BLUNTING THE SULTAN'S SPEAR

During his 1532 invasion, Suleiman the Magnificent faced a seemingly simple obstacle in the small fortress of Koszeg, Hungary. What ensued was a bloody struggle between Ottoman firepower and imperial grit

- WORDS SI SHEPPARD

In October 1531 a delegation of 24 ambassadors dispatched by the Habsburg Archduke of Austria, Ferdinand I, arrived in Constantinople. This embassy was headed by a Croatian aristocrat, Nikola Jurišic. He was tasked with the heavy burden of negotiating with the greatest of Renaissance potentates, the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Inheriting the Ottoman war machine, the finest in the world, when he took the throne in 1520, Suleiman had earned his sobriquet with a succession of military triumphs; taking Belgrade in 1521, wresting Rhodes from the Knights Hospitaller in 1522 and smashing the Hungarian state at the Battle of Mohács in 1526. Only in 1529 had this run of success come to a halt, when the Ottoman Siege of Vienna was broken as much by unseasonably atrocious weather as it was by stubborn Habsburg resistance.

Jurišic was empowered to offer Suleiman an annual subsidy if the sultan would recognise Ferdinand as king of Hungary and withdraw his garrison from Buda. These terms were contemptuously rejected. Suleiman was resolved on war, and seizing Vienna, the prize that had eluded him two years earlier. A renegade Venetian turncoat, Alvise Gritti, wrote to Ferdinand's brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, warning him to beware the "huge and inestimable preparations for war that the said Turk is making both on sea and on land, such that our epoch has never seen". By the end of that year, as the Dutch humanist theologian Desiderius Erasmus noted, it was public knowledge throughout Europe that "the Turk will invade Germany with all his forces, in a contest for the greatest of prizes, to see whether Charles will be the monarch of the whole world or the Turk. For the world can no longer bear two suns in the sky."