Grantville Gazette, Volume 68

by Bjorn Hasseler

  During the so-called Long War or Fifteen Years War (1591-1606), Transylvania joined the Christian coalition against the Ottoman Empire, mostly because of Prince Báthory's politics. In the 1630s, it was Transylvanians who manipulated the Turks, rather than the opposite. There lived people who were born fifty or sixty years before 1630 and consequently had first-hand experiences from the Long War as well as from the wars of Prince Bocskay and Prince Bethlen.

  ****

  The capital of Transylvania was Gyulafehérvár, and another important city was Kolozsvár.

  Transylvania was based on the alliance of three orders: the Hungarians, the Seclers (Székely), and the Saxons along with the equilibrium of four religions, the Catholic, Reformed, Evangelical (Lutheran), and Unitarian, all of which was led by the Protestant Hungarian nobility. There were some Romanians living there as well, but their nobility and religion were not part of this union, though the Orthodox church was tolerated. Later the Jews were also given all the rights they wished for.

  The principality's army was comprised of the following parts:

  Court Corps: the personal guard of the Prince, his regular professional cavalry and artillery;

  The troops of the country: insurgent nobility of the counties and the bands of the high nobility;

  The Seclers (Székely): three military classes of Seclers doing military service for collective liberties; infantry, cavalry, and leaders ("Primors");

  Saxons: mercenary infantry of Saxon towns combined with the artillery and training provided by them;

  Infantry of taxed towns;

  Hajdus: warriors with collective liberties in the flatland border area (in and around the Partium);

  Riflemen: local peasant soldiers with collective nobility;

  Allied and foreign mercenaries.

  The General of the Country was the supreme commander while each field army had its own general. The leader of the Saxon troops was the Royal Judge.

  This well-armed and small but high-quality army contributed well to Transylvania's balancing policy. This modern and partly uniformed army fought successful battles: in Russia (1579); Austria (1606 and 1619); Moldavia (1653, 1654); Wallachia (1594); Bohemia (1619, 1644) and in Poland (1657), continuously avoiding the pressure to wage wars in alliance with the Ottoman Empire. The princes had good military skills, and their tactics were different from either the Ottoman or Western customs.

  The Seclers (Székely) are a subgroup of Hungarian people living mainly in the easternmost part of Transylvania, in the Seclerland (Székelyföld). According to the earliest Hungarian manuscripts, they were the descendants of the Huns, left behind in Hungary when King Attila died. The chronicle said they had greeted Prince Arpad in 895 AD with great joy when he entered the Carpathian Basin.

  In the Middle Ages, the Seclers, along with the Transylvanian Saxons, played a key role in defending the country against the eastern intruders. Their name derives from the Hungarian word meaning "frontier-guards." The Secler territories came under the leadership of the Count of the Seclers, the Comes Siculorum, initially a royal appointee from the non-Secler Hungarian nobility. From the fifteenth century onward, the princes of Transylvania held the office themselves.

  The Seclers were considered a distinct ethnic group, the natio Siculica, and formed part of the Union of Three Nations. These three groups ruled Transylvania from 1438 onward, usually in harmony though sometimes in conflict with one another, under the authority of the king or the prince. They divided their hilly lands into Seats and didn't have to pay taxes like other common folks; it was their privilege in exchange for their military services. These mountain folks preserved a surprising amount from the ancient Hungarian nomadic military tactics and were considered as very sturdy, stubborn, and impulsive people whose discipline was legendary. They were also renowned for their resourcefulness and quick-wittedness and above all, insistence on their freedoms.

  Unfortunately, they had lost much of their military value by the time of the RoF. They were ill-equipped and only seventy percent of the Secler Seats were able to send soldiers to the prince in 1630.

  Almost all of the Seclers remained stubborn Catholics, but some of them embraced the Unitarian faith that had been born in Transylvania and Poland. They are the Hungarians who preserved the most ancient folklore of this nation. To this day, they still have dances that haven't changed since the time of Gábor Bethlen. You can find today more than one million of them in the Seclerland, still fighting for their human rights. Seclerland's area now is 13,000 square kilometers, roughly half size of Belgium but 2,000 square kilometers bigger than the newborn Republic of Kosovo, established by the Western powers in 2006. Seclers would undoubtedly be among the first to ally with Americans from the future.

  The Saxons

  The seven German cities of southern Transylvania (Siebenburgen) are: Beszterce (Bistritz), Nagyszeben or it is called just Szeben (Sibiu, Hermannstadt), Kolozsvár (Klausenburg), Brassó (Kronstadt), Medgyes (Mediasch), Szászsebes (Mühlbach), Segesvár (Schassburg). Szeben (Hermannstadt) was an important cultural center within Transylvania, while Brassó (Kronstadt) was a vital political center for the Saxons.

  Most of the Transylvanian Saxons embraced Lutheranism, with a very few Calvinists, while other minor parts of the Transylvanian Saxons remained staunchly Catholics or were converted to Catholicism later on. In Transylvania being a Saxon meant being a Lutheran and the Lutheran Church was a Volkskirche; i.e., the national church of Transylvanian Saxons. The town of Birthalm (Berethalom, Biertan), with its fortified church, was the seat of the Lutheran Evangelical Bishop in Transylvania between 1572 and 1867.

  In the 1630s, the military value of these seven cities, similarly to the Seclers, had decreased. In contemporary muster-lists their soldiers were described as "good musket, bad musket but has a sword…has a lance…has an iron pitchfork…has a cudgel…he is blind…this is deaf…this one is crippled…" Their training and discipline were also deficient.

  Warfare between the Habsburg monarchy and Hungary against the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries reduced the population of Transylvanian Saxons. Later new settlers appeared, but by the end of the twentieth century they had almost all disappeared due to the systematic ethnic cleansing under Romanian domination.

  ****

  Hungarian Soldiery at the Ring of Fire

  It is very important to commemorate the everyday heroism of Hungary's ordinary soldiers, whether they were simple castle-warriors, Hajdus, or Hussars. Their three hundred years of ceaseless struggle, generation to generation, kept the country and perhaps Europe and the Protestant faith alive. Armies are made up of individual soldiers, and Hungary's armies were as different as its people.

  According to contemporary records, the Habsburgs in 1635 were able to muster an army with forty thousand soldiers, without the castle-warriors of Hungary and Croatia. The French were able to boast of a one hundred fifty thousand-strong army and the Spanish fielded three hundred thousand soldiers. At the same time, Sweden had an army of forty-five thousand and the Dutch could call fifty thousand men to arms. Hungarian circumstances and soldiers differed, though, from the contemporary western standards.

  ****

  The Hajdus were armed herdsmen who worked all over Hungary and the Occupied Lands, taking their grey cattle to markets abroad. They were either detested and despised by mercenary generals, like Wallenstein, or praised by others, like Basta. Almost all of them were Calvinists, and more and more of them went to military service in the first part of the seventeenth century.

  Prince István Bocskay was the first great general who hired the Hajdus in numbers against the Habsburgs. He began to settle economic privileges on them in exchange for military service. He very cleverly established Hajdu-towns for them near the Tisza river, where the borders of the Occupied Lands, Royal Hungary, and Transylvania met. They were given collective nobility but they cannot really be compared to Cossacks. All succeeding princes of Transylvania relied on them a
nd gave them additional rights.

  The Hajdus were both cavalry and infantrymen. While the riders were fighting in formidable light cavalry units armed with their sabres and battle-axes, the foot soldiers were surprisingly steady and reliable troops, famous for their skills with rifles and muskets. In their attire they were not much different from the Turks, save that they wore no turbans. Their hairstyles during this age looked very much like those of punks or teenagers' haircut in 2015 because the scalp was almost entirely shaven except for a mop of hair hanging down or grown as a narrow fringe that closely resembled the Turks' fashion. Besides this, there was no Hungarian warrior without a big mustache.

  The Hajdus had a savage reputation; their officers had to keep strong discipline among them to keep them from plundering the countryside. Palatine Miklós Esterházy issued a military order in 1620 in which he decreed that "…all soldiers must hurry to their designated places when they hear the alarm of the drums with their weapons and whoever tried to defy the loyalty or the order, would receive a shameful punishment…bickering is forbidden…who draws a sword on his comrade, will lose half an arm…at night everyone must stay at his unit, except the guards and the patrols…the soldiers may go out the castle only with the officers' leave…the gates can only be opened or closed at the designated times with a cry 'Jesus'…whoever would break his oath, must be cut in four parts…"

  Like the Hussars and some of the frontier-warriors, the Hajdus elected their lower officers freely. That was still the practice at the time of the Ring of Fire, although it was strictly discouraged by the generals and princes on both sides.

  The battle-value of these soldiers was as great as their bad reputation. Balázs Németi, a Hajdu captain, gained renown for them at Osgyán, at the ford of the Sajó river, 1604, when he stood in battle against General Basta who greatly outnumbered him in soldiers and in equipment alike. Németi had four thousand Hajdus and four thousand armed peasants but could not resist Basta's mercenaries. When he tried to take up positions on the other side of the river, the peasants thought everything was lost and fled. Despite the valiant fight the Hajdus carried on, the battle was soon hopeless. Németi gathered five hundred of his hard men and got into the stately home of Osgyán to cover the retreat of his soldiers. The small palace was only surrounded by a weak fence and Basta soon destroyed the buildings with his cannons. The defenders tried to break out but in vain; most of them died in the attempt, and only a few succeeded. Németi was seriously injured and was taken into captivity. Basta wanted to know more about Prince Bocskay's army so he had Németi hung upside-down on a tree, but the tough captain betrayed nothing. Then he was imprisoned and sentenced to death. When he was escorted to the place of execution, he grabbed the executioner's sword and killed him. He cut down many mercenaries as well before he went down.

  ****

  The frontier-warriors were permanently garrisoned in between one hundred to one hundred twenty castles along the Hungarian frontier. This frontier was longer than the Polish, the Spanish, or the Russian chain of castles and was held for a longer time against the Ottoman Empire than any other military structure in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe. The Hungarian frontier had its little brothers in Poland called the swiat kreswy and the Croatian cosjstvo i junstvo, but none of them were under attack for such a long time as the Hungarian/Ottoman border.

  These castle-warriors were either landless nobles who had lost their lands to the Turks or peasants who had run away from their villages because of the same enemy. Mostly they were cavalrymen, many of them hussars. They were generally underpaid or not paid at all. As a letter of complaint that was sent to Vienna from the castle of Keszthely in 1668 says: "…the soldiers haven't had any payment for four years now…they are threatening to abandon the fort…there is a smaller garrison on the Lake Balaton castle-line called Zalavár where there had been ninety Hajdus but now there are only four left." The soldiers had to use the surrounding villages for feeding themselves, and they wrote to the Emperor in the hope of getting their pay: "We have to guard the gates of your Majesty's castles with sticks and are almost naked."

  The upkeep of a warrior was 3.5 quintals of grain per year. So a garrison of 500 men needed 1,750 quintals of grain annually. Yet food was scarce, and more often than not the warriors themselves had to cultivate the fields to survive. Originally many of them had found refuge in taking up arms instead of working as peasants; the landlords tried to force them back in vain. Being a frontier-warrior became a kind of privilege, and the former peasants didn't want to return to life as serfs. Moreover, they despised the humble farmers, though they also had to work the fields around their castles many times to stay alive. Many of them had a vineyard or kept grey cattle and traded with the products. For instance, they cultivated their vineyards in front of the Turks in the hills overlooking Lake Balaton, with arms in readiness. In spite of the general depression of prices in the seventeenth century, the Hungarian wine was very much sought after.

  When the frontier-warriors had no money at all, they ambushed the Turks and tried to take captives. They shared the plunder among themselves and kept the captured Turks in the castles until their ransoms had been paid. Turkish prisoners were the major source of income for the captains of frontier castles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  It seems as if the general non-payment was one of the triggering causes for protecting the frontier so effectively. The warriors harassed the Turks and ambushed them, attacking them wherever they could so as to get some money. It also turned out to be a rather effective method of warfare because the attacker always enjoys the advantage in these kind of surprise attacks. The attacker can also focus a bigger unit at a weaker point of the defense, and the Hungarians had an excellent information spy network.

  Defending the frontier castles only from behind the walls would have meant total failure. The constantly moving light cavalry units knew the land and knew the enemy's positions. In the 1630s, the roads were controlled by the patrols of these warriors so the Turks could travel only with very large armed escorts, even in the Occupied Lands.

  Another advantage was the warriors' masterful knowledge of martial arts and horsemanship. Duels were in fashion, where Hungarians and Turks met in lethal competitions for fame and money. In winter time, the frozen Lake Balaton served as the greatest dueling field where the opponents frequently met. The greatest frontier warrior duelist, Captain György Thury, had no less than six hundred successful duels against the best Muslim warriors who had come to challenge him from even the corners of Asia. Although Vienna banned duels, they had been going on even in time of "peace." Truce between the empires was a meaningless word on the frontier where things were changing every minute, and a very violent life dictated the rules. Hungarian warriors were adopting Turkish habits, and Turkish soldiers learned Hungarian ways. Soldiers spoke each other’s languages, and generations grew up in opposing castles knowing their enemies' names and deeds.

  The castle-warriors considered themselves a kind of "valiant order," as if they were the afterthoughts of Hungarian knights who lived a long time before. They were not the same as the Western ordo bellatores, the holy warriors or knights as we know of them; they did not view themselves as the defenders of Christendom anymore. Their fixed idea in the 1630s was not that they were the propugnaculum Christianitatis, the "bastion of Christians," but that they were the defenders of freedom of their religion and the liberators of their country from the embrace of the "two pagans." The concept of Pro Patria et Libertate–"for the Homeland and for Liberty" was taking shape.

  ****

  The loyalty of the foreign mercenaries in Eastern Europe always had to be questioned, and it always depended on their pay. We also know that mercenaries were infamous for their cruelty against the local population in an age when logistics were not provided to feed an army.

  In Hungary, though, it was also a bit different: the land was so depopulated and poor (or the peasants were so expert in hiding) that there
was almost nothing to plunder, so feeding the armies was a double nightmare for each mercenary general. It was partly the reason why Prince Bethlen could beat Wallenstein.

  The lay of the Hungarian land was different from the western terrain and didn't offer the "proper" options to deploy a typical western mercenary army in order to fight a battle in their fashion. The divided countryside—the plains and marshes varied with scattered hamlets and woods or valleys among the low hills, as well as the impenetrable Carpathian mountains and their well-guarded passes—was suited perfectly to unexpected ambushes, hit-and-run raids, and snares.

  On top of that, each city or castle had to be taken by siege. The mercenary armies were superior in military techniques and firepower but they couldn't take advantage of it. Most Imperial armies in Hungary were defeated not in a single battle but were rather eroded and crushed by hundreds of harrassments by light cavalry units who knew the land well.

  The Hungarian soldiers' pay was very low compared to the westerners’, but their loyalty couldn't be bought because they fought for their country, their religion, and their families. While the German mercenary General Mansfeld could easily sell his cannons to the Turks, and it didn't cause him a moral crisis to offer his sword to them, Hungarian soldiers treated this kind of person as a turncloak, and even the Transylvanians would cast them out forever. The Turks preferred to hire Albanian and South Slavic mercenaries or even Westerners. The Western mercenaries were not welcome in the Hungarian frontier-castles, either, because everyone knew that they easily yielded the forts to the enemy if their pay didn't arrive or they simply decided that they wouldn't fight against an overwhelming enemy.