At the same time there were approximately forty-five thousand well-paid Turkish soldiers garrisoned on the opposing side, not counting the irregular raiders. Almost every single Hungarian castle was defended to the last man or the last handful of gunpowder, except when foreign mercenaries held them as happened at Szolnok or Temesvár. When a fort went down, sometimes a whole county or dozens of villages changed masters. Sadly, most of the castles are in ruins now; the Habsburgs thought them useless and dangerous and exploded them when they "liberated" the country from the Turks, or did so after the 1703-1711 Hungarian rebellion led by Prince Ferenc Rákoczi II.
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The Hungarian Highland:
The Mining Towns Captaincy and the Captaincy of Upper Hungary
These captaincies were on the northern part of Hungary, in the Carpathian Mountains. The first one was closer to Vienna, bordering Bohemia, while the second captaincy had a friendly border with Poland. Many Germans dwelled in their mining towns like Besztercebánya (Neusohl, Banská Bystrica) and Körmöcbánya (Kremnith, Kremnica), producing lots of gold and silver. Hungary in the Middle Ages provided vast quantities of salt, silver, and gold in Europe, all coming from the Carpathian Mountains' famous mines. Beside the fall of Constantinople (Istanbul), part of the reason why Christopher Columbus set sail to the Indies was that these mines' productivity had decreased by the late fifteenth century. Yet these mines were quite productive in the 1630s, and the possession of these cities was strategic. They produced iron ore and mercury as well. Many "tilting-mills" (mills that used trip hammers to crush the rock to more easily extract the ore) could be found there, too. A very fertile land lay between Pozsony and Vienna, the Csallóköz plains where agriculture was quite developed. Sopron on the west and the lands around Tokaj could boast world-famous wine production. Innumerable grey cattle were also herded toward Austria and Silesia and sold there at a very cheap price. It was the time when the gap between Western and Eastern Europe became highly defined; due to the Turkish wars, Eastern Europe began to export raw materials and received the industrial products from the West in return.
The capital of the western part of the Highland was Pozsony (Pressburg, Bratislava), the gateway to Vienna. It was never occupied by the Turks, who would have been destroyed by the cannons of Komárom before ever reaching it on the river Danube. Pozsony, just eighty kilometers from Vienna, was a coronation town and the seat of kings and princes and palatines. Laws and acts were issued by its Diets, and all the important people had a house there. The Holy Roman Empire's Austrian emperor could rule over Hungary only by being elected by the nobility of the Diet and crowned with the Holy Crown. A Hungarian king had to swear to rule according to the Hungarian laws and traditions, giving all the rights to the nobility that had been granted earlier on. Many times the Habsburgs had tried to take away the Hungarian feudal rights and turn Hungary into one of their provinces where they had the right to rule by inheritance rather than election. Due to the Hungarian nobility's resistance, they were never able to carry it out. The Austrians needed the Hungarians' rich resources and their manpower very badly while the Hungarians realized that they wouldn't be able to finance the fight against the Ottomans alone, especially not with an Austrian enemy on their Western border, as well. In addition to this delicate balance, the Transylvanians were gaining more and more ground in the 1630s.
The other key city of the eastern Highland was Kassa (Kaschau, Kosice), the capital of the Captaincy of Upper Hungary. Whoever took it would have control over half of the Highland. All three great princes of Transylvania (Bocskay, Bethlen, and George Rakoczi I) began their wars against Austria by taking it. Interestingly enough, two of the great Transylvanian princes' lands, Bocskay's and Rakoczi's huge family estates, were in Upper Hungary and in the Partium between Transylvania and the Upper Captaincy. All in all, the Hungarian Highland was a very wealthy area that was worth fighting for.
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The Turk-Occupied lands
The middle section of the Carpathian Basin—roughly the plains between and around the two major rivers the Danube and the Tisza—was the area occupied by the Ottoman Empire, a tongue penetrating into the country from the south. It was divided into six administrative units by the Turks: the central Buda Eyalet, the Bosnian Eyalet (with the capital: Banja Luka / Orbászvár), the Temesvár Eyalet (bordered by Transylvania, with Temesvár as its capital), the Váradi Eyalet, the Egri, and the Kanizsai Eyalet. Between the Occupied Lands and Transylvania there lay an area called the Partium, on the eastern side of the River Tisza. It mostly belonged to Transylvania, although from time to time the Turks tried to seize its castles.
The Occupied Lands had probably the most fertile lands of Europe with a rapidly decreasing Hungarian population. In 1541 when the Turks first got hold of these lands, the entire Hungarian nation consisted of approximately 4.5 million people. When the Turks were cleared out before 1700, one million Hungarians were missing due to the wars with the eastern Janissaries, Tatars, and the western mercenaries. An entire spoken dialect of the Hungarian language became extinct during this one hundred fifty- to two hundred-year period. The Turk-occupied part of the country was more or less a war-zone during this time, including the whole frontier with its numerous forts and castles. Turkish raids were not uncommon on lands controlled by the Habsburg-led Hungarian Kingdom to the north or west. Even the more peaceful Transylvania suffered Turkish raids, coming from the eastern side of the Occupied Lands. Warring was constant despite the peace treaties between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Due to the unceasing wars, this middle section of Hungary was never integrated into the Ottoman Empire in the way as the Balkans had been.
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Few know that the core of the formidable Muslim Janissary warriors as well as a great number of the Turkish army occupying Hungary actually consisted of Serbs and Albanians, new converts to the Islam from the Balkans. (Ninety-one percent of the soldiers were from the Balkans and only two-and-a-half percent arrived from Asia.) The Janissary units were created by collecting young boys from the entire occupied territories in Europe, an awful and grievous slave-tax imposed on the locals. These orphans became the best warriors, received a harsh military training, and were loyal to the death to their emperor and their faith. They had no camp-followers nor women around them: four warriors shared a tent and the youngest was their trainee who served them food and satisfied their sexual desires. One of these warriors' weapons—next to the musket and the sabre—was the yatagan. It was a wicked long dagger-sized sword, having an inward curved blade with the sharp edge on the inside. The hilt was made of the end of a bone and there was no cross guard at the blade to defend the hand as it was said that a true Muslim warrior was not supposed to parry a sword but to attack the infidel. The Janissary infantry was the most steady basic component of any Ottoman army, and they firmly withstood the deadliest attacks of mounted knights and volleys of any artillery or musketry. Initially the Janissaries were very well supplied and trained musketeers, but by the time of the Ring of Fire, this knowledge had declined considerably. According to Turkish contemporary sources, the Janissaries' muskets were old-fashioned and not well-kept, and four soldiers had just one. They also neglected to practice shooting twice a week as it is described in a Turkish script from 1606 called "Laws of the Janissaries." The script described how the designated area of shooting practice would be found next to the training houses. The Janissaries were supposed to go there every Wednesday and Thursday to learn shooting. If somebody should hit the target, he would receive a silver cup or a piece of gold. If someone doesn't know how to shoot, the Avdji Bashi would show him. Gunpowder and fuse were regularly given to the Janissaries to practice and learn from each other, and they made the bullets themselves by melting or chopping the lead pieces. But the script went on to say that these things had been forgotten for a good while; they received neither gunpowder nor fuse anymore. Even when they got some fuse, they made candles of them and burned them in their houses.
In order to compensate for the decline of their artillery power, during the 1630s, the Turkish military leaders tried to hire mercenaries—mostly from their Christian subjects—and supplied them with muskets.
These things contributed to the softening of discipline, and during the first part of the seventeenth century the Janissaries' pay had also been delayed more often. Sultan Osman II was the first Ottoman emperor to be deposed by rebelling Janissaries in 1623, during the heyday of Prince Gabor Bethlen of Transylvania. No wonder that the prince could keep the Turks at bay with his clever diplomacy, envisioning a united Christian attack against the weakened Empire.
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The Turkish people lived mostly in the fortified settlements of the elayets and in their districts (called Sandjaks in Turkish) that guarded the borders. They collected the taxes from the locals but except for raids and punishing campaigns, they were quite indifferent. At the time of the Ring of Fire, the Turks could control only their forts and the roads between the settlements; the land was not safe for them to travel without stronger troops. The Muslim grip was a bit loosened in this period.
The conquered villages and towns were given to the Turkish nobles as feudal lands by the sultan. The new feudal lords became the chain-clad Muslim knights called spahis but their feudal gifts couldn't be inherited by their sons. The sultan could take the land back at any minute. So the new landlords were not the kindest masters and tried to squeeze as many taxes as they could from the land. It was not in their interest to build and develop the economy: sometimes they could hold their lands or office only for a few years before it was given to someone else. By the time of the Ring of Fire, the discipline of the spahis had loosened as well; when they were called to arms, three-fourths of them just didn't show up.
As for taxes, the Christians sometimes had to pay thirty percent more, according to Sharia law, in order to be allowed to follow their faith—be it Protestant or Catholic. The Turks didn't differentiate between infidels; this is one reason why huge numbers of people in the Occupied Lands were targeted for conversion by Protestants. Meanwhile, in Croatia and in the Trans-Danubian territories which were controlled by the Hungarian Kingdom, the people remained mostly Catholics. Many more Hungarians living under Turkish rule embraced the Protestant faith. The Muslims allowed the existence of all Christian churches with only some restrictions such as Christians not being allowed to renovate or build their churches and not being allowed to train new priests. Tolling the bells was also forbidden. Due to the frequent wars and raids, the land was depopulated in huge areas, and many villages were wiped out.
Hungarian peasants were hostile to the Turks, and controlling them was not easy. At the same time, occasional friendships developed between Turkish and Hungarian warriors and between Muslim landlords and Christian villagers. A mutual respect was developed between the enemies and their culture, attire, and warfare was equally and mutually affected by each others’. Music, food, and fashion mixed together and both cultures were enriched by many new elements.
The locals tried to evade Muslim taxes by keeping more and more pigs instead of cattle. Pigs were declared unclean by the Muslim imams, so this is the time when eating pork became a very typical Hungarian habit. Elsewhere beef was the favorite. During the entire Middle Ages, Hungarians always ate more meat than other European peasants. In the seventeenth century Royal Hungary was providing great herds of their grey cattle to the West in enormous quantities, as well as herds of horses. While grain production decreased, wine production substantially increased since Turks were not great wine consumers. The peasants kept more and more animals because it was easier to hide them from the pillaging armies in the swamps of the flatlands. Many people took refuge in the vast swamps to save their lives. Whole villages lived in the "green fortress." At first the Turks tried to drive them out, but when their soldiers got lost in the marshland, they tried to burn the peasants out. By the seventeenth century they had realized that this didn't work, and they had to make a compromise with the population. The peasants were allowed to herd their cattle as far as Strassburg or Prague if they paid taxes to the oppressors.
The hardened herdsmen who were guarding these animals became members of a new soldier-class, the so-called "Hajdu" soldiers. From time to time they had to cross the dangerous Ottoman-controlled territories to reach their destination, facing unheard-of perils along the way. The Hajdus had been given a major military role in Bocskay's and Bethlen's wars, and George Rakoczi I also relied on them. The Hajdus were all Protestants and hated the Turks. Whoever became a renegade and converted to Islam was never accepted again by the Hungarians, not even in Transylvania. Another reason why Protestantism spread so rapidly among Hungarians was that the Catholic Habsburgs could be opposed this way, too. This religious separatism from both oppressors may be compared to the situation between the Catholic Irish and the Protestant English when national interests struggled behind the mask of religion.
Some major cities enjoyed a bit more freedom because they were under the sultan's command and paid their taxes directly to his treasury. The Turks had wanted to finance the upkeep of their local forces from taxes collected in Hungary, but they could never achieve this. The treasury had to send a huge amount of money annually to support their army.
There was an interesting verbal agreement between the new Turkish lords and some of the former Hungarian ones: they divided the tax up among themselves. Behind the frontier castle line—which was the longest fortified border in medieval Europe—the Hungarian villages didn't cut their contacts with their former Hungarian landlords. These lords had to abandon their estates when the enemy appeared and fled to the north, either to Trans-Danubia or what had been called Pannonia in the ancient Roman days. The nobles who fled to the Kingdom of Hungary never gave up their rights over their former lands and properties in spite of the Ottoman conquest. They kept sending their tax-collectors to their formally owned villages and towns and their former subjects tried to pay them what was rightful—or at least as much as they could. Sometimes the villagers sought out their former landlord without being asked. Was it out of a servile loyalty to the old lords or simply a bitter defiance against the new Turkish lords? Or was it simply that neither the old nor the new lords had the proper control? It is strange, but the peasants and the townfolk paid their taxes even from the far-away settlements, not only from the warzone. Many times this way they paid double taxes and sent the Hungarian lord's part by themselves to the north, even if they had to pay the Turks the same or higher amount. Apparently sometimes the locals agreed with their Turkish lord and were not overtaxed, but at times they couldn't. It is likely that without the greed of Hungarian nobles, the Occupied Lands would have become similar to the Balkans. Sometimes the taxes were just symbolical gifts: a pair of boots or some horses. But politically, this taxation habit was an indication that the former lords had never given up their rights, and this was the way they tried to retain some control over their former subjects. Even fields, villages, and tax-rights located on the Occupied Lands were donated or sold to nobles and warriors for their services by the prince of Transylvania or by anyone who had the right to grant lands. After all—many researchers of this period agree on this—it was the Hungarian feudalism that finally won over the Turkish feudalism.
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The Principality of Transylvania
(In Hungarian: Erdély, German: Siebenburgen, Romanian: Dacia)
The relationship between Transylvania and the Ottoman Empire was determined by the Muslim political view that Transylvania had always been a vassal state to them. Sultan Suleiman the Great "established" the principality after 1541.
Transylvania's independence cannot be compared to that of either Wallachia or Moldavia. Here the Turks were only nominal overlords and received symbolic taxes from time to time; its extent was different. It had become traditional, though, that the princes, elected by the Diet of Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia in Romanian, Karlburg in German), the capital, still had to receive an aut
horization called ahdname from the sultan in order to take the throne. Sometimes this "acceptance" came after, sometimes before the elections; it all depended on the current military power-relations. The prince of Transylvania was allowed to reign as he would in his country but was not permitted to act against the Ottomans' interest in his foreign policy. The foreign diplomacy was carried on according to the actual strength of the players. In the case of Bocskay, Bethlen, and Rakoczi I, ruling in the Ring of Fire period, Transylvania was a rather free country. The prince was ruling firmly over a sovereign country much like any absolute ruler.
Transylvania was equally far away from both empires, and the principality was able—due to its outstandingly effective spy and diplomatic networks—to balance skillfully "between the two pagans" during the 1630s.
As Miklos Zrinyi had cited from Machiavelli: "La forza caga alla ragione addosso"–"Force shit on reason." The power at this time was dwelling in the hand of the princes who made Transylvania the "Fairy Garden" of Europe. Transylvania was where the very first law was created in Europe declaring freedom of religion was promulgated—at Torda, as early as 1568. It was the only place in Europe where the Jews could live undisturbed, in accordance with their faith and habits, as Prince Bethlen declared it.
Among the Transylvanian princes was István (Stephen) Báthory, who was Prince of Transylvania (1571-1586) and then King of Poland (1576-1586). He fought back the Russians and defeated Ivan IV the Terrible in 1580 and conquered almost the whole Baltic region for Poland. He was trying to bring together an anti-Ottoman alliance, uniting Transylvania, Hungary, and Poland into a single kingdom, thus getting rid of the Habsburgs and the Muslims at the same time. As King Matthias realized in the late fifteenth century, Hungary had to find partners to become strong enough against the Turks. King Matthias had wanted to conquer Austria and Bohemia to form this power and could have almost done it, had he not been poisoned in Vienna in 1490. Prince István Báthory's concept was to make a coalition with Poland and, inspired by these concepts, all of the following princes of Transylvania wanted to defeat the Austrians in order to be strong enough against the Turks. Sadly, the Habsburgs also thought that they would be the best leaders in defeating the Turks. So it was a stalemate.
Grantville Gazette, Volume 68 Page 13
