is sleeping with whom? Or who is scheming with whom? Some of that only comes to light decades later—and that's for the public figures. Private citizens share their lives in pieces—on social media, yes, but also in video or in email or in a casual conversation. But even now, in this age of great sharing, private citizens keep some part of their lives—and themselves—private.
I'm pretty good at guessing what a past time period feels like. Or extrapolating how it would feel to live in my hometown fifty years ago. Until this fall, I thought I was pretty good at guessing the way an era felt as well.
But as we were moving headlong through election season here in the United States, I realized that I had never captured one particular national emotion. Waiting.
This past U.S. presidential election had turned so divisive and ugly that Americans wanted it to end. It didn't matter which side we stood on; we all agreed that we couldn't wait for November to arrive. I write this in December, as the holiday shopping season is underway, and it seems to me that the season is underway with a vengeance. Everyone is determined to throw off the ugliness of the past several months, and have a merry-happy-jolly holiday no matter what.
Those two facts will be in the history books that some young writer will use to research this time period in some distant future. That writer, if she's good at extrapolation, will write about how uncomfortable everyone was with the divisiveness and how we all threw off the shackles of the 2016 election and dove into the 2016 holiday season.
But that writer will miss what I have missed—that sense of holding your breath. Collectively, we as a nation waited until we could vote. Many of us chose not to, a decision that never makes sense to me, but we each decided what to do that day. And with that exercise of choice came a sense of relief.
The waiting was excruciating. For months, that was all anyone talked about—on social media, in person, with casual strangers. We were all counting the days. Even some of the major national newscasts started a countdown about 90 days out, leading each election story with something like "With 63 days left before the general election…"
Not every historical event can be anticipated, of course. Some are huge surprises. I'm writing this as the handful of survivors (four, I think) travel to Hawaii to honor the dead at Pearl Harbor, which occurred 75 years ago. When I was a kid, Pearl Harbor Day was a Big Deal. Commemorations everywhere, adults talking about where they were or what they had done.
Now, it's an afterthought. But, I note, we as a culture have similar discussions about 9/11. We acknowledge that day—which was itself another surprise event.
The long waits occur with excruciating events only marginally in our control. This election was one of those times. And it forced me to look backwards to other places in the histories I'm familiar with to see if I can spot other periods of waiting like that, which must have been incredibly difficult on the people involved.
I suspect the years 1859 and 1860 were similar. The country was splintering, and everyone knew that the election of 1860 was going to be pivotal. But that's a big dramatic waiting period. I'm sure there were others, ones now lost to history or at least to my casual mental review of it.
I also know that some select groups go through these periods. I would wager that American women felt these emotions as they waited for the first elec
tion after the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. That amendment, by the way, gave women the vote—which they used with a vengeance on November 2, 1920—not voting as a block, by the way. Just voting.
Those are big examples, but there are small ones too, ones we can all relate to. Some people feel a happy anticipation as they await the birth of a baby, but others worry their way into that due date. For first-time parents, there's that sense something will change, but how, exactly, is unknown.
Weddings, moves, any kind of expected big change can bring about that same odd in-stasis feeling. I can write those; I've experienced them. But I had never thought of it with an historical event before.
And I'm not sure I've read about it in secondary histories either. Or in most first-person accounts, for that matter.
Because the feeling dissipates when the day arrives and the future solidifies.
But I made a mental note. I always make mental notes like that. It's one of the curses (blessings?) of being a writer, particularly one who specializes in history. We have to figure out what the past felt like. And sometimes, the feelings aren't knowable. Sometimes, no matter how much documentation we find, those feelings have been lost.
I find myself thinking about them, though, wondering what else we've missed from the murky past.
Sometimes, when I'm feeling pessimistic, I think we've missed a lot.
And sometimes, when I'm feeling confident, I think we've missed very little.
One thing I am sure of, though. I'm sure that human beings remain the same under the skin, just like we were two hundred years ago. Just like we were a thousand years ago.
We can extrapolate backwards. Imperfectly, yes—at least when it comes to the details.
But the details are never important in fiction. The story is.
And figuring out the overall mood of a state, the nation, or a region of the world, is only one small aspect of a story.
If that mood is part of the story at all. And that, my friends, is always for the writer to decide.
Because we can't know the past, just like we can't know the future. But we can invent a plausible one. And some of us do, each and every day.
This Issue’s Cover – 69 by Garrett W. Vance
This Issue’s Cover – 69
This cover springs, or rather pounces, from the pages of "The Long Road Home, Part 2" by Nick Lorance. To honor their fearless and fiercely just Sergeant Hartmann, his men base their new regimental flag on his recently acquired nickname: "The Wolverine."
The Latin text of the motto, Aequo Pugna speciem mihi, translates as, "It looks like a fair fight to me."
Don't mess with the Sarge!
Cheers, Garrett
Grantville Gazette, Volume 69 Page 20
