Szigetvar - "History of the Ottoman Turks", Creasy, 1854

History of the Ottoman Turks

From the Beginning of their Empire to the Present Time

Chiefly founded on von Hammer

By E.S. Creasy, M.A., 1854

SOLYMAN I. A.D. 1520—1566.

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At the time when the tidings that the siege of Malta was raised, reached Constantinople, Solyman was preparing for a new struggle with Austria. The disputes between the rival parties in Hungary had again brought on hostilities. Maximilian II. (who had succeeded Ferdinand) had in person attacked and captured Tokay and Serencz, and the Turkish pacha, Mustapha Sokolli, had invaded Croatia. Solyman determined to conduct the campaign against the young German emperor in person; and there can be little doubt that this Austrian war saved the Knights of Malta from a renewed attack in 1566, which must, in all human probability, have been fatal. Solyman was now seventy-six years old, and so enfeebled by age and illness, that he was no longer able to sit on horseback; but was borne in a litter at the head of his army, which commenced its march from Constantinople to Hungary on the 1st of May, 1566. Before he left his capital for the last time, Solyman had the satisfaction of seeing the great aqueducts completed, which had been built by his orders for the supply of the city. The Sultan arrived at Semlin, in Hungary, the 27th of June, and received the solemn homage of young Sigismund Zapolya, the titular king of Hungary and Transylvania under Ottoman protection. Solyman especially desired to capture in this campaign the two strong places of Erlau and Szigeth, which had on former occasions baffled the attacks of the Turks.

A bold exploit of Count Zriny, the Governor of Szigeth, who surprised and cut off a detachment of Bosnian troops who were on their march to reinforce the Sultan's army, determined Solyman to make Szigeth the first object of his arms; and on the 5th of August the Ottoman forces encamped round that city. It was destined to be the death-place both of the Turkish sovereign and the Christian chief. Zriny himself burnt the lower, or new town, as indefensible; but great reliance was placed on the strength of the citadel, which was protected by a deep fen, that lay between it and the old or upper town. The Turks carried the town in five days, though not without severe fighting and heavy loss; and Zriny and his garrison of 2,300 men then retired to the citadel, where they hoisted the black flag, and took an oath never to surrender, but to fight to the last man and the last gasp.

The Turkish engineers formed causeways across the marsh; and they established breastworks near the walls, where the Janissaries were posted, who kept down the fire of the artillery of the besieged by an incessant discharge of musketry upon the embrasures, and at every living object that appeared above the parapet.

Knolles describes these works with his usual graphic, though quaint vigour. " Then might a man have seen all the fields full of camels, horses, and of the Turks themselves, like emmets, carrying wood, earth, stone, or one thing or another, to fill up the marsh; so was there with wonderful labour two plain ways made through the deep fen from the town to the castle, where the janissaries, defended from the great shot with sacks of wool and such like things, did with the multitude of their small shot so overwhelm the defenders, that they could not against those places, without most manifest danger, show themselves upon the walls."

The heavy cannons of the Ottomans were placed in battery, and the walls began to crumble beneath their salvoes. Solyman was impatient of the delay which the resistance of so small a place as this citadel now caused him, and he summoned Zriny to surrender, and sought to win him over to the Ottoman service by offering to make him ruler of all Croatia. Zriny, whom his countrymen have not unworthily named the Leonidas of Hungary, was resolute to die in defence of his post, and he inspired all his men with his own spirit of unflinching courage. Three assaults were given by the Turks in August and September, all of which Zriny repelled with great loss to the besiegers.

The Turkish engineers now ran a mine under the principal bastion, and the attacking columns were kept back until the effect of the explosion could be ascertained. The mine was fired early in the morning of the 5th of September, and the bright streak of fire, that shot up into the sky from the shattered bastion, might have been thought to be the death-light of the great Sultan, who had died in his tent during the preceding night.

A few hours before his death, he had written to his Grand Vizier complaining that " the drum of victory had not yet beat." He was not destined to witness Szigeth's fall; though his army continued the siege as if by his command, and all except his Grand Vizier, Sokolli, believed that he still lived and reigned. Sokolli is said to have killed the Sultan's physicians lest the important secret should transpire, and to have issued orders in Solyman's name, while the messengers conveyed the important despatches to Prince Selim which summoned him to mount the throne. The fire of the Turkish batteries upon Szigeth was continued for four days after the explosion of the great mine, until all the exterior defences of the citadel were destroyed, and of the inner works only a single tower was left standing.

In that tower were Zriny and 600 of his men; the rest of the garrison had perished. On the 8^th of September the Janissaries advanced in a dense column along a narrow bridge, that led to this last shelter of the defenders; and Zriny, feeling that his hour was come, resolved to anticipate the charge. The gallant Magyar prepared himself for death as for a marriage feast He wore his most splendid apparel, and a diamond of high price glittered in the clasp of his crest of the heron's plumes. He fastened to his girdle a purse containing the keys of the tower, and a hundred ducats carefully chosen of Hungarian coinage. He said:

"The man who lays me out, shall not complain that he found nothing on me for his trouble. These keys I keep while this arm can move. When it is stiff, let him who pleases take both keys and ducats. But I have sworn never to be the living finger-post of Turkish scorn."

Then from among four richly ornamented sabres, which had been presented to him at some of the most brilliant epochs of his military career, he chose the oldest one. " With this good sword," he exclaimed, "gained I my first honours, and with this will I pass forth to hear my doom before the judgment-seat of God.' He then, with the banner of the empire borne before him by his standard-bearer, went down into the court of the tower, where his 600 were drawn up in readiness to die with him. He addressed them in a few words of encouragement, which he ended by thrice invoking the name of Jesus.

The Turks were now close to the tower gate. Zriny had caused a large mortar to be brought down and placed in the doorway, and trained point-blank against the entrance. He had loaded this with broken iron and musket balls. At the instant when the foremost Janissary raised his axe to break in the door, it was thrown open. Zriny fired the mortar; the deadly shower poured through the mass of the assailants, destroying hundreds of them in an instant; and amid the smoke, the din, and the terror of this unexpected carnage, Zriny sprang forth sword in hand against the Turks, followed by his devoted troop. There was not one of those 600 Magyar sabres but drank its fill on that day of self-immolation, before the gallant men who wielded them were overpowered. It is said that some were spared in the conflict by the Janissaries, who, admiring their courage, placed their own caps on their heads, for the purpose of saving them. Zriny met the death he sought, from two musket balls through the body, and an arrow wound in the head.

The Ottomans thrice raised the shout of "Allah" when they saw him fall, and they then poured into the citadel, which they fired and began to plunder; but Zriny, even after death, smote his foes. He had caused all his remaining stores of powder to be placed beneath the tower, and, according to some accounts, a slow match was applied to it by his orders immediately before the Magyars made their sally. Either from this, or from the flames which the Turks had themselves kindled, the magazine exploded while the tower was filled with Ottoman soldiery; and together with the last battlements of Szigeth, three thousand of its destroyers were destroyed.

Solyman the Conqueror lay stark in his tent before the reeking and smouldering ruins. The drum of victory beat unheeded by him who had so longed for its sound. He was insensible to all the roar of the assault, and to the " deadly earthshock" of the fired magazine of Szigeth. Nor could the tidings which now reached the camp of the surrender of the city of Gyula to Pertaw Pacha " soothe the dull cold ear of death." The secret of the decease of the Sultan was long well guarded.

For more than seven weeks the great Turkish army of 150,000 soldiers, went, and came, and fought, and took towns and cities, in the name of the dead man. The Vizier Sokolli had caused the body to be partly embalmed before the royal tent was removed from before Szigeth; and, when the camp was struck, the corpse was placed in the covered litter in which Solyman had travelled during the campaign, and which was now borne along among the troops, surrounded by the customary guards, and with all the ceremonies and homage which had been shown to the living monarch. Sokolli and the other high officers, who knew the truth, after the siege and capture of Babocsa, and some other operations which employed the attention of the troops, gradually drew them towards the Turkish frontier. Solyman's signature was adroitly counterfeited; written orders were issued in his name, and the report was sedulously spread among the soldiers, that a severe attack of gout prevented the Sultan from appearing in public.

At last Sokolli received intelligence that Prince Selim had been enthroned at Constantinople; and he then took measures for revealing to the soldiery the death of the great Padischah. The army was now (24^th of October, 1566,) four marches distant from Belgrade, and had halted for the night in the outskirts of a forest. Sokolli sent for the readers of the Koran, who accompanied the troops, and ordered them to assemble round the Sultan's litter in the night, and at the fourth hour before daybreak (the hour at which Solyman had expired forty-eight days before), to read the appointed service for the dead from the Koran, and call upon the name of God. At the chosen time, amid the stillness of the night, the army was roused from sleep by the loud clear voices of the Muezzins, that rose in solemn chaunt from around the royal tent, and were echoed back from the sepulchral gloom of the forest. Those who stood on the right of the corpse called aloud, "All dominion perishes, and the last hour awaits all man kind!" Those on the left answered, "The ever-living God alone is untouched by Time or Death." The soldiers, who heard the well-known announcement of death, gathered together in tumultuous groups, with wild cries of lamentation.

When the day began to break, the Grand Vizier went through the camp addressing the assemblages of troops, and exhorting them to resume their ranks and march. He told them how much the Padischah, who was now at rest and in the bosom of God, had done for Islam, and how he had been the soldier's friend; and he exhorted them to show their respect for his memory not by lamentations, which should be left to the priests, but by loyal obedience to his son, the glorious Sultan Selim Khan, who now was reigning in his stead. Soothed by these addresses, and the promise of a liberal donative from the new Sultan, the army returned to military order, and escorted the remains of their monarch and general back to Belgrade. Solyman's body was finally deposited in the great mosque at Constantinople, the Souleimaniye, which is the architectural glory of his reign.

Sultan Solyman I. left to his successors an empire, to the extent of which few important permanent additions were ever made, except the islands of Cyprus and Candia; and which under no subsequent Sultan maintained or recovered the wealth, power, and prosperity which it enjoyed under the great lawgiver of the House of Othman. The Turkish dominions in his time comprised all the most celebrated cities of biblical and classical history, except Rome, Syracuse, and Persepolis. The sites of Carthage, Memphis, Tyre, Nineveh, Babylon, and Palmyra were Ottoman ground; and the cities of Alexandria, Jerusalem, Damascus, Smyrna, Nice, Prusa, Athens, Philippi, and Adrianople, besides many of later but scarcely inferior celebrity, such as Algiers, Cairo, Mecca, Medina, Bassorah, Baghdad, and Belgrade, obeyed the Sultan of Constantinople. The Nile, the Jordan, the Orontes, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Tanais, the Borysthenes, the Danube, the Hebrus, and the Ilyssus, rolled their waters " within the shadow of the Horsetails." The eastern recess of the Mediterranean, the Propontis, the Palus Moeotis, the Euxine, and the Red Sea, were Turkish lakes. The Ottoman Crescent touched the Atlas and the Caucasus; it was supreme over Athos, Sinai, Ararat, Mount Carmel, Mount Taurus, Ida, Olympus, Pelion, Hoemus, the Carpathian and the Acroceraunian heights. An empire of more than forty thousand square miles, embracing many of the richest and most beautiful regions of the world, had been acquired by the descendants of Ertoghrul, in three centuries from the time when their forefather wandered a homeless adventurer, at the head of less than five hundred fighting men.

Solyman divided this empire into twenty-one governments, which were again subdivided into 250 Sandjaks.

The governments were,

1. Roumelia, under which term were then comprised all the Ottoman continental possessions in Europe south of the Danube : these included ancient Greece, Macedonia, Thrace, Epirus, Illyria, Dalmatia, and Mcesia;

2. The islands of the Archipelago : this government was vested in the Kapitan Pacha;

3. Algiers and its territory;

4.Tripoli in Africa;

5. Ofen, comprising the conquered portions of Western Hungary;

6. Temeswar, combining the 'Bannat, Transylvania, and the eastern part of Hungary;

7. Anatolia, a title commonly given to the whole of Asia Minor, but here applied to the north western part of the Peninsula, which includes the ancient Paphlagonia, Bithynia, Mysia, Lydia, Caria, Lycia, Pisidia, and the greater part of Phrygia and Galatia;

8. Caramania, which contains the residue of the last-mentioned ancient countries, and also Lycaonia, Cilicia, and the larger part of Cappadocia;

9. Roum, called also the government of Siwas, and sometimes the govern ment of Amasia : it comprehended part of Cappadocia, and nearly the whole of the ancient Pontus that lay in Asia Minor;

10. Soulkadr : this embraced the cities of Malatea, Samosata, Elbostan, and the neighbouring districts, and the important passes of the eastern ridges of Mount Taurus;

11. Trebizond : the governor of this city commanded the coasts round the south-eastern extremity of the Black Sea;

12. Diarbekir,

13. Van : these two governments included the greater part of Armenia and Kourdistan;

14. Aleppo,

15. Damascus: these two embraced Syria and Palestine;

16. Egypt;

17. Mecca and Medina, and the country of Arabia Petraea;

18. Yemen and Aden : this government extended over Arabia Felix, and a considerable tract along the coast of the Persian Gulf and North-western India;

19. Baghdad;

20. Mosul;

21. Bassorah : these three last contained the conquests which Selim and Solyman had made from the Persians in Mesopotamia and the adjacent southern regions : the Tigris and the Euphrates (after its confluence with the other river) formed their eastern limit, and at the same time were the boundaries between the Turkish and the Persian dominions.

Besides the countries that were portioned out in these twenty-one governments, the Sultan was also sovereign over the vassal states of Wallachia, Moldavia, Ragusa, and Crim Tartary. They paid him tribute, which in the cases of the two former were considerable; and the last-named feudatories of the Porte, the Crim Tartars, furnished large and valuable contingents to the Turkish armies. It is not easy to define the territory then belonging to the vassal khans of the Crimea beyond that peninsula. They and their kinsmen, the Tartan Khans of Astrakhan, were chiefs of numerous and martial tribes that roved amid the steppes to the north of the Euxine, and round the Sea of Azof; but the fluctuation of their almost perpetual wars with the Cossacks, the Muscovites, and each other, prevents the ' fixing of any territorial boundaries in those regions for any specified epoch.

At least twenty different races of mankind inhabited the vast realms ruled by the great Solyman. The Ottomans themselves, who are now calculated to amount to about thirteen millions, are believed to have de clined in number during the last three centuries; and we may take fifteen millions as an approximate enumeration of them in the 16 th century, distributed then, as now, very unequally over the empire; Asia containing four-fifths of them, and Asia Minor being especially their chosen home. Three millions of Greeks (the name and the language continue, whatever we may think as to the predominance of the Sclavonic over the Hellenic element in the modern Greek nation), dwelt in the southern portion of European Turkey; a million more were in Asia Minor. The Armenian race, little extended in Europe, was numerous in Asia; and may have formerly amounted, as now, to between two

and three millions. The Sclavonic part of the population was the largest. Bulgaria, Servia, Bosnia, Montenegro, the Herzegovine, were chiefly peopled by Sclaves; who were also numerous in Moldavia and Wallachia, and there were many thousands of them in Transylvania and Albania. They may be estimated at six millions and a half at the epoch which we are particularly examining. The race called Rumanys, and supposed to have sprung from the Roman conquerors of the Dacians, and from the conquered Dacians them selves, dwelt principally in Wallachia and Moldavia; their number may then, as now, have been four millions.

The Albanians, who term themselves Skipetars, and are termed by the Turks Arnauts, were and are a nation of mountaineers—bold, hardy, and unscrupulous; fond of robbery at home, and warfare abroad. Their number is now estimated at one million and a half, and is likely to have varied but little. The Tartar race formed the population of the Dobruska and of the Crimea, and the countries round the coast of the continent connected with it. Judging from the amount of soldiery supplied by the dim Tartars to the Ottoman armies, and other circumstances, I should reckon a million and a half as their probable number in the reign of Solyman. The Arabic race was extensively spread through Syria, Arabia, Egypt, and the whole North African coast; and the Arabian subjects of Solyman must have been nearly six millions. The Maronites, the Chaldeans, and the Druses of Syria were together under a million. The Kurds, a race of close affinity to the Persians, can be only guessed to have numbered the like amount; and the Turkomans of Diarbekir and the neighbourhood cannot be numbered at more than 100,000. We have yet to add the Magyars of that part of Hungary which obeyed the Sultan; the Germans of Transylvania, the Berbers of Algeria and the other African provinces, the Copts of Egypt, the Jews, the Tsiganes (who were and are numerous in Moldavia), the remnants of the Mamelukes, and the Indians who were within the sway of the Turkish governor of Aden. In speaking of an age and of nations in which the numbering of the people was not practised, it is vain to take a retrospective census with any pretensions to minute accuracy; but probably our calculation would not be very erroneous if we considered that from forty-five to fifty millions of subjects obeyed the commands and were guided by the laws of Solyman Kanounni.

Of the various races which we have enumerated, the Ottomans, the Tartars, the Arabs, the Kurds, the Turkomans, the Mamelukes, and the Berbers held the Mahometan creed, which had been adopted also by large numbers of the Bosnians, Bulgarians, and Albanians. The rest, except the Jews and the Tsiganes, belonged to different branches of the Christian religion, the adherents of the Greek Church being by far the most numerous.

The regular military force of the empire, in the year of the capture of Szigeth, the sunset glory of Solyman's reign, was double that which he found at his accession. He raised the number of the Janissaries to 20,000; and the whole paid and permanent army, including the Royal horseguards and other troops, amounted under him to 48,000 men. Solyman bestowed the greatest attention upon his Janissaries. He formed from among them a corps of invalids, into which only veteran soldiers of high merit, who had grown grey in the service, or had been disabled by wounds, were admitted. Solyman also complimented these formidable troops (and his successors continued the custom) by being himself nominally enrolled in their first regiment, and coming among them at the pay-day, and receiving a soldier's pay from the colonel. He honoured another distinguished regiment of the Janissaries by accepting a cup of sherbet from their commander, when he inspected the barracks. This incident also gave rise to a custom for each Sultan, on his accession, to receive a cup of sherbet from the aga or commander-in-chief of the Janissaries, which he returned to that warlike functionary with the words, (significant of Ottoman pride and ambition) " We shall see each other again at the Red Apple," the name which the Turks commonly give to the city of Rome. The number of the feudatory troops, and the irregular levies, at the time of the campaign of Szigeth, exceeded 200,000. The park of artillery contained 300 cannons, and the fleet amounted to 300 sail.

Notwithstanding the improvement in the armies of Western Christendom, to which we have referred when speaking of the epoch of the accession of Solyman, the Ottoman troops were still far superior to them in discipline, and in general equipment. We have already mentioned the pre-eminence of the Turks of that age in the numerical force and efficiency of their artillery; and the same remark applies to their skill in fortification, and in all the branches of military engineering. The difference between the care that was paid to the physical and moral well-being of Solyman's troops, and the neglect of " the miserable fate of the poor soldier " in his rivals' camps, is still more striking. There are some well-known passages in the writings of Busbcquius, the Austrian ambassador at the Ottoman court, who accompanied the Turkish forces in some of their expeditions, in which he contrasts the cleanliness, and the good order of a Turkish camp, the absence of all gambling, and the sobriety and temperance of the men, with the tumult, the drunkenness, the licence, the brawling, and the offensive pollution that reeked in and around Christian tents in that age. It were difficult, even for the most experienced commissary -general of modern times, to suggest improvements on the arrangements and preparations for the good condition and comfort of the Ottoman soldiers, that may be read of in the narratives of Solyman's campaigns. We may mention as one of many beneficial regulations, the establishment of a corps of Sakkas, or water-carriers, who attended in the field and on a march to supply water to the weary and wounded soldier.