On the last day, with nearly all their resources exhausted, food supplies running low, ammunition and other military capabilities nearly expended, the six hundred or so remaining Hungarian and Croatian soldiers, out of an original force of 2,300 fighting men still holed up in the castle of Szigetvár’s keep, gathered around their prince, the Count Miklós Zrínyi. In two languages—for the Zrínyi family was of Croatian origin, the name rendered as Nikola Zrinski—he explained the situation. The Turkish forces under Suleiman the Magnificent, numbering at least 100,000 and perhaps twice that, had destroyed two previous redoubts within the city walls, having pounded those same walls to rubble with the most fearsome weapons of the age, Turkish cannons. The outnumbered Christian forces in the small fortress had no chance of either victory or survival. There was only one thing left to do—and that was to open the last gate, charge across a narrow wooden bridge, and die to the last man.
If anyone demurred, his voice was not recorded. And so they did.
Szigetvár—the name in Hungarian means the “fortress of Sziget”—is the name of the small town in what is now Hungary, but which at that time fell within that large portion of Hungarian territory occupied by the Ottoman Turks as they pressed their expansionist wars of conquest against the Christian Hungarian and Croatian kings (often united in one kingdom) and the Habsburg Empire. Then, as now, Hungary was on the front lines of the conflict between East and West, with the Habsburg royal seat of Vienna the ultimate prize—the overland gateway into the heart of Christendom and thus a trophy of enormous symbolic importance to the Muslims, who had conquered the Eastern Roman Empire’s capital of Constantinople1 little more than a century earlier, in 1453. With the defeat of the Hungarian forces at the Battle of Mohács in 1526, the Turks under Suleiman had taken command of a huge swath of the Kingdom of Hungary (effectively bisecting it), including the city of Buda2; had killed the Hungarian king Louis (Lajos) II; and had dealt a terrible blow to the forward defenses of Christian Europe, which now quaked in terror at the oncoming, all-conquering Turk. Indeed, in 1529, Suleiman had laid siege to Vienna itself, lasting two weeks before ending in failure and withdrawal.
Three years later, Martin Luther published Vom Kriege wider die Türken (On the War Against the Turks), in which he sounded the tocsin against the moral, religious, political, and territorial threat of metastasizing Islam. Originally, Luther had viewed the Turks as God’s punitive justice against European Christians who had fallen from their faith, and a welcome corrective against the impiety he had so recently excoriated in his Ninety-Five Theses.
The spiteful Luther, a man motived by a Luciferian rage against his real and perceived enemies3—particularly the pope (the “anti-Christ”) and the Jews—had finally awakened somewhat to the Muslim threat, partially rearranging his “we had it coming” attitude4 to one a bit more prudential, although, dogmatically, he still regarded orthodox Catholics and Jews as far greater sinners. Luther dove into the Old Testament, particularly the apocalyptic Book of Daniel,5 to find the biblical prophecy he needed in the account of Daniel’s vision of the four terrifying beasts: “I saw in my vision by night, and, behold, the four winds of the heaven strove upon the great sea. And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another.” They were a lion with eagle’s wings, a bear, a leopard, and then a fourth monster, “dreadful and terrible,” with iron teeth, “diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns.”
Belatedly, Luther had become alarmed by the ease with which some conquered Christians had adopted Islam,6 whether by choice or under duress, and so the necessity of stopping the Turks as a matter of cultural and religious self-defense had become evident. Accordingly, he devoted his writings to providing theological counterarguments to what he viewed as the Islamic heresy, issuing one of the first Western translations of the Koran in 1543.
In other words, the Christian West was finally beginning to see the arrival of Islam on its doorstep as an existential threat, both religiously and politically. Even the loss of the Holy Land in the late twelfth century to Saladin and the Ayyubid Sunnis (Saladin was not Arab, but Kurdish), the ceding of formerly Christian Anatolia, the Islamic crossing of the Bosphorus—the traditional boundary between Europe and Asia, the subjugation of Constantinople, and the conversion of the Cathedral of St. Sophia into a mosque—the Islamic signal of permanent conquest—had not alarmed the West in the same way that Mohács, or the near-fall of Vienna, had done.
Now something had to be done—but the Habsburgs were not the people to do it. Nor were any of the other emerging European nation-states, most of which would soon enough be (in large part thanks to Luther) embroiled in one of the deadliest and costliest wars in European history, the destructive and, in retrospect, pointless Thirty Years’ War of religion between 1618 and 1648.
So in this instance it was left to the Hungarians and Croats, peoples of what today we term Eastern Europe, to defend the West. Ironically, both the Hungarians—who traced their lineage back to Attila the Hun7—and the Turks, who arrived on the fringes of Europe in the eleventh century, were of non-European derivation. But Attila was defeated at Châlons in 451 by the Roman general Aetius, whereas the Turks had been Islamified in Central Asia as early as the seventh and eighth centuries, a faith they brought with them westward, still very much fueled by its homicidal missionary zeal.
Zrínyi’s is a name almost unknown to Americans in particular and to Westerners in general, unless, heading east from the Danube in downtown Pest, they are suddenly motivated by a desire to visit St. Stephen’s Basilica, in which case the Zrínyi utca is the road that will deliver them directly to Szent István’s doorstep. The lone statue on the street is not one of Zrínyi but rather that of the Fat Policeman stationed at the intersection of the Oktober 6 utca, next to which tourists from all over the world take selfies after rubbing his shiny, ample belly for good luck before deciding where to dine among of the many restaurants that dot the neighborhood.
And yet, in Central Europe, where the struggle against recrudescent Islam continues to this day, Zrínyi lives on, principally through the epic poem by his great-grandson—a splendid military man in his own right who spent most of his life battling the Turks as well. The poem is The Siege of Sziget, by the hero’s namesake, Miklós Zrínyi (1620–64), written in just one month while the poet was wintering on campaign against the Ottomans and published just short of a century after the battle that took the life of his famous great-grandfather, but which, in the words of Cardinal Richelieu, “saved civilization.” While the subsequent repulse of the Turks at the Gates of Vienna in 1683 turned out to be the decisive defeat that finally halted Muslim expansionism into the West, historians have long noted the crucial importance Szigetvár played in Christendom’s survival in the mid-millennium.
For one thing, the battle itself took the life of Suleiman, the most potent Mohammedan commander since Saladin four centuries earlier. The tremendous casualties inflicted by the Croat and Hungarian forces upon the Muslims during their resistance severely weakened the sultan’s army and made an attack upon Vienna at that point unfeasible. Finally—and something easily discounted today but of huge importance at the time—was the symbolic victory of the Christian God over Mahomet and Allah. Just as we saw in The Song of Roland, clashes between Christian and Islamic armies were seen as not merely military but theological Armageddons as well.
Szigetvár had all the elements necessary for an epic struggle, and one worthy of being immortalized in a poem in the manner of Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, and the Chanson de Roland. That it is not nearly as well known in the West can be explained by the course of Islamic, Napoleonic, Habsburgian, and Soviet European history, the impenetrability of the Hungarian language to outsiders, and the political developments that have afforded both Hungary (though territorially a rump of what it formerly was) and the Croatian nation-state a greater prominence in European affairs.
The Siege of Sziget is one of the touchstones of Hungarian literature,8 and a valuable, eyewitness account of what the Turkish wars were like, told from an authoritative military perspective. With deliberate echoes, including one major character name, of Virgil’s Aeneid, it is also an adumbration of not only the moral principles of Milton’s Paradise Lost but also some of its incidents, especially Book II, the satanic debate in Pandemonium. In this instance, it is the scene from Part Eight, set among the Muslim commanders as they discuss how best to attack the fortress of Sziget and kill the insolent Christian prince who dares oppose them—a man they both hate and fear, just as Lucifer hates God, fears St. Michael,9 who defeated him and the rebellious third of the heavenly host under his command in the War in Heaven. Indeed, in the poem’s second quatrain, Zrínyi the poet strums Virgil’s heroic lyre:
Arms and heroes I sing! The might of the Turks.
Him who was willing to undergo Suleiman’s wrath–
That same Suleiman’s mighty arm,
He at whose saber Europe trembled.
So the poet invokes, as did Virgil, Homer the Muse. To us, four hundred years later, The Siege of Sziget may seem merely a talisman of a bygone age, much like The Song of Roland, featuring dead heroes expiring nobly in a lost cause, but not before a great deal of mayhem, limb-severing, and bloodshed, as two antithetical faiths battle each other for doctrinal and military supremacy.10
But it would be to misread the situation by applying evanescent contemporary standards of ideology to the very real emotions, beliefs, and practical lives of the people of the sixteenth century. Few, if any, counseled diversity, tolerance, or peaceful coexistence with the Turks. There was no American tradition of secularized democracy (however historically false that notion of the Founding actually is) which conflated, and confused, the idea of political citizenship with national identity according to the jus sanguinis, as opposed to the jus soli. Rather (as we have seen with Luther), the Islamified Turk was considered a double existential threat, both militarily and religiously, no matter which lands he had conquered. He was someone who would, if he could, expunge Christianity and the emerging nation-states of Europe in favor of the Islamic ummah under a caliph holding court in the conquered, formerly Christian, capital of Istanbul—the City of Constantine, the first Christian Emperor.
In short, no one advocated a negotiated settlement with the Turks, except on a provisional or compulsory basis. Alliances and even surrender, of course, occurred—but as the Christians learned to their dismay, the Turkish word was nearly worthless; the Muslim doctrine of taqiyyah11 saw to that. Time and again in The Siege of Sziget, Zrínyi remarks upon the faithlessness of the Turks and on the dire consequences that befell those Christians who trusted them. Let one example, among many, suffice:
Foolish is he who believes the Turk’s oath,
Especially if he entrusts his life to the Turks.
A Turk considers it a sin to hold to his word,
Especially if it is given to a Christian.
And yet the poet Zrínyi—again, writing from his personal experience on the battlefield—does not disparage or underestimate the Turks’ military prowess. Instead, like all the Christians of the time, he evinces a healthy respect for Muslim military might, especially regarding their expert development and employment of siege cannons against walled cities such as Szigetvár, and even of the moral caliber of their greatest leaders. In Christian eyes of the time—as exemplified both by Luther and Zrínyi—the Turks believed fervidly in their Mahometan faith and considered their zealotry worthy of emulation by Christians who had often wandered far afield from the tenets of their own devotions. The Turk—the exemplar of Islam—was everywhere to be feared, cleft in twain, beheaded, extirpated, but respected as a worthy adversary, and one sent by God to chastise errant Christians. He was, in short, the ultimate beneficial bogeyman.12
I must write the truth, listen to me now:
Though Sultan Suleiman was our enemy,
Only his faith being pagan aside,
Perhaps never was there such a lord amongst the Turks.
Indeed, throughout the poem, the Christians and Muslims are evenly matched in fortitude, military skill, bravery, and adherence to the faith. Only the numbers were in favor of the Turks. Preparing for the siege with skill and expertise, Zrínyi musters (according to the poem) not only his men but their rations and their armaments: wine, bread, meat, salt; picks, ladders, shovels, materials for starting fires, and even primitive fire extinguishers. And more: lumber, barrows, flammable wood, saltpeter, sulfur, burnt charcoal, grenades made from hard oak—“In one word, everything that is needed for a fort, he had brought.” The pitiless Turks meant business.
The determinative factor, of course, is the Turks’ superior manpower, the number of their powerful siege cannons, their sappers, Janissaries, and multiethnic squadrons of Believers from all across the ummah, which allows them to draw on a wider variety of military skills and specialties than the Hungarians and Croats have at their disposal.
From the start, Zrínyi knows his is a lost cause, and that his brave last stand will cost him his life. And yet, like a true Christian martyr, he goes to his death willingly, even joyously (he even has a conversation with God about it), certain that his redeemer liveth, and that this day, like St. Dismas,13 he will be with Jesus in Paradise. For their part, the Muslims also credit the rightness of their faith, believe they are on a holy quest to destroy the heretical Christians (and, by extension, their spiritual fathers, the Jews), and thus fulfill their prophet’s final revelation from the Almighty.
Today, we fight over politics and seek political solutions to problems so academically intractable that, thanks to political correctness, we can no longer give them either tongue or voice. For at root, war is not about ideology—no one dies for an abstract, impersonal concept, no matter how motivated or animated he was at first by its tenets—but by the most personal and elemental emotions to which the human animal is given: home, hearth, country, faith, leader. When the Muslim and Christian heroes clash at Szigetvár, they may have been mustered there by faith, however described, but equally they meet on the field of honor because of their tribe and their sex. When the fearsome Saracen general Demirham and the Christian knight Deli Vid (married to a Turkish girl who converted to Christianity) collide for the second time, they both fell each other, each dying a hero’s death:
Vid, however, makes [Demirham] to fall further,
For his breast with his gleaming sword he forces open,
Then his weeping soul he spews below the earth,
By a terrible shadow his life is darkened.
Deli Vid himself can struggle no further,
Just barely he manages to hold in his spirit,
Close to Demirham, he too fell there,
The sky sees his soul, the grass drinks his blood.
Szigetvár was a battle about both faith and blood and language and home: all that is elemental in man. Faith is what drives the men on both sides—but blood (lineage) alone accounts for the burning desire not to dishonor their families’ names (the flip side of their desire for glory or even salvation). As in La Chanson de Roland, The Siege of Sziget is about fighting and killing, wallowing in its own bloodthirstiness, expecting its audience not to be appalled by the carnage but to vicariously revel in it. Not to fear the onslaught of death but to welcome it as the ultimate proof of manhood. Not to fear for the safety of the men on either side but to admire them for their sangfroid in the face of their unknown, but most likely lethal, fates. It is a battle of hero against hero, of the Hungarians and Croats against the mightiest warriors drawn from across the sultan’s lands. It is, in the end, a war of heroes against heroes. Indeed, as in Roland, the Aeneid, The Iliad, and every other classical epic, it is a story of superheroes—the foundational origin story of all subsequent origin stories.
In one of several echoes and callbacks to the Aeneid, The Siege of Sziget features a prominent female character named Cumilla.14 Here, she is a Muslim princess, the daughter of the sultan himself, married to the impotent Rushtan but in love with the mighty Tatar warrior Deliman, who slaughters the cowardly Rushtan in his tent and, poisoned by love’s arrows, rudely takes the princess in her bed. Writes the poet:
What shall I say about their union:
Romantic youths’ many romances?
They redouble their kisses around each others’ mouths,
Their hearts rejoice over Venus’s victory parade.
As ivy enwraps a tree
As a snake winds about a pillar,
As Bacchus’s vine leans on a post,
In so many ways did the two phoenixes, entangled, sway.
It’s been noted that the only love story in this fifteen-part epic occurs on the Muslim side, another example of the poet Zrínyi’s empathy even for a mortal enemy. For there can be no doubt, whether reading Roland or Sziget, that the Christian poets viewed their Islamic enemies as fully worthy of both respect and fear, even as they girded their loins to combat and kill them in the cruelest and most violent ways possible. Both sides were confident in the righteousness of their causes; all’s fair in love and war.
For these were also wars for women—to protect them from the unequal physical struggle against an armed masculine warrior, fueled by zealotry, greed, anger, revenge, and lust. Everyone in a besieged city knew what his or her fate would be should the walls come tumbling down: the men and boys were to be slaughtered or enslaved, and the women and girls to be raped into concubinage or sold into sexual and domestic slavery.15 There was no contemporary “moral” element in any of this; these were simply the spoils of war, the bonus pay due a victorious army.
But there is another element; in defending their women, the warriors were also defending their families and, most important, the sons who would carry on their bloodlines—or another’s. The Siege of Sziget has several examples of sons wishing to stay and fight beside their fathers, only to be sent packing because for their fathers, the preservation of the bloodline is more important than a moment of foolish, youthful, transient glory. The boys will grow up to become men and, like the Zrínyis themselves, will continue the fight until the fight is either won or lost, for as long as it takes.
This philosophy and cultural attitude strikes us today as absurd, even barbaric (how the Romans would have laughed), and certainly as “sexist,” a word, as well as a term of opprobrium, entirely unknown to our ancestors. Indeed, some of the noblest words in the English language, deriving from Latin, contain elements of masculinity in their roots, including virtue (from the Latin for “man”) and testimony, from the Roman practice of holding one’s testicles while swearing an oath. Absent the Bible, there was nothing more sacred that a man could swear upon than his own masculinity and the lives of his male progeny.
And so, poetically and dramatically, Roland first boils down to a contest among and between men—between the French champion and the villainous Marsile of Saragossa, and, later, between Charlemagne and the pasha Baligant. Therefore must Sziget also end with a confrontation between the Christian hero Zrínyi and the Muslim commander Suleiman, even if such a duel never actually happened.16 There are many others stories of single combat—for war at this time was a series of single combats, some brief, some epic—but in the end, like any good movie, the story comes down to the hero and the villain, face-to-face at last.
There is something elemental in this form of storytelling. Achilles must meet his Hector for the Iliad to have dramatic shape and impact; and though we might root for Hector, who after all is simply defending his homeland from the invading Greeks, Hector must die that the Greeks might win—and the morally flawed Achilles must also die. It is significant that in this, one of the earliest examples of the Western way of storytelling about the Western way of war, Achilles is not vouchsafed a hero’s death because, in violation of the rules of war and in rejection of the Trojan hero’s dying plea, Achilles desecrates the body by dragging it behind his chariot around the walls of the city. His death at the hands of the cowardly Paris, shot from behind by an arrow in his one vulnerable spot, is thus fully deserved, and dramatically right. Heroes are, after all, heroes.
Audiences hate to see the final confrontation—which is invariably between good and evil—occurring offstage. If it does, they feel cheated of the necessary catharsis the Greeks instinctively understood as essential to proper drama. Real life may not always be able to shoehorn itself into a three-act structure (beginning, middle, end, according to Aristotle), but its dramatic retelling or foretelling most certainly can, and must be. And even when we know the ending and the outcome—Leonidas dies, Roland dies, Zrínyi dies—we nonetheless watch, look, and listen raptly right to the ordained, immutable end. Even when evil triumphs over good, as it so often does, we want to see it—and then see good return for the rematch.
One of the aspects of heroism that so often goes unremarked, but which emerges so clearly from epics like The Siege of Sziget, is that the heroes know that their self-sacrifices are simply tiles in the great, ongoing mosaic of history. Zrínyi understands that unless the Habsburg emperor Maximilian comes to his aid, he has no chance of staving off Suleiman’s forces. Accordingly, he sends out two scouts to try and hack their way through the Turkish lines by night (most of the Turks are drunk and insensible); they almost make it, and then are caught and chopped to pieces. At that moment—their demises are reported to him in the night by one of his most heroic warriors, Deli Vid, who saw their deaths in a dream—Zrínyi knows that help will not arrive in time17 and that he and his Hungarian and Croatian warriors are doomed.
And yet the Christians fight on, somehow relieved that relief will not come and that their deaths, while foreordained, can only result in ultimate glory. Thus freed of fear, they determine to sell their lives as dearly as possible, to take as many Turks with them as they can, and to let history sort things out. In Part Five of the poem we read, “Because fear falls not upon the unmovable / He who with a true cause and a good heart is armed.” The temptation of a coward’s way out, through flight or suicide, is no longer available, and it comes as great relief.
And here we arrive at a key element in all our accounts of last stands, which is the cultural confidence it takes to relate these stories. History is generally written by the winners, but sometimes—as in the case of the last stands under discussion here—it takes a crushing loss in order to inspire the winning side to victory.
In his soul, every boy understands that, on some level, he must test and measure and weigh himself against not only his father, but also the other boys of his generation: to compete with them as men, to fight with them, to ally or struggle with them. There is among males an unconscious sizing up, whether of moral, technical, or physical prowess, something that every boy who’s ever had to wait to be picked for a sandlot game understands. There is no test, no curriculum, no set of laws that determines the pecking order among males; only an unspoken but widely acknowledged obeisance to the instinctive masculine chain of command.
At Szigetvár, Zrínyi and Suleiman are the top dogs, and everybody knows it. They stand at the apogee of their respective armies by dint of their military prowess, their wisdom, their faith. Whether they are “good” or “bad” is immaterial; what matters is that their men respect, obey, and follow them to the death. Their soldiers heed their personal examples and willingly carry out any orders they are given. There is little or no discussion (and then only among senior officers); there is no democracy, no committees, few if any meetings, and no plebiscites. Feminine emotions do not figure into the discussions. There is only willpower, to be put to the test in order to answer the question: Whose is greater? For all the bloodshed, all battles are, in the end, contests of wills.
Thus the graphic descriptions of the combats we find in these epic poems. As at Hastings, heads roll, skulls are cleft, limbs are lopped off and fly through the air. More poignantly, life is often described as “escaping” through the gaping and grievous wounds the warriors suffer; their blood is “tasted” by their opponents’ swords and spears and even the Earth herself; their deaths are not something lived briefly in agony but instead are presented as an almost welcome reward after the fear and pain of the battlefield. Everyone must die, and this is how these men choose to die. Turk or Christian alike, they believe their souls will go elsewhere, and thus their faith animates them in a way an unbeliever’s agnosticism cannot. If there are no foxholes in these battles, neither are there any atheists.
As in La Chanson de Roland, we might perhaps dismiss these descriptions as poetic license. But that is our weakness, not the poets’. The younger Zrínyi was as much a veteran of the Turkish wars as was his great-grandfather. He knew what single combat was like. He knew the wounds swords, arrows, spears, and, especially, cannonballs could make. To get hit was a statistical improbability, but once hit, death was nearly an inevitability. Few soldiers recovered from their wounds, and when the armaments did not kill them, infection and disease did. From each individual combat, there could emerge only one winner.
The advent of gunpowder hastened fate. By the sixteenth century, the Turks were fighting not only with arrows but also muskets (mostly wielded by Janissaries, who were, unlike the Turks, excellent shots) and deadly siege cannons. So also were Zrínyi’s men, although not to the same extent. During the Siege of Malta the year before, the Knights Hospitaller18 under Jean Parisot de Valette had held off the Turkish fleet under Suleiman for four bloody months, during which the two thousand or so Hospitallers—who had been evicted in 1522 from their prior stronghold of Rhodes, only to occupy the more strategic island of Malta, in the middle of the Mediterranean—fought to the end, finally repelling the Turkish host.19 To this day, the name of the Maltese capital, Valletta, commemorates the Hospitaller who defeated Suleiman’s Turks.
Nonetheless, whether by sea or by land, the Turks were the most formidable enemy the Christian Europeans of that time could possibly face. Awaiting the arrival of Suleiman’s army, Zrínyi looks out from his tower to see, approaching from a distance, “a dark cloud in the air … as if a mountain were moving on a level plain.” The sight must have been at once terrifying and definitive. As the poem relates, Suleiman at first tries direct hand-to-hand combat with the Christians who sally forth to engage his forces before the walls of the city. But the Croats and Hungarians get the best of that battle, sending the Turkish commanders scurrying back into camp to debate how best to take the city. Their solution is a classic siege: they dig trenches around the fort to prevent the soldiers from emerging, they excavate the moats and drain them, they atomize the walls of the citadel with cannon fire—“shovels and ammunition take forts.”
To visit Szigetvár today is only to glimpse, as through a glass darkly, what happened there almost five centuries ago. The old town is gone, and the waterway on which it was built is gone as well; the modern town of Szigetvár lies a short distance from the battlefield, as do the homey residential neighborhoods. What remains is a restored version of the castle keep, the redoubt from which Zrínyi and his remaining men sallied forth in their final stand against the swarming Turks. The narrow wooden bridge, over which they passed and on which they fought and died, has been replicated, and there are statues of the armored Christian warriors on the grounds, serried in ranks and ready to march again if need be and when called forth from their graves. There is also an informative museum as well as a reconstruction of the mosque with which Suleiman’s forces temporarily memorialized their conquest. It is quiet now, the reports and cannonades, shouts and screams long since stilled.
How different it was back then! It is hard for modern people to grasp the noise of war. In the sixteenth century, Turkish cannons in their plentitude could pound a city’s walls to rubble in a matter of days—indeed, in the poem, the Turks decide to crush Sziget in exactly this way, after losing early pitched battles to the Western knights. The guns on both sides, manned both by the Christians and the Muslim Janissaries, were (as guns are today) startlingly loud, especially in an age in which there was no man-made ambient noise to inure the ear. The clang of metal on metal, the thump of spears and arrows into shields, and, above all, the screams of the wounded and the dying, which lingered on long after the guns had been silenced, formed the aural backdrop to the warfare of this period.
It was only natural that some good had to be found in this, and that good was to be found in innate ideals of bravery, martial skills, physical prowess, moral courage and endurance, and a willingness to fight to the death, which after all was the only option, other than flight, a soldier had back then. The body counts of modern warfare are terrifying, especially involving the usage of powerful bombs and even nuclear weapons, but as we have seen, the Greeks and Romans would have regarded long-range rifles as they did bows and arrows—as the weapons of cowards not man enough to stand toe to toe with their opponent, to either kill or be killed.
In short, warfare was elemental, in the same way that life of that time was. The fundamental things applied: birth, life, sex, war, progeny (whether born or unborn), and death. No one expected to live very long in any case, certainly not by contemporary standards; death, in fact, was the whole point of life, its foregone conclusion, and the only question was how it would come and how a man would meet it. A good death elevated a life; a noble death enshrined it. Disease and accidents killed far more people than warfare, but only warfare held out the promise of territorial and personal gain, the slaking of a lust for money, women, or power, and the promise of a better future, even if it took place over the corpses of others. Given human nature and the verities of the human condition, war was not only inevitable but desirable.
As the French army officer and influential war theoretician Ardant du Picq writes in Battle Studies (1880)20:
Centuries have not changed human nature. Passions, instincts, among them the most powerful one of self-preservation, may be manifested in various ways according to the time, the place, the character and temperament of the race.21 Thus in our times we can admire, under the same conditions of danger, emotion and anguish, the calmness of the English, the dash of the French, and that inertia of the Russians which is called tenacity. But at bottom there is always found the same man. It is this man that we see disposed of by the experts, by the masters, when they organize and discipline, when they order detailed combat methods and take general dispositions of action. The best masters are those who know man best, the man of today and the man of history.
The men who emerge from the stanzas of The Siege of Sziget are not so very different from the men of today—or at least the men of the day before yesterday. Neither steroid-fueled behemoths nor bewhiskered, chestless boys, they were ordinary in size and stature (we would be surprised by how small yet physically strong they actually were) but outsized in courage and resolve. Their fighting worth came via discipline and a profound knowledge of human nature; for proof of that, we can reach back to Caesar and his Commentaries on the Gallic wars and the events leading up to the Roman civil war and the fall of the Republic. His views of the Gallic temperament—that the Gauls were crazy brave but also undisciplined, prone to discouragement, and ready to flee at a sudden reversal of fortune—were spot on, and help to account for his victories, perhaps most spectacularly during the siege of Alesia in 52 B.C. when, outnumbered as much as four to one at times and threatened both by the Gallic forces within the city and those rallying to their support from the outside, the Romans defeated Vercingetorix and his men by means of superior siege craft.
At Szigetvár, of course, the strategic situation was the opposite. Zrínyi and his men were occupying a castle that stood squarely in Suleiman’s path to Vienna; turned back once before at Eger, the sultan needed Szigetvár to fall. Having failed the previous year to take the Crusader island of Malta by sea, Suleiman had no choice but to proceed overland to sack the capital city of the Habsburgs and thus not only complete his conquest of the Christian outpost of Hungary but also open up all of Europe to the Crescent.
This Zrínyi and his men knew all too well. One by one, Christian strongholds such as Byzantium, Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Serbia had fallen to the Turks. The sacking of Vienna, like the taking of Rome, had been a goal of Islam for centuries. Should Vienna22 fall, there was nothing standing between Suleiman and the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire, or what used to be Cisalpine Gaul south of the Alps into Italy. The defenders at Szigetvár had no choice but to fight: stopping Suleiman by any means necessary was the overriding objective.
Clio, the Muse of History, strums unusual melodies upon her lyre. The mass migration of more than a million Muslims from all over the ummah in 2015 was first felt in Hungary as they marched through, new cell phones in hand, new trainers on their feet, on their way to the former Christian heartlands of Germany, France, and England. Hungary was also one of the first nations of Central Europe to barricade its borders with some of its neighboring states, including Croatia and Serbia, through whose lands Syrians, Afghans, and Arabs proceeded unmolested. Once again, the Hungarians and the Croats found themselves on the front lines of the cultural, political, and religious confrontation between historic Christendom and Islam. Who knows how the latest civilizational clash will turn out?
With Szigetvár’s walls crumbling before the Turkish mortars and cannons, who could have foreseen that the Suleiman the Magnificent would die while the siege was still in progress—indeed, on the verge of success? To this day, no one knows why or how. His death, of possibly natural causes (he was, after all, 72 years old), occurred in his tent the night before the final sack of Sziget and was immediately concealed by his grand vizier, who strangled the physician who had pronounced Suleiman dead. What is certain is that the Siege of Szigetvár was also an Islamic last stand. For all his “magnificence,” Suleiman died unmourned at first and unburied as well, just another oriental satrap who departed his life with an enemy still holding out in the fortress of Szigetvár who knew his life was also expendable, and with a result that even the Magnificent could not have foreseen.23
In the poem’s retelling—or reimagining—Zrínyi does not die in the last heroic charge across the bridge but slashes his way through the Turkish horde, unstoppable, dealing death with every blow. Eventually he comes upon Suleiman; the emperor is surrounded by guards and bodyguards, but Zrínyi hacks his way through them as well. Terrified, Suleiman rushes to mount his horse, but Zrínyi is too quick for him:
Ten of the emperor’s aides he cuts down there,
And then to emperor Zrínyi thus began:
“Bloodsucking selendek,24 despoiler of the world,
The hour of your greed has come;
God your sins no longer pardons,
You must depart, ancient cur, to eternal damnation.”
Thus saying, at his waist he splits him in two,
His blood and his life he spills onto the earth;
Cursing, the emperor releases his soul,
Which his body held so proudly in life.
This was the end of the great emperor Suleiman …
The poet Zrínyi’s account of Suleiman’s death is implausible, but like any good Hollywood dramatist, the great-grandson saves the final encounter for a mano-a-mano duel between the two antagonists. Having literarily established both as worthy adversaries—just as, according to Aristotelian dramatic principles, the contest cannot really be decided until protagonist and antagonist come face-to-face—the fate of Christendom and the ummah comes down to single combat.
Zrínyi meets his own fate in short order. Afraid of confronting the fearsome bán (governor) directly, the Janissaries instead bring him down in a hail of missiles, Leonidas-like, Harold-like, one shot hitting him in the chest, the other in the forehead; his soul is immediately transported to Heaven by angels. Zrínyi’s death, however, is not quite the end of the battle. With all the defenders dead, the victorious Turks rush into what’s left of the castle keep. But Zrínyi had booby-trapped the powder stores by lighting a slow-burning fuse. The resulting explosion takes the lives of an additional three thousand Ottoman soldiers, making the Siege of Szigetvár one of the costliest victories in Muslim history.
Before the last charge, Zrínyi exhorts his troops to fight and die like men. He cannot sugarcoat the truth: they have no chance, except to go down swinging and then receive their reward in Paradise. He says:
Let us not recoil, then, from going to our deaths,
Which will give us a path to eternal joy;
Today, soldiers, we must lose our lives,
And today all our trials end.
We have lived nobly, let us die nobly,
Give the entire world an example by it;
Today we bring dignity upon our names,
This gilds all past actions.
Does anyone in the West still think and talk like this? Do we still have a concept of what it is like to live—and die—nobly? Do we even have family names upon which to bring dignity instead of notoriety or celebrity? Who still believes in going to eternal joy? Or is self-sacrifice a fool’s errand, a suicide charge into oblivion, which the world will little note and not long remember? If nothing is worth dying for, then what are we living for?
The Ottomans won the month-long battle, but at a very great cost—upwards of 20,000 men—so great, in fact, that they abandoned their push toward Vienna. Further, the long delay in subduing Szigetvár meant that time had effectively run out on their military campaign before winter arrived; and there was also the matter of the delicate transition of power to Suleiman’s son, Selim II, who had survived Suleiman’s purge of two of his brothers and the natural deaths of two others. With the Treaty of Adrianople in 1568, a fragile truce was agreed to, along with the payment by the Habsburgs of an annual monetary tribute25 to the sultans, a peace that lasted a quarter of a century before another generation of Zrínyis would rise once more to Hungary’s defense. Never giving up is part of the masculine way of war, as sure as victory or defeat. The last trump never sounds, until it does.
It would not be for another 120 years that the Ottomans would be capable of trying to take Vienna again, and this time they were decisively defeated before the city gates in 1683 by a largely European military coalition led by John Sobieski of Poland and his famed “Winged Hussars.” The Turks would not be gone from Hungary for good until 1699, when, in the Treaty of Karowitz, they ceded most of their conquered territory in the region back to the Habsburgs and other powers. But their baleful memory lingers on in the minds of every Eastern European from now-vanished Wallachia to the western banks of the Danube.
Such a future, however, would not have mattered to the defenders at Szigetvár, even had they been able to foretell it. For them, as for all soldiers, the battle was in the here and now, and it was in that eternal present that they fought, died, and now live on.
Today, at Szigetvár, there is a Hungarian-Turkish Friendship Park, constructed in 1994 on the outskirts of the city, featuring gigantic busts of Suleiman and Zrínyi. The heart and viscera of Suleiman are said to be buried nearby. Zrínyi’s remains are nowhere to be found, but the fact that Szigetvár lies in Hungary, and not in Turkey, bespeaks the success of his last stand—and perhaps once again, given the course of Western and Islamic history, the need for another.