Kozep-Europa harca a torok ellen a 16 szazad elso feleben [The Central Europeans' Struggle with the Turks during the Former Half of the Sixteenth Century] (review)

When the new Ottoman sultan, Mohammed II (the Conqueror, 1451–1481) occupied Constantinople in 1453, he intended to draw Europe, especially Central Europe, under his sway. Although three years later Christian armies led by the Hungarian Regent, John Hunyadi, and the Franciscan friar, John Capistrano, thoroughly defeated the Turks at Belgrade, European leaders neglected to prepare for a final confrontation with the Turk for several decades, and by 1521, Sultan Suleiman I was able to occupy Belgrade; sensing the weakness of domestic leadership in countries north of the Danube, he invaded Hungary in 1526 and demolished the medieval Hungarian kingdom at Mohács. The Ottomans besieged, but could not conquer Vienna; however, the Magyar capital Buda passed under permanent Turkish rule in 1541, and the major portion of the country remained under Ottoman occupation until the end of the seventeenth century. Consequently, the Turks presented a steady threat to Bohemia, the Austrian territories of Steyermark and Carinthia, and, through their allies with Crimean Tartars, also to Poland. Taking a common military front of resistance toward the Turk would have served the mutual interests of the peoples in Central Europe.

The authors of the ten essays collected in this volume emphasize this common interest as they evaluate the sequence of events during the cited time period. Their works are divided in three groups by the editor of the volume. In the first group of essays—"The Turks: a new threat to Central Europe"—Pál Fodor discusses relations between Hungary and the Ottoman empire from 1390 to 1533, using primary sources—in Turkish and in Magyar—and recent studies. Sándor Papp analyzes the beginnings of Magyar-Turkish contacts from the mid-fourteenth century to 1540. He goes into detail on events in Balkan politics, including the bloody confrontation in 1371 at the Marica stream, where the Christian forces suffered defeat (an engagement, from which even the Hungarian king, Louis the Great, 1342–1382, only miraculously escaped). And yet, the author explained that Ottoman diplomacy treated the Hungarian court with respect and on equal terms until 1526.

Ilona Czaman´ska places Polish-Turkish relations in the former half of the 1500's under microscopic examination; in her short but precise study she argues that the Polish court seriously considered confronting the Turks through military means, especially after the nephew of King Sigismund I (of Poland, 1506–1548), the nine-year-old Louis II, ascended to the Hungarian throne in 1516. On the other hand, the Slovak Vladimír Segesš rationalizes in philosophical terms the sometimes logical, sometimes really mindless, background of the wars fought with the Turks as he views those battles from a triangular aspect in terms of time, space, and mobility.

The four studies that form the second part of the book deal with the co-ordinated Polish-Habsburg effort to stand up to the Turk. András Kubinyi opens this section with his exemplarily detailed and thoroughly researched study, painting, as you will, a historic fresco of the role played by members of the mighty Magyar aristocracy, how they reacted to the Ottoman threat to their country in the age of Jagiello kings, 1490–1526. Although his piece relies quite heavily on his earlier works published in Hungarian and in German—as, e.g., "Historische Skizze Ungarns in der Jagiellonenzeit," in his König und Volk im spätmittelalterlichen Ungarn (Herne, 1998), pp. 322–368, or, his essay, "Königtum, Stände und Regierungen am Ende des Mittelalters in Ungarn," in his Matthias Corvinus. Die Regierung eines Königreichs in Ostmitteleuropa, 1458–90 (Herne, 1999), pp. 216–237, just as Kubinyi refers to his study [in Hungarian], "The role held by the Church in...