Suleiman The Magnificent 1520 1566 (11 page)

reestablish the balance of power. In view of all these circumstances, and of the fact that he himself could not venture to depart from Spain, Charles felt that he must leave the question of helping the Hungarians to his brother Ferdinand and to the Empire, which was directly menaced. In Germany, as was usual at that time, much was said and little done. The Emperor had offered to devote a grant of 20,000 infantry and 4,000 horse, which had been voted him at Worms, to a war against the Turks; but the ensuing Diets at Nuremberg (1522 and 1524) had reduced this quota to 6,000 men; and these, since the Turks did not then seem to be threatening, were never raised. Ferdinand was zealous in the good cause, and as active as circumstances would permit. Not content with continually urging others to bestir themselves, he asked leave to garrison the Hungarian province of Croatia with his own troops. As the Hungarian Diet refused to listen to this request, he negotiated directly with the Croatian nobles, and in February, 1526, the Estates of the province formally put themselves under his protection. As they had given up the hope of being defended by the kingdom to which they belonged, they decided at the critical moment to contribute nothing to its defence. The Empire was in no position to come to the rescue. Charles was absent; the Council of Regency commanded little respect; and the country was fiercely agitated by the religious question. So far the decrees of the Diet of Worms against Luther had not been, and as yet could not be, enforced; but neither side felt confident of the future, and both Romanists and Lutherans were forming leagues to strengthen themselves. Worse still was the fact that many of the new faith looked askance at a crusade against the Turks, because it had been instigated by, and promised to redound to the advantage of, the Papacy. Some years before, Luther had declared that "to fight against the Turks is to resist the Lord, who

visits our sins with such rods." These words, already condemned in a bull of Leo X, had been widely repeated; and, taken literally by some, had damaged the Reformer's cause. 4 In 1522-23 the western part of the Empke had been shaken by the struggle between Sickingen and his knights with the archbishop of Treves and his allies. In the following two years the terrible Peasants' War devastated Swabia and Franconia. When, therefore, the Diet of Spires met in 1526, it had many problems to consider. Among them was the report that the Ottoman armies were actually on the march. If help were to be given, there was not a moment to lose; and so the Diet after due deliberation voted to send an embassy to Buda, to inquire into the state of affairs and to report thereon. The vote was proclaimed on the day before the battle of Mohacs, which sealed the fate of the Hungarian nation.

During the autumn of 15 25 Suleiman had discussed with his counsellors the possibilities of a second invasion up the Danube. False rumors reached Ferdinand that the Sultan had decided on a campaign against the capital city of Buda-Pesth. There was also talk of an expedition through Transylvania, with the aid of Wallachian vassal troops, but it was rejected on account of the difficulty of crossing the Carpathians. Instead it was thought wiser to follow the line of the Danube, along which supplies could be carried on boats. Most of the country to be traversed was flat, and though bridges over two large rivers, the Save and the Drave, would have to be built, it was probable that the first and larger of these could be constructed beforehand under the protection of the garrison of Belgrade. On December i, a call to arms was issued, and the winter was spent in military preparations.

4 The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have a considerable literature of theological speculation on the relation between the Turkish Empire and the Book of Revelation. Cf. e.g. Joseph Mede, Opera (London, 1672), [j 2-476; also Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections; Fourth Series, (1868), 48-49, 37*-37*» 675*

On Monday (reckoned a lucky day) the twenty-third of April, 1526, Suleiman, accompanied by Ibrahim and two other vizirs, left Constantinople at the head of more than 100,000 men with 300 cannon. The Sultan's diary gives many details of the advance, which continued for more than eighty days before contact was established with the enemy. There were torrential rains and swollen streams; the current in the Danube was so strong that the Turkish river fleet of some eight hundred boats found it almost impossible to keep abreast of the army. Nevertheless the strictest discipline was maintained. Soldiers were executed for treading down the young crops, or even letting their horses graze on them; and the Sultan was encouraged by the constant arrival of reenforcements. But the thing that stands out above everything else in this portion of Suleiman's own record is the prominence and implicit approval accorded to the Grand Vizir. The egotism which is elsewhere so prominent is here overshadowed by the Sultan's affection for and confidence in his new favorite. Certainly Ibrahim was a tower of strength. At every difficult point he was sent ahead to prepare the way. When the army reached Belgrade it found a bridge already constructed for it across the Save. Tomori, who had already withdrawn the greater part of his few troops from the river, finally retired to the north bank of the Danube. A garrison of about 1,000 men, however, had been left in the town and fortress of Peterwardein, which lies on the south bank of the Danube, about midway between the mouths of the Save and the Drave. This garrison offered the Turkish army the first serious opposition it encountered. But it was all in vain. On July 12 Ibrahim reached the outskirts of Peterwardein; three days later he took the town by storm. The citadel proved a more difficult problem, and had to be bombarded for several days before it was attacked; but on the 27th, so runs the Sultan's diary, "two mines open a breach in the walls of the citadel; it is taken

by assault; only twenty-five (of our) men killed. The Grand Vizir has 500 soldiers of the garrison decapitated; 300 others are sent off to slavery." 5 A force despatched across the Danube in boats obliged Tornori, after a day's skirmishing, to retire still further to the west.

The two middle weeks of August were the really critical period of the campaign. The Hungarian king, council, magnates, and generals had been wrangling at Buda and Tolna over the question of the defence of the realm; while Tomori, from across the Danube, kept sending them messages of the continued advance of the Turks which he was impotent to impede. The obvious thing for the Hungarians to do was, of course, to move southward and defend the strong line of the Drave, but petty jealousies prevented this. The most they would consent to do was to advance to the plain of Mohacs, on the west side of the Danube, some thirty miles to the north of the point where the Drave unites with it. e The inhabitants of Esseg, on the south bank of the Drave, realized that they had been abandoned, and made haste to send the keys of their town to the Sultan, in token of submission, as he slowly approached in a driving rain. When Suleiman reached the Drave, he could scarcely believe his eyes when he found that its northern bank had been left undefended, but he was prompt to avail himself of a God-given opportunity. On August 15 he "gave orders to throw a bridge of boats across this river and personally supervised the work." 7 As the Turkish historian Kemal Pasha Zadeh rapturously declares, "They set to work without delay to get together the materials necessary for

5 Quoted in Hammer, V, 437.

6 Istvan Brodarics, "Glades in Campo Mohacz," in Simon Schard, ed., Histoncum Opus (Basileae, 1574), II, 1185-86. The "Glades" is printed also in Antonio Bonfini's Rerum Ungaricarum Decades Quatuor cum Dimidia (Francofurti, 1581), pp. 757-774-

7 Quoted in Hammer, V, 438.

this enterprise. All the people expert in such matters thought that the construction of such a bridge would take at least three months, but yet, thanks to the skilful arrangements and the intelligent zeal of the Grand Vizir, it was finished in the space of three days." 8 (The Sultan's diary makes it five.) After the army had crossed over, Esseg was burned and the bridge destroyed. It was a bold step to take; for though the invaders were thereby partially protected from the arrival of Hungarian reinforcements from Croatia, they were also deprived of all means of escape in case of defeat by their Christian foes. To quote Kemal again: "When the army had passed the Drave, the Pasha of profound conceptions thought that the best course to follow was to destroy the bridge, in order that, all other means of safety being intercepted, his soldiers should remain firmly and immovably on the field of combat, and that the idea of flight not presenting itself to their minds, the possibility of retreat should not even show itself in the mirror of their imagination struck with fear." 9 —Almost precisely seven years earlier Her-nando Cortes, on the opposite side of the globe, in his campaign against the Mexican Aztecs, had taken a similarly desperate course when he scuttled his ships in the harbor of Vera Cruz.

Meantime the Hungarians were slowly assembling on the plain of Mohacs. King Louis had a bare 4,000 men with him when he arrived there; but fresh detachments came continually dribbling in, and others were known to be rapidly approaching. But they were a motley host, whose mutual jealousies made it wellnigh impossible for them effectively to combine. There was much difficulty over the choice of a commander-in-chief. King Louis was

8 Kemal Pasha Zadeh, Histoire de la campagne de Mohacz, tr. and ed. by A. J. B. Pavet de Courteille (Paris, 1859), p. 74. 0 Kemal Pasha Zadeh, p. 79.

obviously unequal to the task; the Palatine Stephen Bathory had the gout; and so it was finally decided to give the place to Archbishop Tomori, the memory of whose past successes in border warfare against the Moslems was enough to stifle his own protestations that he was not the man for the task. 10 Soon after his appointment, and when the Turks had already crossed the Drave, the Hungarians held a council of war to determine the strategy most expedient for them to adopt. The more cautious of them advocated a retreat toward Buda-Pesth; then the Turks would have no choice but to follow, for Buda was their announced objective and they were staking everything on success. Every day's march forward would take them further from their base, while the Hungarians if they retired would be sure to be joined by reenforce-ments. John Zapolya was but a few days distant with 15,000 to 20,000 men; John Frangipani was coming up from Croatia; the Bohemian contingent, 16,000 strong, was already on the western frontier of the realm. But unfortunately the bulk of the Hungarians, including Tomori himself, refused to listen to such reasoning as this. They were filled with an insane overconfidence. 11 The gallant but rash and turbulent Magyar nobility clamored for an immediate fight. They distrusted the king. Many of them were hostile to Zapolya, and unwilling to have him share in the glory of the victory which they believed certain. It was accordingly decided to give battle at once; and the Hungarians, who could choose their own ground, elected to remain on the plain of Mohacs, in a place which would give them full play for their cavalry. Apparently they forgot that the enemy, whose horsemen were much more numerous than their own, would derive even greater advantage from the position they had chosen.

The relative size of the two armies which were about

verso.

10 Joannes Cuspiniarms, Oratio Protreptica (Viennae, n.d.), fol. A iv rso. n Brodarics, p. 1187,

to encounter one another has been a fertile source of discussion ever since. One thing only is certain; the contemporaneous estimates on both sides are ridiculously exaggerated. Tomori told King Louis, on the eve of the battle, that the Sultan had perhaps 300,000 men; but that there was no reason to be frightened by this figure, since most of the Turks were cowardly rabble, and their picked fighting-men numbered only 70,000! ^ Even if we accept the statement that Suleiman left Constantinople at the head of 100,000 men, we must remember that less than one-half of them were troops of the line. It seems likely that his losses through skirmishing and bad weather, as he advanced, must have more than counterbalanced his gains through reinforcements received along the route. If we put the Janissaries at 8,000, the regular cavalry of the bodyguard at 7,000, the Asiatic feudal cavalry at 10,000, the European at 15,000, and the miscellaneous levies at 5,000, we get a total of 45,000 Turkish fighting troops, besides the irregular and lightly armed akinji, possibly 10,000 to 20,000, who hovered about the battlefield but were never expected to stand the charge of regular soldiers. It is also very doubtful if Suleiman still had anywhere near the 300 cannon with which he is said to have left Constantinople in the previous April.

The actual size of the Hungarian army is almost equally difficult to estimate—principally because of the reenforce-ments which continued to arrive until the day of the fight. In the grandiloquent letter which the Sultan despatched a few days after the battle to announce his victory to the heads of his different provinces, he puts the number of his Christian foes at approximately 150,000, but it seems probable that the true figures were less than one-fifth as large: perhaps 25,000 to 28,000 men, 18 about equally divided

12 Brodarics, p. 1188.

1S Cuspinianus says King Louis was reported to have 30,000 cavalry (Orcttio trotreptictiy foL A iv verso).

between cavalry and infantry, and 80 guns. Part of these troops were well drilled professional soldiers, many of them Germans, Poles, and Bohemians; there was also the Hungarian national cavalry, made up of the brave but utterly undisciplined nobles. And they had, besides, large numbers of heavy-armored wagons, which could be chained together to make rough fortifications, or even pushed forward, like the modern tank, to pave the way for an infantry or a cavalry charge. It was originally a Bohemian device developed a century before, from classical prototypes, by the Hussite general John Ziska, but it was more valuable for defence than offence. When one of the Polish mercenaries advised the Hungarians to intrench themselves behind a rampart of these wagons and await the enemy's attack, they scornfully refused. Francis Perenyi, the witty bishop of Grosswardein, when he found that all counsels of caution had been rejected, is said to have predicted that "the Hungarian nation will have 20,-ooo martyrs on the day of battle, and it would be well to have them canonized by the Pope." 14 The prophecy proved all too true.