Chapter VII: “Today We Bring Dignity Upon Our Names”: The Siege of Szigetvár (1566)

0.     The name of which became corrupted as “Istanbul.”

0.     The hilly western half of Budapest, across the Danube from Pest.

0.     Luther would not be rivaled in this animus for three centuries, until the arrival of the composer Richard Wagner and then Adolf Hitler.

0.     An attitude reflected in the epic poem Siege of Sziget, as we shall see.

0.     See Chapter III.

0.     Indeed, Islamic armies of the time often featured elite warriors called Janissaries, composed largely of captured and converted Christians but also including some Christian allies of the Turks.

0.     “Attila” remains a popular boys’ name in Hungary today.

0.     The poem also contributed to the enlargement—often by classical or foreign loan-words—of the Hungarian vocabulary, which the poet himself lamented in the poem’s foreword: “Latin words I have mixed into my verses, for I thought it more pleasing thus, and then the Hungarian language is impoverished…”

0.     St. Michael even makes an appearance early in the poem, unleashing one of the Erinyes, Alecto, to appear to the Turkish sultan, Suleiman, in the guise of his dead father to inspire him to go to war against the faithless, strayed Hungarian Christians.

0.   Judaism is lacking in such apocalyptical artistic expression.

0.   Lying to an “infidel” for religious or, more usually, political or military gain.

0.   It was a sign of Christian confidence, and relief, after the Western victory at Vienna in 1683, that the vanquished Turk could be lampooned in popular culture by Mozart—in Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio, 1782)—and Rossini in both L’Italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers, 1813) and Il turco in Italia the following year.

0.   The “good thief,” who dies alongside Jesus on the cross, and whose soul is saved.

0.   “Camilla,” the Lycian warrior princess in the Aeneid.

0.   The number of Western women abducted into Muslim harems by the North African Barbary pirates between 1530 and 1780 is estimated at one million.

0.   There is, of course, no way to know for sure. Zrínyi, the great-grandson, was obviously far closer in time to Suleiman’s death, although he does have a vested interest in giving his distinguished ancestor a noble martyr’s death. Then again, neither would it serve Muslim hagiography to have Suleiman cut down while fleeing the battlefield.

0.   His own death is an adumbration of Gordon’s at Khartoum, more than three hundred years later. See Chapter XI.

0.   The Knights, a remnant of the fighting crusader orders (the other was the fearsome Knights Templar, who were destroyed on Friday the thirteenth 1307 on the orders of the French monarch, Philip IV), facilitated the pilgrims’ journey to the Holy Land across two thousand miles of dangerous territory.

0.   Destroyed completely by a European alliance under the Spaniard Don Juan of Austria (the bastard son of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V) at Lepanto, in the Ionian Sea in western Greece, in 1571. Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, fought at Lepanto.

0.   Du Picq died in 1870 at Metz of wounds suffered during the Franco-Prussian war; his book was published posthumously.

0.   By “race” du Picq means what today we might call ethnicity: French, English, German, Italian, Russian, etc., or, in a larger sense, a “people.”

0.   During the Cold War, it was interesting and sobering to note that Vienna, in “neutral” Austria, lay considerably to the east of Soviet-occupied Prague—a wedge into the heart of the Soviet empire.

0.   A historically reliable and accurate account of Suleiman’s death would be most welcome, from a Western perspective.

0.   “Hunting dog” in Croatian—canines are haram (forbidden, unclean) to Muslims.

0.   Thirty thousand gold ducats, worth about $4.5 million today.