Siege of Szigetvár
The siege of Szigetvár ( Turkish Zigetvar Kuşatması , Hungarian Szigetvár ostroma , Croatian Bitka kod Sigeta or Sigetska bitka ) by the troops of the Ottoman Empire in the course of the Turkish Wars lasted from August 6th to September 8th, 1566 and ended after heavy fighting with the Ottoman occupation the castle . Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent died during the siege .
prehistory
The Szigetvár fortress ( Baranya County in southern Hungary ) consisted of the old town and the new town and a castle surrounded by a triple moat . Walls made of earth and wood secured the castle, only the tower in which the powder was stored was made of stone. The fortress was located in the swamps of the Almás River , hence the Hungarian name of the fortress: Sziget (" island ").
Already in June 1556 the fortress Szigetvár was besieged by the troops of the Ottoman Empire, but was liberated by an army led by Palatine Nàdasdy and the Croatian Ban Nikola Šubić Zrinski . In 1557 Nikola Šubić Zrinski was appointed in command of the fortress.
siege
After eleven years, Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent led another campaign personally. He was already 72 years old, very frail and suffered badly from gout , so that he could rarely ride. On his last campaign he led an army with around 90,000 soldiers and 300 guns to Hungary against Szigetvár. The defenders, headed by Nikola Šubić Zrinski , had around 2,500 Croatian and Hungarian soldiers and 69 guns at their disposal. The royal relief troops did not come. They stayed in the camp near Győr and left the castle defenders alone.
The siege began on August 6th. Three days later, the defenders had to give up the new town and retreat to the old town. The attackers filled in the trenches and began attacking the old town from three sides, which was captured on August 19. The defenders withdrew into the castle and were able to repel the attacks of the following days. Sultan Suleyman is said to have promised Zrinski the governorship of all of Illyria and hereditary property of Bosnia and threatened the murder of his only son, Georg, who was allegedly imprisoned. But the defenders were not persuaded to give up. On September 5th, Zrinski rejected one of Süleyman's last offer of honorable surrender .
A fire in the outer castle on September 5th could not be extinguished and the defenders, of whom only about 500 lived, had to retreat to the tower. Sultan Suleyman died on the night of September 5th to 6th. The tower received constant fire on September 7th and began to burn on September 8th. Zrinski preferred the heroic death to surrender and stormed out of the tower with the remaining soldiers on September 8th over the bridge into the outer castle occupied by the Turks. Zrinski wore neither armor nor helmet, but a sumptuous, splendid robe. Almost all of the defenders fell near the bridge. Since a fuse had been placed on the gunpowder depot in the tower before the failure, its explosion tore many attackers to their deaths.
Zrinski was taken prisoner seriously wounded and beheaded . His head was placed on a pole in the Ottoman camp, then sent to the imperial family and sent to Čakovec in the monastery of St. Helena buried.
The death of the sultan, the total losses during the siege of around 30,000 men and the onset of winter caused the Ottoman army to retreat to Istanbul . The Hungarians could not recapture the city until 1689.
The Ottoman chronicler Aşık Çelebi wrote a report on the siege under the title Sigetvarnâme .
aftermath
The case of Szigetvár went down in Hungarian history as a heroic tale and was repeatedly edited in literary terms. Zrinski's great-grandson, Nikolaus Graf Zrinski (1620–1664), who himself defended border castles in the south of Hungary against the Ottomans for years and tried unsuccessfully to recapture Szigetvár Castle held by the Turks, wrote the Latin epic Obsidio Szigetiana (German “Der Fall of Sziget ”). Of Theodor Körner , the 1812 drama premiered comes Zriny . Hugo Badalić (1851-1900) wrote the Croatian libretto for the opera by Ivan Zajc (1832-1914) Nikola Šubić-Zrinjski , which premiered in 1876.
The park of the Hungarian-Turkish friendship is located on the battlefield today, where the monuments of the commanders Zrinski and Süleyman stand side by side since 1996.
