Ottoman success 1422-1606

In the aftermath of the battle of Ankara the Ottoman Empire looked finished. Not only were the Turks beaten, but a power struggle broke out among the sons of Sultan Bayczid, a matter which was not resolved until 141 I with the accession of Mehmet L As events were to prove, this was in fact a turning point in the Ottoman conquests and the beginning of their most successful period during which some of their most celebrated victories were won.
The 1422 siege of Constantinople

The Ottoman fortunes began to revive during the eigbt-year reign of Mehmet 1, but it was not until the reign of his successor Murad 11 (1421-51i that serious moves were made against Christian territories in general and

Constantinople in particular. The 1422 siege of Constantinople was almost a dress rehearsal for the successful conquest of 1453. The latter operation has inevitably overshadowed the earlier conflict, but we are fortunate that an eyewitness called John Kananos left a vivid and exciting account of the campaign. Among the points that Kananos makes is a confirmation that siege artillery was being used by both sides during 1422 along with the more conventional medieval siege weapons. Siege towers pulled 1)y teams of oxen are specifically mentioned. The siege of Constantinople was
abandoned in 1423. In 1424 a treaty was made with Byzantium that reduced its empire to little more than the city and, after fighting off local rebellions, Murad 11 felt able to restart his holy war. He marched on Macedonia, and captured Thessalonica in 1430. Albania was partly subdued between 1435 and 1436. Tbese campaigns took Murad Ii very close to I lungary, whose great national hero John Hunyadi would soon be in arms against him.

The Hungarian campaign 1439-43

In 1439 Murad II captured the castle of Smederevo, which lay downstream from Belgrade. This caused George Brankovic, the Despot of Serbia, to become a refugee in Hungary. With Serbian support John Hunyadi launched a campaign against the commander of the Turkish Army occupying Smederevo, whom he caught off guard returning from a raiding party. The commander, Beg lszhak, assumed that the Hungarians would adopt their usual tactics of attacking his main body with their mounted knights. Instead Hunyadi attacked them with dismounted men-at-arms while his horsemen encircled their enemy and attacked their flanks. Tbe result was a considerable iungarian victory, although Smederevo was not recaptured. To sbow his gratitude George Brankovic donated Belgrade to the litingaria n king In 1442 Murad II invaded Hunyadi's homeland of Transylvania. Hunyadi gave battle at Hermannstadt (Sibiu) and, later that same year, Murad it sent another army against Transylvania, but this time John Hunyadi waited for them close to his border at the narrow pass known as the Iron Gates. After attacking the sipaizis and the Janissaries Hunyadi put into motion a false retreat, which lured the Turks back to the wagon line and, following a fierce fight, the 'lurks were defeated.

John Hunyadi had meanwhile appealed to the princes of western Europe to capitalise upon his victories and join him in a grand crusade against the Ottomans. Pope Eugenius 1V supported him enthusiastically, but there was very little official response from the military leaders of Europe except for Poland, whose king Wladislaw III had been elected King of Hungary in 1439. We are however told tbat considerable numbers of French and German knights attended in a personal capacity as crusaders.

 

The plan of campaign was uncomfortably like the humiliating Nicopolis crusade of 1396, but the `Long Campaign' as it is known in I lungarian history began very successfully witb a crossing of the Danube and a rendevous near Sofia, from where the army marched westwards and captured Nis on 3 November 1443. The Hungarians then crossed the Balkan mountains in winter and defeated a Turkish army. The objective was Philippopolis (Plovdiv) and to some it looked as though they could go much further and drive the Turks back across the Bosphorus, but after a victory on Christmas Day 1443 supplies were beginning to run low. Hunyadi sensibly withdrew and reached Buda in triumph in February 1444, where he received a hero's welcome. Murad 11 was forced to accept a ten-year truce with Hungary.

The battle of Varna 1444

The success of the Long Campaign brought messages of congratulation to John Hunyadi from all over Europe, anti ideas of crusading began to be entertained once again – truce or no truce. At a Diet in Buda attended by the Papal Legate Cardinal Cesarini, a fanatic who once wrote that he could think day and night of nothing else other than the final ruin of the Turks, an ambitious plan was drawn up. A newly formed crusader army would follow the line of the Danube while Venetian ships prevented the Turks from crossing the straits and the Greeks made diversionary attacks in the Peloponnese. The Christians could then annihilate the 7,000 Turkish troops left in Thrace and Bulgaria and Constantinople would be saved. The recapture of Jerusalem was even discussed.

The plans were impressive, but soon began to fall apart. The Byzantine Emperor John VIII concluded that duplicity would not help his delicate relationship with the Sultan. He therefore refused to join in arid, together with George Brankovic, prevented the Albanians from making any more positive a contribution. George Brankovic of Serbia, whose daughter was married to the Sultan, felt that be bad more chance of regaining his territories through negotiation with his son-in-law than by force of arms. Terms were agreed in lune 1444 whereby Brankovic received the return of several Fortresses and hostages.It looked as though the crusade would have to be cancelled, but Cardinal Cesarini persuaded the King of Hungary that an oath sworn to a Muslim was invalid, and when a Turkish delegation arrived in Szeged to ratify the earlier agreement, the king publicly reiterated his aim to 'hurl back the infidel sect of Mahomet overseas'. He then marched into Bulgaria, but Murad fl had been given ample time to complete his other campaigns in Asia Minor and prepare fur a Christian attack.

Soon there was little more than a Hungarian army left to suffer the biggest crusading disaster since Nicopolis. Their one notable supporter was Vlad Dracula of Wallachia, who did not hesitate to express severe misgivings about the whole operation. He referred particularly to the meagre size of the Christian Army and warned King Wladislaw Ill that even the Sultan's hunting party contained inure men than the crusading host. Then, one by one, the other elements in the grand plan started to collapse. The Greeks completed the supportive task allotted to them, but the Venetians were prevented by heavy winds from sealing off the Bosphorus. So instead of being confined to Asia Minor, Murad 11 was able to bribe the Genoese into transporting his army across to the European shore. The two opposing forces met in battle near Varna on the Black Sea in November1444. Hunyadi had chosen a strong position between the end of a marsh and the bay. Scouts brought news that the Turkish Army was scarcely 4,000 paces away and numbered at least 60,000 men. Cardinal Cesarini argued that they should make a defensive enclosure with the wagons, as had been done successfully in tbe past. Hunyadi was for launching an immediate attack, but his hand was forced by news that the Turks were already advancing, so the wagons were hastily arranged. The Wallachians took the left wing and the Hungarians took the right. King Wladislaw III, who was suffering from an abscess on his leg, was placed in the position of greatest safety in the centre where his Polish and Hungarian bodyguards surrounded him.

The Sultan pitched his tent on top of a hill, and legend tells that near to it he fixed the treaty of peace that the Hungarians had repudiated prominently on a pole. He had four soldiers for every one in the Hungarian Army. His Anatolian troops were on the left wing and his European troops were on the right. Just before the battle began a strong wind blew down all the Christian banners except for that of the king. This was inevitably taken as a bad omen, but the battle began well for them. Following an initial attack by Turkish mounted archers, a senior Turkish leader was killed during the first hand-to-band encounter. Believing that victory was now assured, King Wiadislaw prepared to join the battle personally, something that John Hunyadi had tried to persuade him not to do.

Unlike the king, the experienced Hunyadi was not fooled into thinking that the Turks were already beaten, because as he travelled round the battlefield he could see that the crusader army was hard pressed at every point. At this point, according to the chronicler Chalkondylas, some knights near the king who were jealous of Hunyadi urged the young monarch to win some glory of his own and the next time Hunyadi returned to the royal command post his king had gone. Finding him enveloped within a cloud of Janissaries, Hunyadi attempted his rescue, but it was not long before the King of Hungary's head in its silver helmet was beingwaved on the point of a Turkish spear. From that moment on the crusaders were lost, but the battle had been so bloody and so evenly balanced up to that point that it was not
until the following day that Murad II realised that he had won the greatest Turkish victory since Nicopolis.

The last victories of Murad 2

Soon after the battle of Varna Murad abdicated in favour of his son Mehmet, but certain problems forced the old Sultan back out of retirement. The most serious was John Hunyadi's Danube expedition of 1445. The Ottoman Army monitored and shadowed the raiders from the southern bank and by the end of the campaigning season in October Turkish pressure caused the new crusaders to withdraw.

Murad 11 made the next move when he returned to the Balkans to take further revenge for the treaty-breaking before Varna. The Greeks were the first to suffer for their support when the Peloponnese was captured in 1446, but at this point the newly elected Pope Nicholas V proclaimed a new crusade. The Venetians fiercely opposed the scheme, and the only real support came from George Skanderbeg of Albania, who had once been a hostage of the Turks and was now a doughty fighter for his country.

The Ottoman response was an invasion of Albania and Murad II's incursions brought John Hunyadi hack into the field. The Hungarians crossed the Danube into Serbia in September 1448 with the aim of linking up with Skanderbeg. Hunyadi led an army of 24,000 men, including 8,000 Wailachians, but suffered another military defeat without even seeing his Albanian allies. This encounter was the second battle of Kosovo, which was fought at the same site as the momentous struggle of 1389. Both sides were drawn up in an order similar to their dispositions at Varna, but, unlike Varna, there was no attempt made to break the Turkish line by a wild cavalry charge. Instead John Hunyadi set a strong force of German and Bohemian handgunners against the Janissaries in the Turkish centre with mounted knights on the flanks. As both sides acted defensively from behind field fortifications the result was stalemate between the bullets from one side and the arrows and bolts from the other, and even an attack delivered under cover of darkness was insufficient to break the Jarrissury line. Meanwhile there was a series of cavalry charges on the wings until the Wallachian allies of Hunyadi gave way in the face of superior Turkish numbers on the second day.
Kosovo 1448 was Murad Il's last great victory. He died in 1451, having failed to impose bis rule only in Albania, where the national hero George Skanderbeg fought a fierce and successful guerrilla war against successive Ottoman armies. But the failure to take distant Albania was a trifling detail compared to what Murad II could now pass on to his successor Mehmet 11, who was to earn the enviable sobriquet of Mehmet the Conqueror.

Mehmet the Conqueror 1451-81

Mehmet II was destined to become the greatest sultan of his line so far. Although young he had twice reigned in his father's stead and had accompanied him on campaign. But in Europe he was widely believed to be a youth of no promise, weak and vicious, from whom nothing should be feared. His early acts were deliberately designed to foster these suspicions, because he desperately needed time to deal with domestic matters in Anatolia before embarking on his grand design. As the year 1453 approached the Turks steadily tightened their grip oil Constantinople, which was rapidly running out of allies. The current ruler of Wallachia was a Turkish vassal, as was George Brankovic of Serbia, who even sent troops to fight on the Turkish side during the great siege. Tbe Knights Hospitaller of Rhodes were in no position to risk their island by sending military support, and the rulers of Morea, Georgia and Trebizond (Trabzon) were kept firmly in check. Ragusa (Dubrovnik) on the Dalmatian coast happily maintained its privileged position by paying an annual tribute to the Sultan anti even John Hunyadi of Hungary, after his two defeats at Varna and Kosovo, had turned his thoughts from attack to defence. The result was that when tbe Byzantine Emperor John V111 passed away in October 1448 he died in the knowledge that Constantinople now stood alone, anti that his successor would be isolated when he faced the greatest challenge in the empire's long history.

The conquest of Constantinople 1453

The conquest of Constantinople was a matter of vital concern to the Ottomans. At the meeting called by Mehmed II when it was decided to proceed with a campaign that was to end successfully in 1453, the following points were made:

1. The holy war, the ghaza, was the basic duty of the Ottoman ghazis.
2. The continued existence of Constantinople in the middle of the Ottoman Empire protected their enemies and incited them against the Sultan.
3. The Byzantine Empire had given

sanctuary and support to false claimants to the Ottoman throne, and had been the main instigator of crusades.

1. There was every possibility that Constantinople could be surrendered to Latin Christendom. Tbat would mean that the Ottoman Empire would never be fully integrated.

With these thoughts in mind preparations were made for war. Mehmet's long-term strategy of isolating the city from all sides continued with the taking of all the remaining Byzantine possessions on the Black Sea coast and, most important of all, he was determined to have full command of the sea. On the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus lay a Turkish fortress called Anadolu Hisar. Mebmet now built another castle opposite it on the European side called Rumeli Hisar (the European castle). It was completed in August 1452 and allowed the Ottoman artillery to control all shipping in and out of the Black Sea in a way never before possible. In November 1452 a cannonball fired from Rumeli Hisar sank a Venetian galley. 1 he days of relief armies arriving by sea were over.

In March 1453 an Ottoman fleet assembled off Gelibolu and sailed proudly into the Sea of Marmara while the Turkish Army assembled in Thrace. The sight of the Ottoman Navy passing under the sea walls of Constantinople towards Rumeli Hisar while the army approached its land walls was one that struck terror into the inbabitants. To add to the lesson already delivered from Rumeli Hisar concerning the potential of the Turkish artillery, there soon came lumbering into view a tremendous addition to their firepower. A well-known story tells how a Hungarian artillery expert named Urban approached the Byzantine Emperor with an offer to cast guns for the defence of the city. Because the price he demanded was too high he was sent away, so he immediately turned to the Sultan, who hired him for four times the fee he had asked. Urban boasted that these cannon could reduce 'even the walls of Babylon'. They took three months to make and were test-fired at Edirne. The enormous
cannon were each transported to Constantinople by 70 oxen and 10,000 men. Following the advice of his artillerymen, Mehmet II positioned the siege guns against the weakest and most vulnerable parts of tbe wall. The targets included the imperial palace of Blachernae at the north-western corner of the city and the Romanus Gate in the middle wall. The bombardment, which was to last 55 days, soon began to cause massive destruction. The defenders hit back with their own artillery weapons, but they faced several problems, one of the most serious being that the flat roofs of the towers in the medieval walls were not sufficiently strong to act as gun emplacements. As Leonard of Chios put it, `the largest cannon had to remain silent for fear of damage to our own walls by vibration'. Chalkondylas even wrote that the act of firing cannon did more harm to the towers than the Turkish bombardment.

On 20 April three supply ships braved the Turkish blockade and entered the Golden Horn. This natural harbour, across which a stout chain had been slung, was the only sea area that the Byzantines still controlled. But two days later the defenders' elation turned to despair when Mehmet II put into motion an extraordinary feat of military engineering. A wooden roadway was constructed from the Bosphorus to a stream called the Springs that entered the Golden Horn, and with much muscular effort some 8(3 Itirkish ships were dragged overland and relaunched far beyond tbe boom.

Seaborne attacks could now be made from much closer quarters, but rumours were heard concerning the approach of a relieving army from Hungary. This prompted Mehmet II to launch a simultaneous assault against the land and sea walls on Tuesday 29 May. Tlw attack began in the early hours of the morning. The Byzantine emperor had concentrated his troops between the inner and middle walls and when they were in position the gates of the inner wall were closed because there was to be no retreat. The Turkish irregulars went in first but were driven back, as were the Anatolian infantry who followed them. A final attack by the Janissaries took the middle wall and when a wounded senior commander of Constantinople was seen being evacuated through the inner wall into the city the impression was given that he was retreating. Resistance began to fade and when the Emperor was killed in a brave counterattack Constantinople fell. The Ottomans had finally extinguished their most symbolic rival and the Ottoman Empire would never be the same again.

The siege of Belgrade 1456

Following the fall of Constantinople Hungary was surrounded by lands that were either sympathetic to the Ottomans or cowed by them. Skanderbeg's guerrillas in Albania were unlikely to leave their mountains and Serbia was equally passive, but owing to George Brankovic's earlier understanding with the Hungarians, the in 1456 this mighty triple-walled fortress where the Sava met the Danube became the Mehmet the Conqueror's first objective in his post-Constantinople euphoria. 'I shall be dining peacefully in Buda within two months' he is reported as saying.

In the event Belgrade was saved by the citizens' army described below. But the rest of the Balkans still looked doomed and Serbia's neighbour, Bosnia-Herzegovina, also fell, but for very different reasons. The area had long been the heartland of the fiercely persecuted Bogomil sect, who saw in the Turks a probable relief from their sufferings, so many inhabitants welcomed the Ottomans. By the end of 1463 Bosnia had become another Ottoman dominion after the campaign described below through the eyes of Konstantin Mihailovic. Soon almost the whole Orthodox world of the Balkans was in Turkish hands, leaving only a small mountainous district later known as Montenegro to enjoy some measure of autonomy. In Albania George Skanderbeg repelled no less than 13 Turkish advances between 1444 and 1466 and it was only after his death in 1468 that the Turks were able to make any headway. In Greece the Duchy of Athens surrendered to the Turks in 1456 and internal dissensions made the Ottoman conquest of the Peloponnese a straightforward task. Only Hungary and its immediate neighbours now stood against the Turks.

The Ottoman war with Wallachia

In 1456 Wallachia, one of the Balkan principalities that had hitherto posed little threat to the growth of the Ottoman Empire, suddenly provided a new challenge. Taking advantage of the Sultan's concentration on the siege of Belgrade, Wallachia's exiled prince won back his throne and took an oath of suzerainty to the king of I lungary. By this act Wallachia finally repudiated any vestiges of loyalty it may have retained towards the Turks and placed itself on the front line against the Ottoman advance. Its previously obscure prince thereby began a new challenge to Mehmet's conquest. His name was Vlad Dracula and it was his war against Mebmet the Conqueror that made him a Balkan folk hero long before a 19th-century novelist appropriated his name for his classic gothic villain.

The real Vlad Dracula was no vampire, hut certain aspects of his behaviour made him horrible enough. Without accepting all the tales of terror that are told about him, most of which were either elaborated or even invented by unsympathetic chroniclers long after his death, there is little ground for doubting that he employed torture as a weapon of statecraft. Dracula's notoriety derived largely from his Favourite means of execution, so that he became known as Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler).

Hostilities with the Ottomans began when Vlad Dracula refused to continue paying tribute to the Sultan and instead impaled the Turkish ambassadors. In 1461 he attacked and captured the fortress of Giurgiu and then led raids down the Danube in a campaign similar to Hunyadi's Long Campaign of 1443, taking all the points along to the Danube Delta of the Black Sea from which the 'lurks could make a waterborne response. The chronicler halkondylas writes of Mehmet leading a Turkish army larger than any since the siege of Constantinople, outnumbering even the host sent against Belgrade. Tbe force assembled at Philippopoiis {Plovdiv) in May 1562, but because of Dracula's attacks on the Black Sea ports the Turkish naval involvement was minimal and they initially did little more than attack Brailla and Cbilia near the Delta. The Turks then marched overland from Plovdiv and first tried to cross the Danube at Vidin, one of the few ports still left intact, but they were prevented by archery fire from disembarking on the far shore. Finally, during June, an advanced unit of Ottomans succeeded in landing at Turnii on the Romanian side of the river near Nicopolis.

Vlad's cruelty to Ottomans soldiers and civilians alike is described below. It was therefore in the Ottomans' favour that a resolution of the Wallachian campaign Iay through the contrast that Mehmet was offering the people in the choice between Vlad and his brother Radu. Soon Vlad Dracula was on the run. After a few years of imprisonment he returned briefly to Wallachia, hut was killed in battle in 1476.

The Moldavian campaign

Neighbouring Moldavia was ruled at the time by Stephen the Great, who put up a spirited resistance to the Ottoman advance. Mehmet 11 ordered an invasion of Moldavia in 1475, which was to be synchronised with an attack by sea against the Black Sea port of Chilli]. Stephen concentrated his forces around Vaslui and the population of lower Moldavia fled to the mountains.

The Grand Vizier Suleirnan led the Turkish advance and came upon a Moldavian covering force. The Moldavians gave way and slowly retreated, keeping up attacks on the Turkish columns. The state of the roads slowed the Ottomans down still further until they were successfully led towards the defensive position prepared by Stephen at Vasltd. The Ottoman vanguard arrived early on 10 January 1475. It was a dark and misty morning. Field up by the fierce fighting of the Moldavian troops the Ottomans were crushed by a counterattack led by Stephen the Great later in the day.

The Ottoman Army withdrew, but returned to Moldavia in 1476. This time the advance was supported by their vassal prince in Wallachia and from the north by the Tartars of the Ukraine. In view of the situation Stephen ordered the population of Moldavia to flee to the mountains, destroying crops and wells as they went. This made the Turkish advance very difficult and cholera soon added to their problems. Stephen attacked the vanguard at Valea Alba, but on the following day the Ottoman main body under Mehmet the Conqueror dispersed Stephen's guerrillas and began to overrun the country. Only an agreement with King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary promised help anti when the Hungarians moved against Moldavia the Ottomans withdrew. There was no further fighting until 1484.

The first siege of Rhodes 1480

In 148(1 Mchmet the Conqueror turned bis attentions against the Knights of Rhodes on their island fortress close to the Anatolian mainland. The Turkish landing was unopposed because the Grand Master d'Anbusson could not spare the manpower from the walls. In command of Mehmet's army was a certain Misac, who began by carefully selecting his artillery positions, because personal experience had taught him the tremendous damage that artillery could do in attack. He targeted points that were both vulnerable and strategic and within days nine towers had been destroyed and the Grand Master's palace had been reduced to ruins.

But a successful besieger of Rhodes also had to take the harbour and the 'bower of St Nicholas was the key to achieving that objective. Three hundred balls were loosed at its 24ft-thick walls, which eventually cracked, but fortunately for the garrison the rate of fire from the huge siege cannon was not very rapid as tbe barrels had to cool down, so 14 sbots a day was a normal average, and by day and by night the defenders carried out repairs to the walls as quickly as the Turkish cannon could demolish them.

On 1 June the defenders were heartened by the arrival of a supply ship into the commercial harbour. After a ten-day bombardment of St Nicholas Misac launched an amphibious dawn attack on the harbour using triremes that had been stripped of all non-essential equipment. There was no attempt at surprise – the Ottoman Army attacked with its customary din from drums and musical instruments – but as the triremes entered the harbour they came under attack from the section of the harbour walls defended by the "IOngue (Division) of France. Soldiers who tried to land in the shallows became caught in defensive stakes, and the attack was driven off with the loss of one ship and half the attackers.

On 7 June Misac began a long and carefully planned operation against the sections of wall dedicated to the Tongues of Provence and Italy. The curtain wall along this length was comparatively thin, so Misac ordered a two-pronged approach of batteringthe walls and launching balls and incendiary devices over them into the Jewish quarter of the town immediately beyond. The south-eastern wall slowly collapsed into the moat and presented the Turks with an easily scalable ramp.

At dawn the bombardment ceased. There was a brief pause and then a single gunshot ordered the final advance. Great waves of Turks swept across the moat and up the sloe that their guns had created, and it was not long before the defenders who had been driven out of the much damaged Tower of Italy saw the Ottoman standard flying from it. Many Turks were beginning to scale the broken wall that led from the Tower of Italy down towards the sea while their comrades provided covering fire from the tower itself. Yet Rhodes still held out, and 3,500 "lurks were killed during the repulse of the attack on the breach and the subsequent pursuit. The siege was over, and when Misac finally withdrew his troops after a campaign that had lasted three months, he had suffered a probable casualty list of 9,000 dead and 15,000 wounded.

The Ottoman invasion of Italy 1480

In 1480 Mehmet the Conqueror launched the most audacious expedition of his career when an army under Gedik Ahmet Pasha landed in southern Italy and captured Otranto. They then raided inland and struck at Brindisi, Taranto and Lecce, but Duke Ferrante of Naples led a counterattack and drove them back to Otranto. The majority of the Rakish Army then sailed away, leaving a garrison at Otranto wbo sat there stubbornly during the whole time that Rhodes was being besieged. When Rhodes was abandoned Turkish interest returned to this hold but lonely outpost, which saw fighting well into 1481.

The occupation of Italian lands so close to the main altar of Christendom caused a level of panic that exceeded the reaction to the loss of Constantinople and recriminations were liberally tossed around. The Venetians in particular were accused of doing nothing to prevent the Turkish advance and even of having instigated the invasion. In spite of the retention of Rhodes fear of the Turk was now at its highest. Mehmet the Conqueror himself was said to be coming to Italy and the Pope considered fleeing to Avignon. Instead he asked for help, but it was not the polyglot force he assembled that saved Italy, but the eventual death of Mehmet the Conqueror in 1481.

The heirs of the Conqueror

In spite of all his achievements the work of consolidating the Ottoman gains was not completed when Mehmet the Conqueror died. He left two surviving sons, Bayezid and Jem, each of whom had charge of a province of Anatolia. A clash between them was inevitable. The current Grand Vizier favoured Jem and tried to keep the news of Mehmet's death from Bayezid, but his plot was found out and Jem was defeated. He fled to Rhodes where he took refuge with the Knights. They sent this valuable bargaining counter on to France, and Jem found himself the centre of various crusading plots until bis death in 1495.

The result was that Sultan Bayezid pi's entire reign was overshadowed by the possibility that Jem might be used as a pretender by the western powers. As long as Jem was alive the Ottomans dared not engage in major wars, so the characteristic activities of Bayezid's reign were raiding and border warfare. Ottoman attacks were made on Croatia and the Austrian lands of Styria, Carniola and Carinthia. in 1493 an Ottoman army was defeated at the battle of Villach.

Peace was restored in 1495 with a three-year truce with Hungary, but the Ottomans still had to win control over the estuaries of the Danube and the Dneister in order to establish safe land communications with the Crimea. So in 1484, Bayezid 11 concluded an armistice with King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary. This gave him a free hand to attack Stephen the Great of Moldavia. In the same year Bayezid 11 captured the fortress of Chilia. His campaign into Moldavia was checked by reverses at the battles of Catlaburga in 1485 and Scheia in 1486, but in spite of these defeats Moldavia became an Ottoman dependency.

The capture of Belgrade

Suleiman (suleyman) the Magnificient became Sultan in 1520 at the age of 25. History now remembers him as the greatest sultan of his line, a man who fully justified the two epithets he was given - 'the Magnificent' to Europeans, and 'the Lawgiver' in his native land - but in 1521 his greatness was merely potential. The repression of a revolt in Syria was Suleiman's first campaign. Hungary was the next, and the key to any advance into Hungary was the city of Belgrade, which lies on the southern bank of the Danube at its confluence with the Sava. It had remained out of Ottoman hands in spite of the vigorous siege in 1456 and the capitulation of much of the rest of the Balkans.

The Ottomans had long since been in possession of the line of the lower Danube from Smederevo to the Black Sea, a factor that Suleiman intended to exploit. He left Constantinople for Belgrade on 16 February 152] and his army was followed up the Danube by a supply convoy of 40 boats. On reaching Ms the force divided. One part, commanded by Ahmed Pasha, the beylerber of Rumelia, moved against Sabac, followed a few days later by Suleiman himself. The second main body under the Grand Vizier Phi Pasha headed for Belgrade, while the akinji were also separated into two bodies, the first to act as scouts, the second to raid into the Carpathian mountains of Transylvania.

Sabac defended itself with fruitless heroism, and 100 heads of the soldiers of the garrison who had been unable to escape by river were brought to the Sultan's camp. On 8 July these heads were placed on pikes along his route. Suleiman then proceeded to transfer his army across the river using boats and marched downstream along the northern bank towards Belgrade. Loud cheers from his army, who had already begun a siege from the south, greeted his arrival on the enemy side. An initial assault was repulsed, so Suleiman began bombarding the walls from the island in the middle of the Danube, and SIX) Janissaries were ordered to go up the Danube in boats to intercept the Hungarians. On 8 August an attack was launched that caused the defenders to abandon the city and retire to the castle, where they held out for a further three weeks. Belgrade only surrendered after one of the main towers had been destroyed by a mine.

The second siege of Rhodes

Although the 1522 attacks on Rhodes were every bit as fierce as 1480 and delivered with the support of guns even bigger than those used then, the siege proved to be a very different affair from what had been expected. In 1522 the siege operations were conducted as much under the ground as above it. Fortunately for the garrison, some prisoners revealed that Suleiman had recruited many miners from his conquered territories. The acquisition of this information allowed the Grand Master time to bring into his service a renowned military engineer called Gabriele Tadini, who was placed in charge of all counter-mining operations.

The walls of the Knights' defences followed the lines of old culverts, affording the possibility that these tremendous walls, although built upon solid rock, were already undermined for most of their length by old tunnels. The Turkish plan was to drive mines under the moat to connect with the ancientpassages where sites could be selected for explosives to bring down towers or to collapse walls. The Turkish assault, however, began in a way very similar to that of 1480 with the installation of cannon batteries for what was to prove a sustained and long bombardment.
On 9 September two mines exploded under the sector of Provence but had little effect due to Tadini's countermeasures, while another under the English sector brought only a minor collapse of masonry. The formidable reinforcements built round the gates were hardly touched, an eloquent testimony to the strength of their designs, although the Bastion of St George still shows a vertical crack to this day. Reinforcements and supplies for the Knights continued to arrive in dribs and drabs while the pattern of mining and countermining, assaults on the breaches and bloody hand-to-hand fighting continued. By the beginning of December the new tunnels added to the ancient culverts had created such a honeycomb beneath the walls that it is surprising that they stood up at all and the garrison were running short of supplies.

Three individual meetings were held between Suleiman the Magnificent and Grand Master de L'Isle Adam during which an amicable settlement was negotiated. The personal trust that bound the eventual agreement between the two deadly enemies is quite remarkable. When Suleiman the Magnificent rode into the city through the Gate of St. John he dismissed his guards, saying, 'My safety is guaranteed by the word of a Grand Master of the llospitallers, which is more sure than all the armies in the world.' Yet the Sultan's generosity bad its downside, because the Knights of Rhodes whom he let sail away unharmed were to become the Knights of Malta.

The battle of Mohacs

Suleiman's next European campaign resulted in the greatest victory of his career. On 23 April 1526 he left Constantinople at the head of an army of perhaps 100,000 men and 300 cannon to advance against Hungary: a kingdom that was divided against itself and almost abandoned by its allies. The long march lasted 80 days before contact was established with the enemy. Dreadful weather added to the Turkish difficulties, and torrential rain increased the current of the Danube so much that the fleet of 800 supply vessels had great difficulty keeping tip with the army.

Nevertheless strict discipline was maintained. Soldiers were executed for treading down young crops or even letting their horses graze on them and, in spite of his slow progress, Suleiman was able to take heart from two things. The first was the constant arrival of reinforcements to his standard. The second was the exemplary efficiency demonstrated by his Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha. When the Sultan arrived in Belgrade he found a bridge already waiting for him, courtesy of Ibrahim l'asha, who was then sent on ahead once again to capture the fortress of Petrovaradin. It lay on the southern bank of the Danube about midway between the Sava and t he Drava near present-day Novi Sad. Two mines opened up a breach in the walls, and the citadel fell to the Turks with a loss to the besiegers of only 25 men.

The time it was taking the Ottoman Army to advance should have allowed plenty of opportunity for King Louis II of Hungary to make defensive preparations. It was obvious to Suleiman that the most likely place for their advance to be stopped was the river Drava, the only river barrier that now remained between the Sultan and Ifungary since the fall of Belgrade. The Drava joins the Danube just below Osijek in Croatia and for much of its length forms the present-day border with Hungary. On their way there the Turks captured Illok on 8 August, in spite of being delayed again by wet weather, and it was not until 14 August that the Sultan reached the junction of the Danube and the Drava. He was expecting to find a huge Hungarian army sitting on the Drava's northern bank. But there was no enemy in sight.

King Louis II had reached Tolna on 2 August, where his allies began to arrive to join him. But personal rivalries prevented tbem from cooperating effectively. It was to King Louis' great credit tbat he appreciated as much as did Suleiman the tremendous strategic importance of the line of the Drava. It was very late in the day for it to be secured, but by 8 August tbere was still time to reach it from Tolna, so the young king ordered Stefan Bathory to occupy Osijek and defend the Drava. But the majority of the Hungarian nobles who were ordered to march with him refused to move. They would only serve under their king, they declared, not his mere deputy. Bathory tried to set them an example of loyalty, even though a bad attack of gout made it difficult for hint to mount his horse. But the plan had to be abandoned, and instead of sending a vanguard to the Drava the whole army marched on to a point almost midway between Tolna and Osijek near the little riverside hamlet of Mohacs. John Szapolyai, one of the king's strongest Hungarian allies as well as one of his greatest rivals, was ordered to go raiding.

Meanwhile Sultan Suleiman had dealt with the undefended line of the Drava in a manner that was militarily effective and profoundly symbolic. He gave orders for a bridge of boats to be thrown across the river, a task his enthusiastic followers completed in five days. When all his army were safely across he burned Osijek and then destroyed the bridge itself. There was to be no turning back.

The battlefield of Mohacs is located south of the present-day town of Mohacs along the road to Croatia, and most of the actual fighting probably took place in an area between four and seven miles away from the town. In 1526 most of the land to the east of the present road, including the section now inside Croatia, was swampy woodland. The heavy rain that had dogged the campaign up to that point had made the conditions much worse than normal, and the little river called the Borza, which eventually empties into the Danube, had disappeared into the morass.

A combination of woods and ridges shielded the Turkish advance from the eyes of the Hungarians. King Louis II set up his standard at a point just over balfway between Mohacs and the Borza River. The Sultan, who was aware of the potential striking power of the Hungarian knights, arranged his defences in depth. A thin screen of azaps (conscripted light horsemen) stood out in front. The Rumelian and Anatolian horse, supported by artillery, constituted the first two major lines under the Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha and Behrem Pasha respectively. The third line consisted of the heavy artillery with 15,000 Janissaries and sipahis on the flanks under the personal command of the Sultan himself. Squadrons of cavalry lay to the rear in support, while far over on the left wing, and much advanced towards tbe Hungarians, stood a force of akiuji.

The battle of Mohacs began with a salvo from the Hungarian artillery. Then a tremendous charge of Hungarian knights took place across the firm grassland. The shock of the knights' charge broke the Rumelian and Anatolian horse and advanced towards the third line. They looked as tbough they were about to make contact with the Sultan himself when suddenly they were brought to a violent halt by the fire from the line of Turkish guns that had been chained together along the edge of a depression. Part of the Hungarian left wing gave way and retired to the marshy ground and when the Ottomans launched their counterattack the main body of the Hungarian knights were driven straight back towards the king's camp. There they found to their dismay that some Turkish light horsemen had already arrived and were slaughtering the camp followers.

Meanwhile the detached Turkish units advanced in two sections, one against the flanks of the melee that was now threatening to turn into a full-scale Hungarian retreat, and the other on towards the king's position at the rear. The slaughter was finished by 6pm after only two hours of actual fighting. Of the king's estimated 13,000 foot soldiers only 3,000 got away. King Louis II of Hungary completely disappeared. He had fled from the battlefield, but when his horse tried to climb the steep bank of a small stream it fell and landed on top of him, crushing him to death. His body was only found and identified two months later when the floods of the Danube had subsided. A number of prisoners were taken, but the Sultan had them all beheaded the next day.
John Szapolyai eventually arrived at Mohacs the day after the catastrophe, but hurriedly withdrew when the sight of destruction met his eyes. After three days rest Suleiman the Magnificent continued unopposed to Buda, burning the cathedral city of Rinfkirchen {Pecs) on the way. On entering Buda on 10 September he ordered the place to be spared, but it was burned and looted anyway. Many treasures were carted off to Constantinople while the irregular horse raided throughout Hungary. Thewidowed Queen Mary fled to the safety of Bratislava and then on to her brother the Archduke Ferdinand of Hapsburg, who ruled Austria from Vienna.

Suleiman had already decided not to annexe Hungary but to make it into a tributary principality like Wallachia, and in this decision he was aided by the ambitions of John Szapolyai, who sent envoys to the Sultan at Buda offering his services. As a result of their discussions John Szapolyai entered Buda as the Turkish representative when the Ottoman Army withdrew.

To the family of the late King Louis II the only claimant for the throne of Hungary was Anne, the sister of the dead king who was married to Archduke Ferdinand. A Diet was called in Bratislava on 26 October and elected Anne and her husband as king and queen of Hungary. But three weeks later on 10 November 1526 the Turkish nominee John Szapolyai was also crowned king of Hungary at Szekesfehervar. So to add to the massacre at Mohacs and the Turkish subjugation, Hungary now had to suffer the problem of rival kings, a native Hungarian who was the puppet of the Ottomans and the Hapsburg Archduke of Austria. Two centuries of war and disunity were to follow.

The momentum that the victory at Mohacs gave to Ottoman expansion entrenched land warfare as the favoured means of extending the empire's boundaries. The close link between military success and political power that existed in Ottoman society also ensured the reputation of Sultan Suleiman. All Europe expected him to return to the Danube in 1527 to continue where he had left off, but the Turkish Empire stretched into distant domains of which few Europeans were aware and these territories were to occupy him for some time to come.

His Balkan governors nonetheless served to demoralise Hungary still further - not that Hungary needed any external pressure to be demoralised, because a civil war between its two monarchs was already performing that task very successfully. That same year King Ferdinand, with the help of Bohemian troops, drove John Szapolyai's armies out of Buda, captured Raab (Gyor), Komoron and Gran (Esztergom) along the line of the Danube and also took Szekesfehervar. Szapolyai naturally appealed to the Sultan for support, but help did not come in 1527, nor did it come in 1528. Instead John Szapolyai became a footnote in the next great Turkish advance against Europe in the most ambitious campaign of the great Sultan's reign.

The siege of Vienna

Suleiman the Magnificnt launched his Vienna campaign on 10 May 1529 and reached Osijek on 6 August with an army of perhaps 120,000 men. On 18 August he met up with King John Szapolyai and, with the pro-Turkish Hungarian king leading the way, tbe army of invasion proceeded north. Buda capitulated on 8 September, and John Szapolyai gratefully installed himself within tbe city while the rest of the army continued on along the line of the Danube. To the dismay of the Austrians several of the fortresses they had recently captured from Szapolyai, including Gran (Fsztergom), Tata, Komoron and Raab (Gyor), now surrendered and the only place that put up any sort of defence was Bratislava, from where the accompanying Turkish fleet was bombarded as its sailed upriver. On 27 September Suleiman the Magnificent arrived safely at the gates of Vienna.

Ferdinand's garrison was over 16,000 strong, but his men defended medieval walls from which modern artillery bastions and the like were conspicuous only by their absence. The defences of Vienna therefore paled by comparison to somewhere like Rhodes and the wall that surrounded the city was in many places no more than Gft thick. We know from accounts of the siege that the usual precautions were taken of levelling the houses just inside the walls and building an inner earthen wall from which a counterattack might be launched. Provision was also made for a rapid breaking down of the bridge across the branch of the Danube that acted as the city's north-eastern moat.

In spite of the weak state of the old-fasbioned walls, the Turks realised that they would bave to deal with an attitude of determined defence equal to that shown at Rhodes seven years earlier. The quality both of troops and of their leadership far surpassed the shambles at Mohacs. The majority of the garrison were professional soldiers fighting under a soldier who had recently distinguished himself at the battle of Pavia. One of his sorties from the walls, designed to disrupt the digging of sap trenches (which it did successfully), also came within a hairsbreadth of capturing Suleiman's illustrious Grand Vizier, Ibrahim Pasha.

Otherwise it was the time-honoured sequence of bombardment and mining, although the former was much reduced because much of the Turkish heavy artillery had been left behind owing to the foul weather and the latter technique was vigorously countered by sheer bravery. Several Turkish mine heads were detected and blown in and, on 6 October, 8,000 men of the city took part in an attack designed to clear the ground behind the Turkish front line where mines were started. Immense damage was done, although congestion on the army's return allowed the rear companies to he badly cut up. After a number of attacks had been repulsed an Ottoman council of war on 12 October began to consider the possibility of a retreat. Winter was fast approaching, so Suleiman decided that one final effort should be made. His men were spurred on by the promise of a rich reward to the first man to climb over the wall. But even this could not guarantee victory and at midnight on 14 October screams were heard coming from the Turkish camp as their prisoners were massacred ready for a withdrawal.

The Turkish retreat was disastrous. On land the army struggled through early snow and on the Danube the ships came under fire from the cannons of Bratislava. Suleiman's light cavalry ravaged their way home, but it was calculated that the number of Austrian peasants they killed was smaller than the number of Turkish troops lost during the siege. In Buda King John Szapolyai came out to congratulate his suzerain on a great victory, but the contrast to the confident army that had marched north was very noticeable.

The 'Little War' in Hungary

During 1530 the triumphant Archduke Ferdinand took advantage of the Sultan's absence to recapture Gran and other Danube forts. He even attacked King John Szapolyai in Buda, although the resistance offered by its Turkish garrison drove him off. But Suleiman was back in Hungary in 1532 for a second try at Vienna with an even larger army than he had brought with him in 1529. He crossed the Drava at Osijek, but instead of taking the usual route for Vienna he turned westwards into the narrow strip of Hungarian territory towards the Austrian border that was still in King Ferdinand's possession. After taking a few minor places he laid siege to a castle that was then, as it is today, the last fortress in Hungarian territory.

The town is now called Koszeg, but in 1532 the Austrians called it Guns. It was a tiny place defended by only 700 men, yet it held out against the Turks for almost as long as mighty Vienna. Its commander was one Miklos Jurisics, a Croatian by birth and a captain of great resolution and integrity. His 700 men had been intended for the general muster at Vienna but stayed behind when they realised the Thrks' immediate intentions.

They had no cannon, few arquebuses and little powder, but the siege was started in blissful ignorance of these facts by Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha. Suleiman the Magnificent came to join him shortly afterwards. The layout of Koszeg's wails made mining a feasible strategy, but even though several mines succeeded in blowing holes in the fortifications, every subsequent assault was beaten off.

Jurisics was then summoned to a parley in the tent of Ibrahim Pasha to receive his proposals for an extraordinary deal. Suleiman the Magnificent, who still did riot realise how small was the force that had delayed him for so long, offered to spare the garrison and march away if Jurisics would offer him a nominal surrender. The only Turks who would be allowed to enter the castle would be a token force who would raise the Turkish flag and keep their comrades out before withdrawing for good. Miklos Jurisics was acutely aware of the desperate straits his tiny garrison were in and agreed to this unprecedented proposal. As a result, while the rains of a miserable August continued, the Ottoman Army withdrew.

The other result of the Sultan's second invasion of Austria was a peace treaty concluded with King Ferdinand. Its terms still maintained the right of John Szapolyai to be king of all Hungary, but recognised Ferdinand's possession of that part of the country that enjoyed the status quo. A breathing space was therefore given to all sides and it would be nine years before Suleiman the Magnificent resumed his land war against Hungary and Austria.

Meanwhile the rival kings Ferdinand and John kept up sporadic hostilities against each other. Ferdinand was tbe first to break the treaty and sent tbree of his ablest generals, all veterans of the siege of Vienna, to besiege Osijek in 1537. In this they far outreached their lines of communication. A fierce counterattack by Turkish cavalrymen drove them back along the Drava through the November snows and in a series of running figbts near Valpovo (Valpo) in Croatia suffered a defeat tbat produced a casualty list almost as long as Mohacs.

In 1537 Suleiman the Magnificent produced yet anotber of those dramatic military gestures that caused periodic panic in western Europe. This time he marched a large army to the coast of Albania and landed it in Italy near Otranto, iust as Mehmet the Conqueror had done in 1480. Eight tbousand irregular horsemen then raided inland, altbough Otranto and Brindisi held out. Tbis produced as much terror in Italy as the incursion of 1480 had. But when an expected Frencb invasion of Italy from the north did not materialise the Sultan withdrew all his troops and chose instead to besiege Corfu, an action that led to the indecisive naval battle of Prevesa.

When the pro-Turkish King John Szapolyai died in 1540 his heir was but a few weeks old, so Queen lsabelia hurried to have him crowned in his cradle as news of a rapid advance on Buda by King Ferdinand began to reach ber ears. Sultan Suleiman came to her aid in 1541, helped immeasurably by tbe incompetence of the elderly Austrian general kogendorf. Ferdinand's commander already controlled Pest and should bave been capable of crossing the Danube to take Buda, but was not. Having destroyed Rogendorf's stalemated army outside the city Suleiman crossed to Pest and slaughtered the rest of the Austrians stationed there. The Queen was most grateful, but became suspicious when the Sultan asked for the baby king to be brought to his tent. No harm was done to the child, whom Suleiman swore solemnly to protect. The catch was that, in the Sultan's opinion, this protection would be better exercised if the child and his mother were moved to the safety of Transylvania until the infant, now named John Sigismund, came of age. While these delicate negotiations were taking place a Turkish garrison secretly entered Buda castle. Measures were therefore taken for the direct annexation by the Turkish Sultan of those territories that had hitherto been held by his vassal John Szapolyai.

In April 1543 Suleiman returned for a large-scale mopping-up operation to capture the Hungarian towns that had gone over to the Austrians during Ferdinand's last invasion. Gran (Esztergom), Pecs and Szekesfehervar returned once again to the Turkish fold. All that remained of Hapsburg Hungary was now a long, narrow strip of borderland. It looked as though just one mighty push could take tbe Sultan again to Vienna, but a further peace agreement allowed young John Sigismund Szapolyai to attain the age of 11. He was also recognised as Prince of Transylvania, where some bitter campaigning deprived the Austrians of all the fortresses they had occupied there.

It was only when tbe Turks returned to Hungarian territory in 1552 that a further reverse awaited them at Erlau (Eger). It lay almost at tbe north-western extremity of King Ferdinand's scrap of Hungary and provided the second of three instances when small Hungarian fortresses defied Suleiman tbe Magnificent. In command of Erlau was Istvan (Stephen) Dobo, whose garrison was sustained by large quantities of the local red wine. Someone who saw the wine dripping from the whiskers of the defenders during tbe siege claimed that they were fortified by bulls' blood, an appellation that has stuck for the Eger vintage to this day. The women of the town played a gallant part by keeping tbeir menfolk supplied with powder, ball and of course flagons of bulls' blood, while emptying cauldrons of boiling water over the Turkish siege ladders. The result was a second humiliation for another overwhelming Turkish Army.

The Great Siege of Malta

When the Knights of St John moved from Rhodes to Malta they did more than merely occupy another island base. With the same foresight and energy with which tbey had given Rhodes the finest fortifications they could afford, the Knights converted the rocky island into a formidable galley port where Spanish fleets could rest and re-arm.

Although financial resources did not stretch towards fortifying the area where Valletta now stands, Grand Master Jean de La Vallette, after whom the capital would one day be named, had erected a fine star-shaped fort called St Limo to guard the harbour approaches. For this reason the Turkish Army came ashore on the west coast of the island and directed their first efforts against Fort St Elmo. This initial operation went on for a full month. St Elmo was contested under thecircumstances of a curious reversal in the physical positions of the two armies, because the Turks attacked by land while the Knights reinforced and supplied the place by sea. This convenient arrangement ended when the corsair Dragut arrived and placed guns at a strategic position to cut off any ships crossing the harbour mouth, even by night. The final capture of St Elmo was expensive for the Turks, who lost 8,000 men for the 600 killed among the defeated. Dragut was killed during the attack and Piale, the commander of the fleet, was badly injured by a ricocbeting sbot.

With Fort St Elmo out of action Mustafa Pasba was able to bring his whole force round to the harbour of Marsa Muscetto immediately to the north of the Grand Harbour. Tbe inner defences of Malta were now subjected to seven weeks of attack in tbe second phase of the operation, but the system of walls kept any breaches to a minimum, and the discipline and fighting skills of tbe soldiers held any breaches that were created.

Early in July a new method of attack was tried. Hassan, the Pasha of Algiers, who was the son of the great Khaireddin Barbarossa, led an attack by small boats on the weak points of Malta's seaward defences while a land assault went on. Both attacks failed, the waterborne one disastrously so when it was found that a boom just under the surface of the water had covered the so-called weak points. In desperation the leader of the unit thrust his boats against the rocky point of the spur and some of his men even got a footing, but they were driven out and exterminated when their boats were caught in a crossfire.

This was the only attempt at an assault on Malta by sea. Otherwise the siege was the usual pattern of mining and bombardment to create breaches and desperate struggles for the gaps thus created, but by the end of August the Turks had had enough and the arrival of a reinforcing fleet served only to confirm them in the decision to withdraw. Malta therefore survived to deny the Ottomans the control of the North African coast that they had sought.

The end at Szigetvar

The defeat at Malta marked the beginning of the final year of Suleiman the Magnificent's life. I I is woes included serious dissension within his own house, largely over the question of who would become the next sultan. The one thing that might satisfy him was victory in battle, so in January 1566 Suleiman the Magnificent went to war for what was to prove the last time. He was 72 years old, and suffered so badly from gout that be had to be carried in a litter, yet his 1566 campaign was the 13th military expedition he had conducted in person.

The new invasion was also his seventh against Hungary and, on 1 May 1566, Suleiman left Constantinople at the head of one of the largest armies he had ever commanded. His weakened state meant that the host proceeded slowly and only reached Belgrade after 49 days' marching. On 27 June he received in audience John Sigismund Szapolyai, to whom he confirmed his promise to make him ruler of all Hungary. From the Belgrade area Suleiman made ready to move to the northern border area, but he had hardly started on his way when news came of the defeat at the castle of Siklos, in southern Hungary, of one of his favourite generals Mohammed of Trikala. One Miklos Zrinyi, who had fought the Turks during the siege of Vienna over 30 years previously, had brought about the reversal.

Zrinyi was based at Szigeth (Szigetvar), another fortress near the Hungarian/Croatian border. Szigetvar was off Suleiman's planned line of advance, and involved marching away from the army the emperor was known to have assembled near Vienna, but nevertheless the angry Sultan gave orders for a diversion to tbe west and an attack on Szigetvar.

On 5 August 1566 the Ottoman Army took up its positions around Szigetvar for a siege that was to become the equivalent of Malta on dry land, although the combination of rivers, moats and marshes around Szigetvar made Miklos Zrinyi's castle look very much like an island fortress. The water defences were fed by the Almas River, a tributary of the nearby Drava, and had been cunningly utilised to surround what was an unusual design of castle. Szigetvar fell into three sections, each of which was linked to the other by bridges and causeways. Although it was not built on particularly high ground the inner bailey, which occupied much the same area as the castle site does today, was surprisingly inaccessible, because two other baileys had to be taken and secured before a final assault could be launched.

Ottoman morale was high. At Szigetvar Suleiman was motivated by thoughts of revenge as well as conquest and spurred on his men with readings from the Koran. A spell of dry weather favoured the besiegers by reducing the water level in the moats, and by 19 August both the old and new towns were in their hands. While a fierce counter-battery bombardment went on, with both sides giving as good as they received, the Turks began to throw material into the moat of the inner fortress to create their own causeway across. Suleiman had high hopes of taking the castle in a second attack delivered on the auspicious anniversary of the battle of Mohacs. But still the castle held out, as it did again on 1 September. However, for the past two weeks Suleiman's engineers had been busy in the very unglamorous task of digging a mine under one of Szigetvar's principal bastions. This was a very hazardous undertaking against a fortress that was surrounded by water fed from a river. They managed to reach beneath the wall without detection and fired the mine on 5 September. The resulting explosion was more than anyone had dared hope for. An enormous hole now existed at the corner of Szigetvar, and flames had spread to the buildings inside.

The fall of the castle was inevitable, but the Ottoman high command hesitated for a moment, for on that very same day Suleiman the Magnificent died in his tent behind the siege lines. No doubt the immense strain of the current campaign had contributed towards this most unwelcome event, but at all costs it had to be kept secret. Only the Sultan's innermost circle knew of his demise, and the courier dispatched from the camp with a message for Selim, Suleiman's successor, may not even have known the content of the message he delivered to distant Asia Minor within a mere eight days.
Miklos Zrinyi certainly did not know of the momentous development. He was now in command of a battered fortress with only three sides left standing. An assault across the breach could come at any moment, so Zrinyi decided to resolve the issue by leading his men in one last suicidal sortie. He had only 600 able-bodied soldiers left and, with Zrinyi at their head, they charged across the bridge into the Turkish host who were preparing for the final advance. Zrinyi died almost instantly when two bullets hit him in the chest, and very few of the 'gallant six hundred' survived their absorption into the hostile Turkish ranks. The Ottoman Army then surged forwards into the remains of Szigetvar to meet a colossal booby trap when the castle's magazine exploded among them.

Szigetvar had fallen and, with admirable presence of mind, the Grand Vizier forged bulletins of victory in the Sultan's name. They announced that their lord regrettedthat his current state of health unfortunately prevented him from continuing with the hitherto successful campaign. His lifeless corpse was borne back to Constantinople while those officials in the know pretended to keep up communication with him. Turkish sources state that the illusion was maintained for three weeks, and that even the Sultan's personal physician was strangled as a precaution.

The capture of Cyprus

When Suleiman the Magnificent died in 1566 be was succeeded by his son Selim II. He was otherwise known as 'Selim the Sot' because of his addiction to drink. He is said to have openly announced his intentions of conquering the Venetian possession of Cyprus, the greatest achievement of his reign, even before his accession. Popular legend ascribes his enthusiasm to his preference for Cypriot wine over all other varieties.

In 1568 the Ottoman war in Hungary was brought to an end with a peace treaty that left Selim II free to achieve his objective. The invasion force of about 350 ships sailed for Cyprus on 27 June 1570 and landed without opposition on the southern coast of the island on 3 July. The military operations of the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus fall into two distinct episodes. The first was the seven-week-long siege of Nicosia, which lasted from 22 July to 9 September 1570, and this was followed by the much longer siege of Famagusta, which held out for 11 months between 15 September 1570 and 1 August 1571.

Selim's commander Lala Mustafa began the operation against Nicosia with a feint against Famagusta, but his force was surprised by a sortie. The Venetian attack may have been more successful had not one member of the raiding party mistaken a donkey for a Turkish soldier and opened fire too soon, but the demonstration was otherwise very effective and caused several Turkish casualties. Meanwhile the full Turkish Army finished disembarking.

On 30 July Mustafa began the construction of earthworks for artillery emplacements as close to the walls as he dared. This was accomplished in spite of fierce cannon fire from Nicosia's angle bastions. The return fire from laboriously constructed temporary forts did little damage, because most of the 60lb shots simply buried themselves in the soft earth of the turf-covered slopes that formed the upper part of the bastions. From the defenders' point of view the only disadvantage to tbis remarkable absorbency factor was that any earth that was dislodged tended to fall into the ditch and thus gradually built up a ramp that would make the Turks' assault that much easier when it eventually came.

In order to prepare for this event Mustafa began sapping forward in long zigzags which went through tbe counterscarp and into the ditch, throwing out earth and making traverses which were stiffened by wood fascines brought up by horses. From the trenches the Turkish arquebusiers, who were regularly relieved by fresh troops, kept up a constant fire so that no defender dared show his head above the parapet.
On 9 September the 45th and largest attack on the walls of Nicosia was delivered. So fierce was the assault that the prepared entrenchments filled up with the corpses of the defenders. The garrison's lack of ammunition finally allowed the Turks entry. As panic spread through Nicosia the northern Kyrenia Gate was opened, and many tried to escape, only to be cut down by the Turks. At about this time the eastern gate was forced open and the Turkish Army began to pour in. Nicosia suffered a massacre, with only boys and women suitable for the slave market escaping a savage death. Spurred on by religious fury the conquerors also killed all the pigs in the city and mixed their bodies with the slain of the garrison. The plunder was the greatest, they said, since the fall of Constantinople.

An advance guard of Turkish cavalry arrived before Cyprus's other strong point of Famagusta on 15 September. Over 200,000 may have been present, and comment was made that so many soldiers were ready for the assault they could have filled the ditch by each throwing one of his shoes into it. Losses in action were steadily replenished by further troops shipped over from the mainland. At Famagusta as many as 145 guns finally joined in the bombardment, including four huge cannon firing shot of up to 2001b in weight.

On the defenders' side were probably about 8,500 men with 90 artillery pieces. They were well used and on one occasion a 601b shot fired over a distance of three miles scattered a review of troops that Lila Mustafa was carrying out in person. The Turks set up an artillery battery on a rocky spur out in the harbour. Other guns from different locations joined in the bombardment and an extensive programme of sapping began. Both sides used mines with considerable effect.

The Ottomans then began to lay down enormous system of trenches using their 40,000 Armenian sappers and local peasants. The result was that for a distance of three miles south of the fortress a maze of zigzagging trenches capable of sheltering the entire Turkish Army covered the landscape, each excavated so deeply that when mounted men rode along them only the tips of their lances were visible. At the point where the saps came within artillery range of the city forts were erected from beams and fascines packed with earth and bales of cotton. In all ten torts were made like this, and the close-range bombardment from tbem began on 12 May. Heavy arquebus fire also began with an aim of keeping the defenders' heads
down, and two hours before dawn on 19 May the fiercest artillery duel of all commenced.

The final Turkish attacks on Famagusta were carried out as a series of hand-to-hand assaults over the heaps of rubble that had once been the city walls. in one incident a urkish hero called Canbulat charged the Arsenal Tower, where the defenders had apparently rigged up a contraption that spun round a number of sword blades on a wheel.

He was cut to pieces but destroyed the machine and lies buried in the former Arsenal Tower that now bears his name. Few arquebuses were fired to meet the Turks' advance because powder was running so low and an inventory taken on 31 July revealed that only seven barrels of powder of any variety was left. Food was every bit as scarce, so, with still no sign of the relieving fleet, the garrison surrendered on 1 August 1571.

The battle of Lepanto 1571

The famous battle of Lepanto was fought by the Christian fleet that arrived too late to save Cyprus. Instead they located a Turkish fleet at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth at a place called Lepanto. With such a large navy assembled and with its prime objective lost, it was difficult to resist the opportunity for revenge, so their commander, Don John of Austria, sailed into the attack.

The Christian fleet went into battle in a wide crescent, the main line consisting of galleys ranked close together with a reserve squadron half a mile to the rear. Don John also had a secret weapon in the form of the galleass – galleys of double the usual size, higher built with overhead protection for their oarsmen and larger and more numerous guns in their bows. Six galleasses fought at Lepanto, and were placed in pairs ahead of the main line of galleys so that their size and firepower would have more impact.

Lepanto was a galley battle in the grand style, because every ship was crammed with soldiers and the tactics used were similar to those of a land battle. The wind was a
westerly and blew in the Christians' favour, although they were outnumbered by the Turkish galleys, by 270 ships against 220. As expected, the mighty galleasses broke the Turkish front line, but five or six Turkish galleys immediately surrounded each one. Don John's flagship galley rammed the flagship of the Turkish commander, Ali Mouezinzade, with such violence that the prows of both ships were broken off from the impact, leaving the two vessels stuck together. Don John's troops then boarded the enemy flagship and fierce hand-to-hand fighting took place until Ali Mouezinzade was shot through the head. Someone stuck it on a pike as a trophy.

Similar encounters took place all along the line as individual galleys locked together. It was a scene of utter confusion, but it soon became clear that the Christian soldiers, who were more generously supplied with firearms and better protected with body armour, were gaining the upper hand. Fifteen thousand Christian galley slaves were liberated from their chains, and in the end only six Turkish ships escaped. Their casualties were enormous, running into scores of thousands, while Christian losses totalled 15 galleys sunk and 7,566 dead.

Mustafa Pasha, who had captured Cyprus, returned in triumph to Constantinople to find the capital in a depressed mood because the news of the defeat at Lepanto had preceded him. On the other side the battle of Lepanto was immediately hailed as the salvation of Christendom. In England the people rejoiced with bonfires and sermons,and the bell-ringers of St Martin-in-the-Fields rang a great peal `at the overthrow of the Turk'. This was something of an exaggeration. Not only did Lepanto come too late to save Cyprus, it did not cripple the Turkish war effort as much as contemporaries liked to think. So vast were the Sultan's resources that he had rebuilt his fleet by 1573 and time was to justify his boast that on Cyprus he had cut off one of Venice's arms, whereas at Lepanto the Christians had only shorn his beard. Nevertheless, Lepanto broke the spell of the Ottomans' invincibility at sea.

The loss of Cyprus was felt particularly heavily in Venice and in 1573 a new treaty was signed with the Ottoman Empire. This left Spain as the main Christian nation to take on the Turkish Navy and Don John of Austria captured Tunis, only to lose it again in 1574. Spanish attentions were now turning far more to their problems in the Low Countries, but it was not long before the Ottomans were presented with different challenges of their own. In 1578 a 12-year-long war broke out between Turkey and Persia that was to absorb the best of men and materials of the Ottoman Empire, leaving few resources to be diverted back to Europe when a new challenge emerged.

New threats from the north

Turkey's relations with Russia had originated through contacts in the Crimea, and were mainly concerned with commerce and the depredations produced by Tartar and Cossack raiders. But a new challenge arose for the Ottomans from this direction when Ivan the Terrible captured the great Muslim city of Kazan on the Volga in 1552. Two years later King Philip of Spain met a Russian trade delegation while be was in England to marry Mary Tudor. Negotiations began, during which it was agreed that he would supply the Tsar with arms and artillery for use against the Ottomans. No immediate conflict followed, but by 1576 it was clearly recognised in Constantinople that the religious ties between the Russians and the Ottomans' Orthodox subjects had the potential to cause divisions in the future.

In May of that same year Stefan Bathory of Transylvania was crowned king of Poland. Bathory had dreams of a great central European kingdom from which he could advance to the expulsion of the Turk from Europe. Fortunately for the Ottomans (who had not objected to his promotion even though he was nominally a Turkish vassal) most of his warlike energies were directed against Russia. The death of Stefan Bathory in 1586 restored calm. Two years later tensions were raised again between Turkey and Poland. The election of a new Polish monarch of whom the Ottomans did not approve and a huge raid into Ottoman territory by Cossacks, freed now from Stephen Bathory's restraining hand, nearly caused an invasion of Poland by the Ottomans.

The Thirteen Years War

The conclusion of the Persian war had finally left the Sultan's bands free, but his
European enemies had taken precautions by building new frontier fortresses and restoring old ones such as Kanicsa (modern Nagykanizsa), Raab (Gyor), Komarno (in present-day Slovakia) and Eriau (Eger), These fortresses challenged their Turkish-held equivalents in places such as Gran (Esztergom), Buda, Stuhlweissenhurg (Szekesfehervar) and Temesvar (Timisoara in present-day Romania). The Austrians under their rulers from the Hapsburg dynasty also began a policy of settling refugees from Turkish lands along the borders and providing support for these 'marchers', who received land, finance and religious privileges in return for military service.

War between the Ottoman Empire and Austria broke out again in 1593 and once again it was the 'front-line state' of Hungary that saw most of the fighting. In a further echo of the 15th-century situation, the conflict from the European side rapidly assumed the character of a crusade, in spite of all (he contempt that the Reformation had heaped upon that long-discredited concept. This Christian optimism was sustained by the persistent belief that once serious warlike moves were made against the Ottomans the peoples of the Balkans would rise up against their occupation.
The Ottomans were also faced with a far more professional force of soldiers than others they had encountered in the past. Defending the Austrian borderlands with Hungary were mercenaries who had fought in tbe barsh conflict in the Low Countries. They were experienced and well armed, as was shown when a force of Ottoman shazis raiding into Croatia from Bosnia was thoroughly routed at Sissek in 1593. This battle provided what were to become the opening shots of a long war.

Personal and dynastic ambitions also played their part. In 1593, the year the Thirteen Years War began, the three key principalities of Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania each acquired new rulers and each opposed the Ottomans. Very soon these princes were in command of the lower Danube, thereby depriving the Ottomans not only of forts and territories but also of the food supplies they were accustomed to draw from the coastal lands of the Black sea.

An angry Ottoman response soon materialised. On hearing of the defeat at Sissek the Grand Vizier Sinan Pasha threw Emperor Rudolph's ambassador into prison and marched against Hungary with the whole of the Sultan's European levies and 13,000 Janissaries. He first captured Veszprem, the Hapsburgs' most outlying fortress, but failed to go any further when the Janissaries mutinied against the promise of a winter campaign. Sinan Pasha returned to Hungary the following year (1594) with a largest seen since the days of Suleiman the Magnificent. The move obliged the Austrians to abandon a siege of Gran on the south bank of the Danube, opposite the shores of present-day Slovakia, and retire across the great river. With Gran relieved Sinan Pasha could turn his attentions against Raab (Gyor) and he captured this important fortress. He then laid siege to Komarno, hut this powerful base across the Danube held out long enough for the approach of winter to force the Ottomans to withdraw. It was nevertheless a satisfactory outcome for the 1594 campaign.

In 1595 the Ottoman Empire acquired a new sultan who began his reign by eliminating 19 brothers. The new ruler was Mehmet Ill, and he had inherited a very dangerous situation from his fatber Murad ill. This was largely because the defection of the ruler of Transylvania, Sigismund Bathory, to the imperial cause had exposed the Ottoman right flank. Sinan Pasha led a counteroffensive as far as Bucharest but was forced back across the Danube. It was a great change from his largely victorious campaign of 1594 over in the west.

Elated by the news from the east the Imperial forces carried the fight down the Danube from Austria and finally succeeded in capturing the great fortress of Gran, which had been in Turkish hands since 1543. The fall of Gran occurred in August 1595 after a Turkish relieving force was heavily defeated. Then Visegrad, high on a mountain peak beside the Danube, also fell to the Austrians and in a pattern similar to that seen at the time of Mohacs tbe other northern 1-lungarian fortresses held by the Ottomans began to collapse like a deck of cards. Soon hands of Christian horsemen could be seen marauding very close to Edirne.

The new situation was so grave for the Ottomans that the Sultan decided to lead the next campaign in person. His counterattack began in the north-eastern corner of Hungary. Mehmet Ill accordingly took the field and targeted Erlau (Eger), which lay between the Austrians and their new Transylvanian allies. Erlau fell on 12 October 1596, partly because of treachery from the mercenaries in the garrison. It was nevertheless a gain that must have given immense satisfaction to the Turks, because Erlau was the fortress that had held out so well against Suleiman the Magnificent, sustained by its supplies of bulls' blood. But even better was to come.

The battle of Kerestes

An Austrian army had been on its way to relieve Erlau wben the castle capitulated. Archduke Maximilian of Austria and Sigismund Bathory of Transylvania were both present with large armies and decided to risk everything in one huge battle with the Ottoman forces. Tbis was the battle of Kerestes (near modern Mezokeretses in eastern Hungary). Not only was their army a large one, it was also most unusual in its composition, being predominately cavalry rather than infantry, with an additional large artillery arm. Among the cavalry were many reiters, the mounted wheel-Iock pistoleers who were beginning to dominate European cavalry warfare.

A force of Ottoman cavalry tried to prevent the Imperial Army from taking up its position. They were driven off, and when the main body of Turks arrived Mehmet [II could see how his enemies had fortified themselves in a field encampment behind a marshy area fed from a tributary of the river Theiss. The Sultan sent forward a detachment of light Tartar horsemen to try the passage of the marsh. They were forced away, so tbe Ottoman Army drew up in a similar encampment about a mile away.

On 24 October the Turkish attack began, but was driven off with losses on both sides. Two days later another attack was launched. The Sultan was disinclined to lead it and suggested that he should move to the rear, but this was felt to be bad for morale. The Tartar horsemen began an outflanking movement while the Turkish main body crossed the marsh with wings advanced, the European troops on the right and the Asiatic on the left. The latzissaries were in the centre along with the Sultan, who rode beneath the banner of the Prophet. Just as at Mohacs, one detachment (under the junior Vizier Cicala) was kept out of sight.

The Imperial Army had made themselves ready for the expected Turkish attack and when the clash came their cavalry charged out to meet it. On the right wing the Asiatic horse were driven back in disarray across the marsh. Some fled as far as Szolnok – 20 miles away. The Austrian Archduke had ordered that the Ottomans were not to be pursued beyond the river, but his orders fell on deaf ears when his commanders on the field realised the opportunity that had come their way, As their right wing rolled back the Turks so their centre companies advanced to join them and destroyed a force of Janissaries holding out in a ruined church. The Sultan bravely did not flee, but took up a position behind the abandoned camp.

It was then that the position changed dramatically in favour of the Ottomans, because the victorious Imperialists on the right wing abandoned their pursuit of the fleeing Turks for an orgy of plunder within the Sultan's camp. So ricb were the pickings that the greedy knights dismounted to ransack the tents more effectively. This was the moment that Cicala's hidden unit had been waiting for. They charged against the totally disordered mob that had once been thy pride of tbe Imperial cavalry. The routed troops bolted back across the marsh, causing utter confusion in the Austrian rear and soon the Archduke had no one left on the field. All their guns were abandoned to the Turks andthousands were cut down. So serious was the defeat at Kerestes that it was regarded as being akin to Mohacs in the catalogue of Christian disasters against the 'Lurks. Emperor Rudolf of Austria forbade all Christmas festivities that year as a sign of respect.

Had the Ottomans followed up their victory then the war would not have lasted 13 years, but Kerestes was a battle that the Ottomans had very nearly lost and unwise recriminations followed against units of the Ottoman Army whose performance was regarded as less than satisfactory. The Sultan's harsh reprisal measures caused a revolt that nullified many of the gains of Kerestes. A truce was in fact proposed, hut as neither side could accept each other's peace terms the war dragged on.
Siegework now became the order of the day and, in spite of the slaughter at Kerestes, the Austrians managed to put two armies into the field by the summer of 1597. No grand Turkish Army advanced to meet tbem. instead the responsibility was left in the hands of the Junior Vizier Mohammed Satourdji, who had been left in command of the Danube line. One Imperial army under the Archduke Maximilian captured Papa and Tolls (Tata), while the Transylvanians besieged Temesvar (Timisoara). In 1598 matters deteriorated even further for the Ottomans when the Austrians recaptured Raab (Gyor) and Veszprem. They even laid siege to Buda and thwarted a Turkish attack under Satourdil on Grosswardien (Oradea in present-day Romania).

The embarrassments of 1598 stung the Ottomans into mounting a more vigorous response in 1599. Their campaign beganwith the execution of the untortunate Satourdii, but the subsequent advance ended with a feeble effort to threaten Gran and the army pulled back to Belgrade for the winter. In 1600 the Turks did much better, recapturing Papa through the treachery of some French mercenaries who sold the Fortress to the besiegers. Not daring to move against Gran, the Grand Vizier besieged and captured the supposedly impregnable Kanicsa (modern Nagykanisza). This was an important gain, and the Austrians wasted much time in two unsuccessful efforts to recapture it in 1600 and 1601. But by now the pattern of capture and recapture was becoming depressingly familiar. In 1601 Stuhlweissenburg (Szekesfehervar) was captured by the Austrians from the Turks, but they lost it again in 1602, when there was also a further long and indecisive contest for Buda and Pest.

In 1603 Sultan Mehmet III died and was replaced by his 14-year-old son Ahmed 1. War was looming again on the Persian front, so negotiations with the European enemy seemed advisable. Tbere were problems on the Christian side too. Tbeir attempt to prise Transylvania out of tbe Turkish sphere of influence had been reversed by the disaster of Kerestes. In 1601 the pro- Turkish Stefan Bocksai had been elected prince of Transylvania, and in 1605 he formally allied himself with the Ottomans, His support helped in a final flourisb of Turkish success so that in the course of that year the Turks retook mighty Gran, Visegrad and Veszprem. But both sides were now ready for a settlement, and the result was the Peace of Zsitva-Torok, signed in 1606, which brought to an end the bloody Thirteen Years War, described by a Christian commentator as 'the slaughterhouse of men'.