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Spring 2000

Madjaristan: The Ottomans in Hungary 1520-1686

Matthew Pearsall
Western Washington University

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Pearsall, Matthew, "Madjaristan: The Ottomans in Hungary 1520-1686" (2000). WWU Honors Program
Senior Projects. 285.
https://cedar.wwu.edu/wwu_honors/285

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 Madjaristan
The Ottomans in Hungary
1520-1686
By Matthew Pearsall
Senior History/Honors Thesis
Dr. Leonard Helfgott: Advisor
Western Washington University
Spring Quarter, 2000
I

WESTERN
B WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
Honors Program
An equal opportunity university

Bellingham, Washington 98225-9089

(360)650-3034 Fax (360) 650-7305

HONORS THESIS

In presenting this Honors paper in partial requirements for a bachelor^s degree at Western
Washington University, I agree that the Library shall make its copies freely available for
inspection. 1 further agree that extensive copying of this thesis is allowable only for scholarly
purposes. It is understood that any publication of this thesis for commercial purposes or for
 The relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Europe has traditionally been

viewed in terms of conflict. History books are full of accounts of the Ottoman conquest

of the Balkans and of Constantinople, as well as the conquest of Hungary and the ensuing

conflict with the Habsburg Empire, which would stretch into the twentieth century.

When the topic turns to questions outside the realm of warfare, however, things become

murkier. While the many wars—as well as the occasional bout of peace—between the

Ottomans and the West are focused on in detail, the role of the Ottomans in Europe

outside of war is often seen in much broader terms. Often the focus is on Turkish

attitudes towards their Christian subjects, with a special focus on the Turkish practice of

enslaving Christian children for military service. In reality, the relationship between the

Ottomans and the Christian peasantry they ruled was much more complex. The

intricacies of this relationship, however, are often lost behind the politics and war, which

dominated Turkish-European relations.

When the topic of the Ottoman occupation of Hungary is brought up, the facts

become even more vague. The Turks ruled the Balkans for five hundred years, so it is

really impossible to ignore the profound impact they had on the societies living there.

Modem historians, however, often view the occupation of Hungary, almost totally within

the context of the wars and political machinations between Istanbul and Vienna. The

Ottomans ruled a majority of Hungary, however, for almost 150 years, and dunng that

time neither the Turks nor their Hungarian subjects were standing around waiting for the

Austrians to get around to reconquering the kingdom. The Turkish occupation initiated a

period of great change for the kingdom of Hungary. In the space of fifty years the

Ottoman Empire conquered and annexed one of the greatest kingdoms in Europe.

- Pearsall 1 -
 Furthermore, the Ottoman’s did not intend for Hungary to merely be a buffer area

between them and Austria. Instead they wanted it to become a functioning province of

their empire, and in attempting to do this Hungary came to be Islamified in a way not

seen in the heart of Europe since the Spanish Conquest eight centuries earlier.

This was a dynamic time for both the Ottomans—who both reached the zenith of

their power in Hungary and began their precipitous decline there—and the Hungarians—

who found themselves conquered by a foreign power and their homes turned into

battlefields. The Ottomans reached their greatest power and entered into a slow decline

that would continue into the twentieth century. For the Hungarians the Ottoman

conquest signaled the loss of independence. The struggle of the Hungarians to reestablish

their own independent Kingdom would dominate the history of Hungary up into this

century.

The Fall of the Kingdom of Hungary

The Ottoman conquest of Hungary is remarkable in that it would have been

unthinkable fifty years earlier. In the latter third of the Fifteenth Century, Hungary had

emerged as one of the great powers of Europe. Under the kingship of John Hunyadi and

his son Matthias Corvinus Hungary emerged from the Middle Ages to become a major

force in the Central European Renaissance. These two kings had centralized the

traditionally fractured internal politics of their kingdom. This had allowed Hungary’s

economy to strengthen and the people prosper by lessening the threat of both external

invasion and internal strife. By the latter part of Matthias Corvinus’ reign, Hungary was

strong enough to provide its king with the power base to stand for the title of Holy

- Pearsall 2 -
 Roman Emperor against the power of the Habsburg family. The capital city of Buda was

becoming one of the major cities in Central Europe, and despite lacking both a university

and a bishopric it came to rival some of the Imjjerial Free Cities through the patronage of

the Hungarian Royal Family.'

During this p)eriod of unprecedented strength for the Kingdom of Hungary,

however, the threat of Ottoman invasion was always present. Matthias Corvinus built a

strong standing army— known as the “Black Army”—to defend against the Turkish

threat. This mercenary army was, however, extremely expensive to keep in the field, and

king Matthias had to levy a high and unpopular poll tax on his subjects to pay for it.

Even this modem, expensive, standing army could only accomplish so much against the

rising Ottoman threat. After a war against the Turks in 1476, King Matthias came to

realize that no matter how strong, Hungary would never be able to mount any significant

offensive campaign against the Ottoman Empire. Instead, he chose to concentrate his

resources towards building a solid defensive line of fortresses, and with maintaining

peace with the Ottomans whenever possible.^

Why in 1521, less than fifty years after the reign of Matthias Corvinus, did the

Ottomans choose to attack Hungary, a strong nation on the rise in Europe, and which

posed no immediate threat to the Ottoman holdings in the Balkans? By 1521, when the

Ottomans began their conquest with the capture of Belgrade, Hungary was a shadow of

its former self. Two weak monarchs, Wladislas II and Louis n had succeeded Matthias

Corvinus. Neither of these kings could unify the various factions among the Hungarian

' Domonkos, Leslie; The Battle of Mohacs. as a Cultural Watershed. From Hunyadi to Rakoczi: War and
Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Hungary. Edited by Janos M. Bak and Bela K.
Kirdly. Brooklyn College Press: New York. 1982: 203

- Pearsall 3 -
magnates the way their predecessors did, and as a consequence Hungary swiftly declined

in strength. The unity of the Hungarian Kingdom, which Hunyadi and Corvinus had

worked so hard to forge, proved too fragile to survive their deaths. The leadership of the

kingdom quickly broke up into three main groups—the royal faction, the magnates, and

the lower nobility and urban bourgeoisie.^ None of these factions could gain the upper

hand, however, so the Kingdom of Hungary soon returned to the divisive internal

squabbling, which had plagued it before the reign of John Hunyadi.

In an effort to curry favor with the great magnates, Wladislas did away with the

unpopular taxes that paid for the Black Army, and consequently had to disband the force.

In its place he shifted the burden for defending Hungary onto the bandaria, or feudal

levies. These levies, based around individual magnates’ private forces, were often poorly

trained and very hard to mobilize. Only a very small force of mercenaries, which

numbered less than 7,000 backed up the bandaria.^ By the year 1518, the deficiencies of

these defenses were clear to the Hungarians, and they concluded a peace treaty with the

Sultan Selim I.

A weakened Hungary posed even less of a threat to the Ottomans than it had

under Matthias Corvinus, so why did they choose to invade such a large and distant

territory? The traditional answer is that King Lx)uis II insulted the sultan Suleyman II—

known generally as Suleyman the Magnificent—soon after the latter came to the throne.

This insult arose when Suleyman sent an emissary to Louis to affirm the peace treaty that

Selim I had signed two years earlier. Instead of receiving this emissary as an honored

^ Kubinyi, Andras: The Road to Defeat: Hungarian Politics and Defeat in the Jaeiellonian Period. From
Hunyadi to Rakoezi: War and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Hungary. Edited by
Janos M. Bak and Bela K. Kir^ly. Brooklyn College Press: New York. 1982: 160
MbID 172

- Pearsall 4 -
guest, Louis and his court went out of their way to humiliate the messenger, and sent him

back to Suleyman without renewing the treaty. The story goes that Suleyman was so

enraged by these actions that he immediately prepared to launch his campaign against

Belgrade and the other fortresses along Hungary’s southern border.^ While this story

makes a nice tale, there is more behind Suleyman’s decision to invade than a mistreated

ambassador.

The invasion of Hungary, in fact, marked a major turning point in Ottoman

expansion, and took more than an insulted ambassador to cause Suleyman to set the

Ottoman Empire in this new direction. Since the capture of Constantinople in 1457 the

Ottoman Empire had focused on naval superiority in the Eastern Mediterranean, not on

land conquests. The Turkish navy became the dominant power in the Mediterranean,

with all the economic and military benefits that that entailed. By the end of Selim I’s

reign, however, forces within the empire pushed the Ottomans towards a policy of

territorial conquests. The need to provide new land for the Sipahi Class within the

Empire played a major role in this. The Sipahis were a group of landed gentry roughly

equivalent to European nobility, except that they did not hold their land directly but only

through a grant from the Sultan. Like the European nobility, however, they made up the

cavalry of the Ottoman armies, and formed one of the pillars of Turkish strength. Sipahis

did not inherit their land from their fathers; instead each Sipahi son had to earn his own

land by somehow proving himself to the Sultan. In addition to the Sipahis, by this time

many imperial civilian bureaucrats and military officers expected similar grants of land as

a reward for their services. This demand for land resulted in pressure for the Empire to

* The actual figure for the year 1515, as given in Kubinyi 169, are 1,657 horse and 770 foot on the Croatian
border and 3,590 horse, 400 foot, and 1,100 Danubian boatmen along the Ottoman border.

- Pearsall 5 -
expand its borders and open up new areas for the Sultan to give to those demanding

land.^

The Janissary Corps made up another major force pushing for renewed land

conquests. This group of highly trained professional slave-soldiers had become the

backbone of the Ottoman military, but this military excellence caused certain problems.

When not actually at war, the Janissaries had a tendency to revolt, or at least cause havoc

in the cities where they were stationed.^ To prevent outbursts like these the Sultans kept

the Janissaries occupied fighting wars on the frontier.

While these general forces were pushing the Ottoman Empire towards military

conquests, one of the major reasons that Hungary became its first major target was that it

stood in the way of further Ottoman conquests in Europe. Sultan Mehmet U had

conquered Constantinople in 1457 and won for himself eternal fame. To a young,

ambitious sultan like Suleyman the next great target for conquest was the city of Vienna,

and Hungary stood in his way.® Previously, Hungary stood as a strong bulwark against

further Turkish advances into Europe, but by the beginning of the Sixteenth Century it

was very weak, and Suleyman knew this. The poor treatment of his envoy by King Louis

n served as a perfect excuse to begin a war that would lead to his conquest of the greatest

city in Central Europe, Vienna.’

Sultan Suleyman’s campaigns against Hungary went spectacularly well, and

perhaps the Ottomans ended up suffering from too much success. In 1521 the Ottomans

launched their first major campaign, which resulted in the capture of Belgrade, the key to

*IBID 171
* Fodor, Pdl: Ottoman Policy Towards Hungary, 1520-1541. Acta Orentalia Academiae Scientiarum
Hungaricae. Tomus XLV (2-3), 271-345 (1991). 282
^IBID

- Pearsall 6 -
Hungary’s southern defenses. The Sultan’s armies achieved this unprecedented success,

unthinkable just a few years earlier, because of the divisions within the Hungarian

Kingdom. With no one person willing or able to step forward to lead the defense against

the Turks, and not nearly enough money available to pay for an adequate mercenary army

along the lines of the Black Army, the Hungarian defenses suffered greatly. The defeat at

Belgrade threw the kingdom into chaos and laid it open to an Ottoman advance.

Hungary gained a temporary reprieve when the Ottomans turned their attention

towards campaigns against Egypt, Persia, and the island of Rhodes. In the spring of 1526

Suleyman again mounted an expedition against Hungary. The Sultan planned to capture

the Hungarian fortresses along the Drava and Danube rivers and to annihilate the

Hungarian army, severely weakening Hungary’s position in regards to the Ottomans

forcing King Lx)uis n into some form of vassalage to the Ottomans, along the lines of

Walachia and Moldavia.*® Suleyman wanted to make Hungary secure for a Turkish

army to march through on its way to Vienna.

The Kingdom of Hungary, however, did not become a vassal state of the

Ottomans. Instead, the kingdom descended into a state of disorder that made it

impossible for the Ottomans to deal with it at all. This happened because the Ottoman

army was so strong, and the Hungarian forces so disorganized, that their defeat proved far

more decisive than the Ottomans intended. The Turks captured the Drava River without

any fight, and at the battle of Mohacs so thoroughly defeated the Hungarians that the

kingdom itself disintegrated. A large chuck of the nobility and the ecclesiastical

*IBID 271
’ibid

- Pearsall 7 -
hierarchy died as well as King Louis himself. Suleyman succeeded in capturing the

territory he wanted and in crushing the Hungarian army, but when this was done, no one

remained to surrender.*'

The Surviving Hungarian nobles divided into two factions after the battle of

Mohacs, with each side nominating their own candidate to succeed Louis as King of

Hungary. One side chose John Zapolyai—Voyvod of Transylvania and the most

prominent surviving Hungarian—as king, and the other chose Duke Ferdinand Habsburg

of Austria. The two factions refused to find a compromise, and a fifteen-year period of

civil war began control of the Kingdom of Hungary. Sultan Suleyman opposed

Ferdinand becoming king, because that would bring the Habsburg Empire right to his

doorstep. Instead, the Ottomans gave significant support to John Zapolyai, who while

being anti-Turk had no choice but to accept any help he could get against the much more

powerful Ferdinand. Twice the Ottomans marched against Ferdinand in support of John,

in 1529 and 1532, and in 1529 John gave them the opportunity to besiege Vienna. While

the Austrians just barely beat back the Ottomans, John became the status of Turkish

vassal.'^

At this point Suleyman had what he wanted. He turned Hungary into an allied

buffer state, and opened the way for further campaigns against the Habsburgs, but events

forced the Ottomans to take a more active role in Hungary. John Zapolyai had formed a

secret agreement with Ferdinand that he would have no children, and when he died

AlfOldi, LdszI6 M.: The Battle of Mohacs. 1526. From Hunyculi to Rakoczi: War and Society in Late
Medieval and Early Modem Hungary. Edited by Janos M. Bak and Bela K. Kirdly. Brooklyn
College Pres; New York. 1982: 192
" Bayerle, Gustav [1]: One Hundred Fifty Years of Frontier Life in Hungary. From Hunyadi to Rakoczi:
War and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Hungary. Edited by Janos M. Bak and Bela
K. Kirdly. Brooklyn College Pres: New York. 1982: 227
'■ Domonkos 213

- Pearsall 8 -
Ferdinand would become sole claimant to the Hungarian throne. Just before he died,

however, John did father a son, and a Zapolyai faction remained. The Ottomans saw how

precarious this faction was, however, with an infant as their leader and Ferdinand looking

to seize all of Hungary. Therefore, in 1541 the Ottomans again invaded Hungary,

ostensibly to support the infant king John n, but in reality to stabilize a situation that they
saw as far too unstable for their comfort.*^

This time, when they seized the capital city of Buda—which they had temporarily

held three previous times—they stayed. “King” John II was soon sent east, where he was

crowned Prince of Transylvania, and the Ottomans took over direct control of most of

Hungary, leaving Transylvania as a client state under Ottoman supervision. Suleyman

decided that it would be better to annex Southern and Central Hungary directly into the

Ottoman Empire rather than rely on any local proxies, and therefore set out to sweep

away the old Kingdom of Hungary and replace it with several new Ottoman provinces

collectively known as Madjaristan. The Turks converted major cities of the Kingdom,

which had been mostly German and Hungarian in makeup, into Muslim centers of

administration. The Ottomans forced local German and Hungarian merchants and

craftsmen to totally evacuate these cities, or at best forced them to live on the fringes of

them, beyond the city walls. Outside of the cities the Hungarian nobility fled north to

Austrian controlled territory. The few who tried to remain did not fair well, and soon

faded into the masses of displaced Hungarian peasants within Ottoman territory. In this

fashion what had been the Kingdom of Hungary quickly became another province in the

Ottoman Empire.

Szakaly, Ferenc: The Early Ottoman Period Including Roval Hungary 1526-1606. A History of Hungary.
Edited by Peter F. Sugar. Indiana University Press: Bloomington. 1990:85

- Pearsall 9 -
 An Austrian army attacked Buda next year, but could not drive the Ottomans out

of Hungary. The Ottomans themselves, however, had stretched their military to its limit

just occupying central and southern Hungary, and could not capture the northern part of

the country controlled by Ferdinand.'"^ In the end, in 1547 Sultan Suleyman and Emperor

Charles V signed an armistice, which recognized Turkish control over Hungary, and

forced the Austrians to pay an annual tribute to the Ottomans as payment for the sliver of

Hungary under Austrian control. For thejiext 150 years Hungary would be divided into

three parts: A small area in the north was under Austrian control, Transylvania was an

vassal state of the Ottomans, and central and southern Hungary—the vast majority of the

historical Hungarian kingdom—was annexed directly into the Ottoman Empire.'^

Just because the Habsburg Empire recognized the reality of Ottoman control of

most of Hungary did not mean they accepted the situation as permanent. Duke Ferdinand

realized the vulnerability of Vienna, now that no major fortresses stood between it and

Buda. Consequently he turned the section of Hungary under his control into a heavily

armed buffer state. The Hungarian nobles, most of who now lived in Austrian Hungary,

were converted from a medieval-style heavy cavalry into a more mobile light cavalry

along the lines of the Ottoman ghazi raiders.'^ The area between Vienna and Buda

quickly became a no-mans land, as these Hungarian raiders and their Ottoman

counterparts continually fought with each other, ignoring any truces between the

Habsburgs and the Ottomans. In addition to these constant border skirmishes, several

large-scale wars erupted between the Turks and the Austrians, which transformed

Sugar, Peter F.: South Eastern Europe Under Ottoman Rule. 1354-1804. University of Washington
Press: Seattle, 1977: 70
Szak^tly 86
“ Bayerle(l]231

- Pearsall 10 -
Hungary into a permanent battlefield for the Austrians and the Ottomans for the next 150

years.

The Ottoman Administration of Madjaristan

Collectively, The Ottomans referred to their Hungarian territories as Madjaristan.

but for the purposes of administration Sultan Suleyman divided Hungary into two

vilayets—or provinces—Buda and Temesvar. Later, after the Ottomans captured some

more territory in the early seventeenth century, they created two small vilayets were

created: Eger and Kanizsa. Buda was by far the largest of these, stretching from Buda in

the north as far south as Belgrade, and was itself divided into twelve sanjaks. A Pasha

governed each vilayet, with the Pasha of Buda being the overall ruler of Madjaristan.

The Ottomans built the governmental structure of Madjarist^ on a military model. At

the top was the Pasha, below him were the twelve Beys, one for each sanjak. Finally, on

the local level, the Ottomans ruled through the Sipahis.‘*

The central Turkish government set up the provinces of Madjaristan as timar

provinces. This meant that all of the land officially belonged to the Sultan in Istanbul,

who only loaned it to the local Ottomans on a temporary basis. All of the income from

these land grants went directly to the grant holder, without anything being paid to the

central government. In return, the local Ottomans were expected to pay for a significant

portion of their defense out of their own pockets. The civil administrators of Madjaristan

’’ Madjaristan. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition. Compiled by J. van Lent; Edited by P.J.
Bearman. E.J. Brill; New York, 1995; 1010
Sugar 42

- Pearsall 11 -
received their pay through income set aside specifically for that purpose.’^ The Ottomans

conducted a very detailed census survey to determine how the land would be allotted.

This survey not only noted how many people lived where, but how much in tax revenue

each town and village could be expected to produce, as well as how much taxable trade

took place across the provinces.^® The Ottomans first conducted this survey soon after

their annexation of Hungary in 1541, and updated it regularly, as needed, to maintain an

accurate estimate of the value of each village and farm.

The Ottomans used this census information to divide the land between all the

various groups who wanted a piece of the income from the new provinces. The most

profitable lands, as well as all of the major urban centers of Madjarist^, beczime khass

estates. The Sultan held most of these directly, and their income went straight to

Istanbul. The rest of the khass estates paid the salaries of the local Pashas and Beys, and

were called sanjakbeg khasses. The Ottomans designated about twenty per cent of

Madjarist^ as some form of a khass estate. Another ten per cent of the provinces

became zVamets. The Sultan gave these estates, with total revenues of between 20,000

and 100,000 aqce per year, as rewards to high-ranking administrators and generals.

While the zi’amets supported some of the most powerful people in Madjarist^,

the majority of the land—some forty per cent—supported the backbone of the Ottoman

presence there: the Sipahis. These people, who were the traditional land holding class

among the Ottomans, and formed the cavalry wing of the imperial army, received small

estates across the whole of Madjaristan. These timar estates, with yearly incomes

” Shaw, Stanford: History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. Volume /; Empire of the Gazis: The
Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280-1808. Cambridge Uniyersity Press: London, 1976:
122

- Pearsall 12 -
between 2,000 and 20,000 aqce were often little more than one or two agricultural

villages. From this revenue a Sipahi not only supported himself, but also a number of

soldiers ready to accompany him into battle. It is important to realize, however, that the

zi'amets and timars differed fundamentally from the estates held by the Hungarian

nobility. The Ottoman Sipahis and Zaims did not have any actual title to the lands they

controlled. The Sultan had merely granted them the right to collect the revenue from

these estates. The Sultan reserved the right to change who held what estates at any time,

and in fact did so very often. This system resulted in a very different style of government

from that demonstrated by the previous Hungarian rulers. The Sipahis and Zaims—those

who held zi’amet estates—saw their land as nothing more than a revenue source, which

could be taken away at any time and could not be passed on to their sons. Because of

this, the local Ottoman rulers were much more focused on short-term profits than their

Hungarian predecessors had been.^*

The remaining thirty per cent of the land in the Ottoman provinces supported

troops and fortifications, sustained wa^/endowments, or provided funds for other

miscellaneous purposes.^^ By the 1550s, after the Ottomans had been in control about ten

years, this system of land holding had almost completely replaced the older Hungarian

system.^^

“ Kaldy-Nagy [1], J.: The Administration of the Saniaq Registrations in Hungary. Acta Orientalia
Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae. Tomus XXI, 181-223(1968): 183
Kdidy-Nagy (1] 183
For information on the percentage breakdown of the land, see 11—38, and for information on the general
revenue of the different estates, see Bayerle, Gustav (2): Ottoman Tributes in Hungary. Mouton;
The Hague, 1973: 13
^ Bayerle. Gustav [3]: The Kanun-Name of the Saniak of Seeedin of 1570. Archivum Ottomanicum
(Germany] 13(1993-94): 55

- Pearsall 13 -
 To the Hungarian peasantry, the Ottoman property financial and administrative

systems—based on Islamic Sha’ria Law—appeared completely foreign.^'* The Ottomans

sought to impose this new system, rather than adapt the indigenous Hungarian laws,

because they hoped to integrate Madjaristan into the Ottoman Empire by Turkilying the

provinces’ laws and practices.^^ Initially the Turks put off any attempts to impose

Ottomzin laws on Madjaristan in the hopes that it could be done after they conquered

Vienna.^^ The Ottomans hoped that Vienna would fall quickly, and that they could

integrate the Hungarian provinces into the empire while in a relative state of peace. After

the first siege of Vienna, however, it became apparent to the Sultan Suleyman that the •

Austrians would not be defeated any time soon, and therefore he began the process of

integrating Madjarist^ by annexing it in 1541.

Ottoman power was represented in Madjarist^ through two main branches of

power. The military/ bureaucratic element represented by the Pasha of Buda and the

various Sipahi families below him made up the primary branch. Within the Ottoman

bureaucracy the office of Pasha of Buda was considered a very prestigious one to hold

because the distance between Buda and Istanbul meant that the Pasha could exercise

quite a bit of personal power. Because of this, many leading men in the empire became

Pasha of Buda.^^ Also because of the power of the post, the Sultans made sure to appoint

new Pashas every few years, to keep one person from accumulating too much of a base of

"Kdldy-Nagy(l) 182
IBID
“ Fodor 272
Budun. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, compiled by J. van Lent; edited by P.J.
Bearman. E.J. Brill; New York, 1995: 1285

- Pearsall 14 -
 support in Madjaristan. Over the 145-year life of the vilayet of Buda, seventy-five

different people held the office of Pasha, some several times.^*

While the Pasha of Buda represented the Sultan in Madjaristan, the Sipahis—who

made up the local ruling class across the countryside—represented the Sultan to the local

Hungarians. Ideally, the Ottomans hoped that the Sipahis would act as an integrating

force that would help bring rural Madjarist^ into the Ottoman Empire proj)er. By tying

them to the land through their timars the Sipahis would get to know the region and

become responsible local representatives of the Sultan. This ideal situation did not

become the norm, and in the end the Sipahis did little to help integrate their timars into

the empire. The Sipahis, for a number of reasons, never made any serious attempts to

become more than foreign conquerors to their new Hungarian subjects. They generally

did not learn Hungarian, and many never even visited their estates in person, choosing to

instead communicate with them solely through writing.^^ Very few of the Sipahis

actually lived on their estates with their subjects. Instead, most lived in fortified, totally

Islamic towns for security. They only ventured out to their lands when it was time to

collect tithes. Because they did not live on their estates, the Sipahis failed to fill the void

left by the departed Hungarian nobles in regulating the daily lives of the Hungarian

peasantry. The old Hungarian lords had acted as judges and arbiters for their peasants,

and through this had had a connection to their lands that went beyond profits and losses.

The Sipahis, perhaps because of the constant threat of transfer to a different timar.

“ibid
“ Bayerle, Gustav (IJ 232

- Pearsall 15 -
remained almost totally focused on gaining as much profit from their land as quickly as

they could, without regards to the livelihood of their peasants.^^

Alongside the Pasha of Buda and Sipahis in Madjarist^, the Mufti of Buda and

the Qadis below him represented the religious and judicial elements of the Ottoman

Empire. The Mufti and the Qadis presided over the enforcement of the Sha’ria law in

Madjaristan. The Mufti of Buda’s court became the court of last appeal, not only for the

local Muslims, but also for the Catholic Hungarians because of this, the Muftis had to be

familiar not only with Islamic law but with the Christian laws that governed most of the

Hungarians.^* This knowledge of Christian laws made the Mufti a key player in the

constant diplomatic negotiations between the Ottomans and the Austrians. Because of

this, the Mufti of Buda became one of the most powerful officials in Ottoman Hungary.

The Qadis represented Ottoman law and order on the local level. Every city and town

where Muslims lived had a Qadi who served as the judge for both the Muslim and

Christian communities.

Neither of these two branches of Ottoman power succeeded in integrating

effectively Madjarist^ into the empire because they could not effectively consolidate

local power. The Hungarian nobility had fled to Austrian Hungary almost to a man, but

they had not stopped taking an active interest in the estates they abandoned. Through

agents and occasional personal visits across the border, Hungarian nobles continued to

exercise a significant amount of power on their former estates in the form of continued

“ IBID 233
Agoston, GSbor; Muslim Cultural Enclaves in Hungary Under Ottoman Rule. Acta Orientalia
Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae. Tomus XLV (2-3), 181-204 (1991): 194
” IBID 195

- Pearsall 16 -
feudal privileges.They never allowed the Ottoman Sipahis who replaced them to

become the sole source of authority. Even though the Hungarian nobles were in exile,

they stayed in contact with their former estates through agents and occasional direct visits

in conjunction with raids. While the Ottomans ruled the daily lives of the peasantry, the

Hungarian nobility remained a constant presence in the peasants’ lives. Eventually, as

the Ottoman power weakened, the exiled nobility forced their peasants to choose between

following their exiled hereditary lord and their appointed Ottoman ruler; generally the

peasants sided with the exiled noble. Also, unlike the Balkans, nearly all of the

Hungarians under Muslim rule remained Christian. The widespread conversions that

helped weld Balkan society to the Islamic society of the Ottoman Empire never took

place. Consequently, Sha’ria law and the Qadis never penetrated into Hungarian life

outside of the few cities where Muslims and Christians lived together.

In effect, the Muslim rulers of Madjaristan isolated themselves in their own towns

and fortresses, while the countryside got caught in a state of limbo, with the occupying

Ottomans and the exiled Hungarian nobles both vying for control. This contest played

itself out politically, economically, and militarily between the two sides, and would be

one of the dominating factors in determining who would ultimately control the nation of

Hungary. The Ottomans inability to secure the countryside kept Madjaristan a large

border region, and eventually this resulted in the Ottomans retreat from their westernmost

provinces.

” IBID 181

- Pearsall 17 -
 Taxation

While the Ottomans and the Austrians played power politics and fought wars to

see who would control the fate of Hungary, they did not have to live in the territory they

fought over. While the Sultans in Istanbul and the Emperors in Vienna fought and

maneuvered the Hungarian peasants had to live in a land that had been turned into a

battlefield. Hungarians in Ottoman Hungary faced the additional burden of adjusting to

completely new rulers. While in the cities the Ottomans made their presence felt in many

ways, in rural Madjaristan—aside from the occasional army on the march—the Ottomans

entered into the Hungarian peasant’s life through taxation more than anything else.

Soon after the conquest of a new territory the Ottomans conducted a detailed tax

survey to determine where the revenue sources were in their new province, and to assign

these revenue sources to various deserving soldiers and administrators.'^^ The Ottomans

did this in Madjaristan within a decade of the establishment of the vilayet of Buda. The

Ottoman based their tax system in Madjaristan on the number of taxable residents in a

village rather than on the total productivity of that village.^* A poll tax—where all non-

Muslims who owned over 300 aqdes^^ of property had to pay a tithe—made up the bulk

of the income to the Ottoman treasury. By the end of the sixteenth century, about sixty

per cent of the peasants of Madjaristan owned enough property to have to pay this poll

^ Bayerlc (11 233

” Bayerle |21 14
^*Kdldy-Nagy (1)192
The aqce was the standard coin of the Ottoman empire at this time. One aqcc was roughly equal to fifty
Hungarian forints by metal weight. By the seventeenth century the aqde had been devalued several times
and was worth significantly less.

- Pearsall 18 -
tax.^* Each of these taxable families also had to pay a property tax of twenty-five aqces

on each door to each building they owned.^^

While these two taxes represented the most standard across Madjarist^—

individual landlords had little discretion in raising or lowering them—the taxes on

agricultural produce, while generally less severe than the poll and property taxes, could

be the most oppressive to the peasants. The peasants had to pay these taxes in-kind, and

when income from the poll and property taxes decreased these would often go up to

compensate. Generally, peasants turned over 1/30 of the total crop to their landlord, but

this could go as high as 1/10 when the landlord tried to squeeze as much out of their land

as possible.^ In addition to these taxes, the Ottomans assessed taxes on everything from

firewood to candles, and on sheep and pigs, and amount of land used as pasture.

Individual families paid all of these taxes, not whole villages or individuals, and the

Ottomans collected payment in kind, not in cash.'** The Ottomans also maintained the old

Church tithe of ten per cent of total agricultural output as another tax due to them from

the peasantry, except now the tithe went to the Ottoman treasury in Buda rather than to

the Catholic Church.^^ Also, those who had not paid taxed under the Hungarians—such

as priests and laborers working for the military—remained untaxed under the Ottomans.**^

While these taxes could be burdensome to the peasants, they actually paid

somewhat less than they had paid under their old Hungarian nobles. The Ottomans also

did not impose work-levees on the peasants to the degree that the Hungarian magnates

had. Unlike the Hungarian nobles, the Ottomans did not consider the Hungarian peasants

Bayerle [2] 20
’’Kildy-Nagy [11 194
^ IBID 199
Bayerle [2] 22

- Pearsall 19 -
serfs, and under the Ottomans peasants had limited rights to their land, such as the ability

to pass it on to their heirs."^ What the Ottoman landlords made up in even lighter

taxation and limited freedoms, however, they squandered in shortsightedness. As has

been said before, the Sipahis, who made up the majority of landlords in Madjaristan,

could not pass on their land to their sons. Furthermore, the Sultans and Pashas often

shifted the Sipahis from timar to timar every few years, as the revenues from them

changed. This discouraged the Sipahis from looking towards any long-term development

of their timars in favor of squeezing as much short-term profit out of them as they could.

The peasants often ended up getting strong-armed for as much as they could pay without

receiving any of the benefits they had gotten from their old Hungarian rulers, such as

protection and someone to arbitrate disputes.'^^

Tolls on trade passing through the provinces made up the other main source of

revenue for the Ottomans. The central government carefully outlined toll levels, but the

Ottomans farmed out the right to collect those tolls to independent contractors. These

contractors purchased the to collect the tolls in certain towns in exchange for a cash

payment to the treasury in Buda."^^ Similarly, some villages could buy the right to tax

themselves from the treasury. Instead of being taxed per household by the Ottoman

government, the town would pay a single lump-sum payment to the Ottoman treasury.

This was a coveted right, because it meant that the Ottomans could not conduct their

census surveys in those towns, and consequently the Ottoman government left these

Bayerle [2] 22
Kdidy-Nagy [1] 195
^ Zimany, Verai: Economy and Society in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Hungary. Akademiai
Kiado: Budapest. 1987: 37
Szakily 88
^ Bayerle [3] 59

- Pearsall 20 -
towns pretty much on their own."*^ Most of the towns that gained fell under direct

Sultanic control, rather than under the control of local Beys or Sipahis, because the

Sultans—due to the distance to these possessions—often felt more at ease letting the

locals on their lands govern themselves.

Although the Ottomans collected their taxes and fees in the provinces of

Madjarist^ thoroughly the total amount of income gained never equaled the money spent

by the Ottomans in Madjaristan. All of the provinces of Madjarist^ remained constantly

on a war footing, and skirmishes between the Turks and the Austrians happened daily.

The price tag for maintaining the necessary forces in Madjaristan far outstripped the

Ottomans tax income. In the Islamic year 966 (1558-1559) the total income from the

Sanjak of Buda—the largest section of the Vilayet of Buda—came to 6,348,578 aqces,

while the total expenses for defending the border came to 23,347,565 aqdes.^^ This was

just one section of all of Madjaristan; the Ottomans absorbed very high losses for

maintaining their presence in Hungary. In general, year in and year out the provinces of

Madjarista only paid for a third of the cost of their own defense with the rest being paid

by the central government in Istanbul."^’

Economic Development in Madjaristan

If Madjaristan was to ever be more than a drain on the imperial treasury, the

Ottomans had to have to turn the territory they had conquered into more than a buffer

state. When they came to power in 1541 the economy of Hungary lay in ruins and what

Kaldy-Nagy[l]213
Kaldy-Nagy, J. [2]: The Cash Book of the Ottoman Treasury in Buda in the Years 1558-1560. Acta
Orentalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae. Tomus XIV (1960): 182
Madjaristan 1022

- Pearsall 21 -
the Ottomans did to revive that economy would be crucial to whether they could integrate

Madjaristan into the empire. Their results were overall, mixed. Considering the state

that Madjaristan was in the first half of the sixteenth century, the Ottomans did some

good things, but with only one real exception Ottoman Hungary never recovered to where

it was at the end of the fifteenth century.

In the first fifty years of Ottoman rule, basically up to the turn of the century, the

economy of Madjarist^ regressed dramatically. Prior to the Turkish invasion the

Hungarian economy revolved around very intensive farming of wheat and other staples

on the Hungarian plain, with copper and gold mining in the north playing another

important role.^^ After the conquest the mineral resources of the north came under

Austrian control, while war devastated the farms of the Hungarian plain. The plain is not

especially fertile, and for the Hungarians to get as much production out of it as they did

took very careful and intensive farming. The constant strife of the sixteenth century

severely disrupted this system, and once disrupted it proved impossible for the farms on

the plain to regain their former productivity. With no significant stretches of forest to

protect the land, as soon as farms were left fallow for a couple of years erosion would

wash away the soil. This wide-scale erosion across the Hungarian Plain turned large

swathes of what was farmland into infertile desert, and even the areas that remained

farmland did not regain the production levels of the fifteenth century until very recently.^*

The Ottomans responded to the decline of the Hunganan Plain by introducing

large-scale stock breeding to the area. While the Hungarian Plain may have become poor

agricultural land, the abandoned fields made perfect pastures for grazing cattle, and

* Szak^ly 88
” Sugar 88

- Pearsall 22 -
herding soon became the economic mainstay of Madjaristan.^^ The boom in stock-

breeding centered around the small, Hungarian towns on the Hungarian Plain, such as

Kecskemet and Vac. The burghers of these towns seized on the fact that many of local

peasants had abandoned their farms and fled to acquire huge amounts of land to form

ranches.^^ During the second half of the sixteenth century the towns on the plain

managed to increase their land-holdings to as much as four times what they had owned

before the Ottoman conquest.^'^

While local Hungarians sparked the rise in stockbreeding, Ottoman policies

helped to promote the industry. Many of the towns on the Hungarian plain gained the

right to collect their own taxes. By doing this, the plains-towns achieved a measure of

local independence, and they became refuges for Hungarians fleeing the Ottoman

takeover of the rest of Hungary. The towns also benefited large numbers of refugees

emigrating from other parts of Hungary. These refugees helped the towns to grow

rapidly, which helped fuel the growth in the cattle-industry. The Ottomans also taxed

cattle differently from other livestock. The Ottomans taxed animals such as sheep, goats,

and pigs twice, with both a head-tax and a tax on their pastureland. The Ottomans,

however, did not have a head-tax on cattle, making them much more profitable.^^

Cattle soon became the major source of food for Madjaristan, as well as the single

largest export for the provinces. By the end of the sixteenth century the Hungarians

drove an average of 100,000 head of cattle west into Austria and Germany each year.^^

Livestock exports made up approximately ninety-four per cent of the total exports from

” IBID 284
” Zimany 45
^ Sugar 90
” Kdldy-Nagy (1)207

- Pearsall 23 -
Madjaristan, and Hungarian cattle made up some sixty-four per cent of all the cattle sold

in all of Europe.^^ The Hungarian towns that engaged in stock raising did very well

economically. Despite the constant warfare between the Ottomans and the Austrians,

which sometimes made its way down into the Hungarian plain, these towns came to rival

some of the Free Imperial Cities of the Holy Roman Empire in wealth.^®

The astronomical growth of stock raising did come with a heavy price for the

economy of Madjarist^, however. Despite its success, cattle raising transformed the

economy of the Hungarian plain from one that produced locally needed commodities into

a cash-crop economy. As stockbreeding grew, the agriculture of Madjaristan fell farther

and farther into decline. While Madjaristan exported a huge number of cattle, it became

a net importer of grain.^^ Stockbreeding also came at the expense of another Hungarian

agricultural staple: wine production. Before the Ottoman invasion, Hungary had been

one of the major wine producers in Europe, but after the invasion, as ranches took over

vineyards, wine production dropped off precipitously. In the town of Tolna, which had

been a major wine center up through the mid-sixteenth century, wine output dropped

from 150,000 gallons per year in the 1560s to almost nothing by the seventeenth

century.^ In the end, this turned Hungary into the source of most of Europe’s beef while

stunting sectors of the economy which would have proven more locally beneficial in the

coming years.

Just as the Ottoman invasion caused a shift in Hungarian agriculture from farming

towards stockbreeding, Hungary’s position in international trade also changed. Despite

^ Szakily 88
’’ Zimany 22
** IBID 64 and 67-68
IBID 22

- Pearsall 24 -
the Ottoman invasion, the cities of Hungary never lost their trade ties to the west. With

the coming of the Turks, however, Hungary no longer formed the eastern border of the

Christian world, but the bridge between the East and the West. The older trade ties to

Austria, Germany, and Poland became tied into trade with the Ottoman Empire through

Hungary.^' The main source of income for the Ottoman government in the major cities

of Madjarist^, such as Buda and Szeged, came from trade. In Szeged in 1548, for

example, total income from taxes was 85,900 aqces, while income from tolls reached

373,550

The major difference between the boom in stock raising and the boom in East-

West trade, however, lay in that Hungarians ran the stockbreeding trade, while most trade

in Madjarist^ came to be the exclusive territory of local Muslims. Prior to the Ottoman

invasion, Germans had controlled most of the trade in Hungary, but after the Sultan

Suleyman had massacred all of the Germans in Buda in 1529, most fled to Austria and

Austrian HungaryMuslims coming up from the Balkans soon filled the vacuum

created by this in Madjarist^. By the seventeenth century Muslim merchants—mostly

recently converted Bosnians who moved north—conducted virtually all of the trade in

Madjaristan.^

While trade passing through Madjaristan between the Austrians euid the Ottomans

grew to be a major source of income for the Ottomans, it never grew to such a size that it

compensated for the destruction of the local Hungarian trade-based economy. The

Ottoman conquest shut down nearly all of Hungary’s textile and craft production, which

“ MadjaristSn 1023
Zimany 67
“ Bayerle [3] 59
“ Zimany 49

- Pearsall 25 -
fell to the point where the local Hungarians could barely supply their most basic needs.^^

With the Ottoman invasion many of the local Hungarians who had produced craft goods

fled, and the Ottomans replaced them with soldiers and administrators. The Ottomans

failed to replace the lost local craft production. They were not interested in promoting

the local Hungarian crafts but instead imported Turkish-style goods from the East.

Textiles and finished goods—mostly from elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire—made up

eighty eight per cent of the imports in Madjaristan.^

The Hungarian Peasantry Under Ottoman Rule

Due to the Ottoman conquest, the decades of endemic warfare, and the Turkish

attempts to integrate their new provinces into their empire, the lives of the Hungarian

peasantry and urban bourgeoisie in Madjarist^ changed dramatically. During the period

of Ottoman rule, from the mid-sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century, the

Hungarians who lived under Ottoman rule lived a very precarious existence. On the one

hand they found themselves subjects of the Ottoman Empire, but on the other the exiled

Hungarian nobility never gave up their claims of lordship. The Hungarian peasantry also

suffered from constant raiding and occasional wars that engulfed the countryside as well

as religious stresses associated with the rise of the Reformation. All of this served to

severely destabilize the lives of the peasants in Madjaristan.

The initial Ottoman occupation of Hungary in the mid-sixteenth century caused a

massive shift in the population of Madjaristan. Soon after the conquest, the population of

Ottoman Hungary dropped significantly. Some of the drop can be attributed to the

Szakdly 88

- Pearsall 26 -
destruction of the wars during that time, but most of it resulted from many Hunganans

fleeing to Austrian Hungary or Transylvania to escape Ottoman rule.^^ Many fled due to

a genuine fear of the Turks. In addition to the destruction caused by the various armies

marching across the country, the Sultan Suleyman took almost 100,000 Hungarians—

mostly women and children—and sold them into slavery in Istanbul as an example for

those who would resist the Ottoman conquest.

In general, however, the depopulation of the Hungarian countryside can not be

blamed completely on the Ottomans. In fact, the Ottomans would have much preferred to

rule over a we 11-populated countryside, one that would have provided them the same

revenue that had been provided to the Kings of Hungary a century earlier. Peasants fled

to escape the war. The Ottoman invasion resulted in widespread devastation of farmland

as armies foraged for food and destroyed crops to keep them out of other armies’ hands.

This explanation, however, does not adequately explain why the so many Hungarians

fled, because the places they fled to—Austrian Hungary and Transylvania—suffered just

from the war as Ottoman Hungary. In fact, while the population centers in Hungary

shifted due to the invasion, the total population of the old Kingdom of Hungary remained

steady at around 2.5 to 3 million. The real change was within the borders of the old

Kingdom. The Ottoman territories, which had been the most populous, suffered from a

significant population drop, while in Transylvania and Austrian Hungary the population

rose.

“ Zimany 22
MadJaristSn 1023
“ Bayerle (11 239

- Pearsall 27 -
Estimated Population of Hungary in 1598 (In Thousands

Austrian Hungary 1320-1620

Madjaristan 600-700

Transylvania 600-700

Free Imperial Cities (Austrian Hungary) 120-140

Total 2640-3080

Many peasants fled because their noble lords, who themselves fled almost to a

man, encouraged and sometimes even forced them to escape from Ottoman controlled

territory. Most of the noble families of Hungary fled to Austrian Hungary, where they set

up shadow-versions of their estates, complete with county courts for their exiled subjects.

Because of the encouragement of the nobility, thousands of Hungarian peasants fled from

Ottoman ruled territories.^®

While many peasants did flee, the majority remained and fell under Ottoman rule.

For them, life proved particularly difficult, mostly due to the constant state of war in

Madjaristan. While these peasants did not flee from Ottoman rule, many still left their

original homes. Constant raiding by both the Ottomans and the Austrians put the

peasants in continual danger of having their villages and crops destroyed. To avoid the

armies and raiders many peasants abandoned their old villages for more defensible

locations. Many villages moved from lowland sites to more defendable hilltop locations,

and many other villages simply disappeared.^' By the early seventeenth century, up to

‘’Zimany 15
^ Sugar 284
Zimany 15

- Pearsall 28 -
thirty per cent of all pre-war villages in Madjaristan had vanished due to war7^ Even by

1570, just thirty years after the Ottoman conquest, in the district of Novigrad near Buda

32 of the 166 villages (twenty per cent) lay abandoned/^ The area along the border

between Austrian and Ottoman Hungary had suffered so much from continual raiding

that it became a virtual no-mans-land.^"^ John Demschwam, a traveler in Madjaristan in

1555 said of the Hungarian countryside that:

.. .this beautiful and fertile land has become a desert; the thickets and forests
serve as lurking-places for robbers and marauders, one can see the traces of many
devastated villages, the arable land is scarcely cultivated and the region is getting
more and more deserted every day.^^

The Ottoman conquest definitely caused some of these problems. In their effort

to construct a huge network of fortresses along the border with Austria they used the

peasants as a source of free labor, and even after these fortresses were finished the

peasants had to provide food and free transportation to the garrisons.^^ Furthermore the

Ottoman armies that constantly moved though the countryside on the way to and from the

Austrian border sucked the peasants dry. While seldom openly looting and pillaging,

they requisitioned whatever they needed from the local farmers and often paid well below

market value, if they paid at all. An Ottoman army on the march could sometimes leave

a trail of abandoned villages in its wake.^^

The Ottomans, however, did try to help their Hungarian peasants. In an effort to

stem the tide of fleeing farmers, the Ottomans worked hard to protect the peasantry from

^Bayerle[l]235
^ Bayerle [2] 19
’MbID 13
Tagebuch einer Reise nach Knostantinopel imd Kleinasien, 1553-1555, as quoted in Zimany 14
^‘Bayerle (1)232
^ Bayerle (3) 60

- Pearsall 29 -
Austrian raids/* The Ottomans also sought to appear as more benevolent to the

peasantry rulers than their Hungarian lords. The Ottoman Empire had no serfdom, and

the Ottomans hoped that, by granting the peasants a greater degree of personal freedom—

such as rights to their own property and the right to pass their property down to their

sons, as well as limited freedom of movement—that the peasantry would slowly become

more loyal to the Ottomans.^^ Also, Ottoman landlords—the Sipahis—did not have as

much power over their peasants as Hungarian lords had had. Hungarian peasants in

Madjarist^ could even seek legal redress from their Sipahi lords in the Qadi courts if

they felt mistreated.*^

This strategy worked for the Ottomans in the Balkans, where the peasantry

accepted the supremacy of the Turks, and where some had even converted to Islam. In

Madjarist^, however, the Hungarian peasantry never fully accepted Turkish rule. The

influence that the exiled Hungarian nobles still exercised over their occupied estates

played a major role in undermining Ottoman authonty. Unlike in the Balkans, the

Ottomans had not been able to destroy the local nobility, just drive it out; so unlike the

Balkans, the local peasantry had another power contesting for their loyalty.

The Hungarian nobility never accepted the Ottomans as permanent conquerors of

their territory, and consequently acted as a govemment-in-exile in Austrian Hungary and

continued to hold influence over their estates. Many Hungarian lords sent agents across

the border to watch over their estates and keep tabs on what the Ottomans were doing

with them. These agents also served to remind the peasants that their Hungarian lord still

IBID 59
^ Zimany 37 and Sugar 96
“ Bayerle (3) 59

- Pearsall 30 -
considered himself to be their rightful ruler, despite the Turkish conquest.*' These

Hungarian nobles also refused to relinquish their right to the income from their estates,

which they expected their peasants to pay on top of the taxes levied by the Ottomans.

The Hungarian nobles demanded the same taxes that they had received before the

Ottoman invasion, plus the tithes due to the Catholic Church. This amounted to a one-

forint poll tax and up to a twenty per cent tax on agricultural produce. Hungarian

raiders enforced their nobles’ demands for taxes by attacking villages that did not pay

their feudal taxes. By the early seventeenth century the bulk of the villages in
83
Madjaristan as far south as Szeged paid taxes to both the Ottomans and the Hungarians.

Paying this double taxation proved extremely difficult for the peasants of

Madjaristan, who were already dealing with a lot of problems. Avoiding paying one tax

or another meant choosing sides between the Ottomans and the Hungarian exiles,

however, and this could prove dangerous. In a letter from Sinan, Pasha of Buda, to

Archduke Ernest dated October 27, 1591 the Pasha stated that unless the villages refusing

to pay their taxes to the Ottomans relented he would be “seize some of them [e.g. sell the

residents into slavery] to set an example for the rest.”*"^ On the other hand, if villages

refused to pay their taxes the Hungarian nobles could be just as cruel. In another letter

dated July 21, 1591, Sinan Pasha complained that “Habsburg captains threaten with

impalement those villagers who would pay taxes to their spahis [sic].”*^ In the end most

peasants could not avoid paying either set of taxes, so through the beginning of the

*' Bayerle (I) 2.13

Bayerle (21 23
Bayerle (11 234
^ Bayerle, Gustav (4): Ottoman Diplomacy in Hungary: Letters from the Pasha of Buda. Indiana
University Press: Bloomington. 1972: 131 (only an abstract is given in English, the reference to
selling into slavery is from the introduction, page 11)
IBID 96

- Pearsall 31 -
seventeenth century double taxation became very common for the peasants of

Madjaristan.

Urban Growth on the Hungarian Plain

While those peasants who could responded to these oppressive conditions by

fleeing Madjaristan, most could not do that. Within Ottoman territory, however.

Hungarians fleeing the countryside found one area of refuge: the cattle-towns of the

Hungarian Plain. These towns—located on Sultanic khass estates—did not fall under the

control of the local Sipahis or Ottoman bureaucrats, and these towns had also arranged to

collect their own taxes, and in doing so freed themselves from most Ottoman

administrative interference. In effect, these towns formed islands of Hungarian

autonomy within Madjarist^, and consequently they attracted a large number of rural

refugees.*^

These towns had initially remained Hungarian when most other urban centers in

Madjaristan became Muslim enclaves because of their proximity to the Ottomans' initial

invasion. After the battle of Mohses they had quickly fallen under Turkish rule and

therefore the population never had time to flee. These towns had also always been

centers of opposition to the Hungarian magnates. In 1514 they had been the center of a

large peasants' revolt and had consequently lost many of their privileges to the local

magnates. When these magnates fled the residents of these towns did not feel as much of

a desire to flee with them, as had much of the rest of the country.*^

“Sugar 91
^ IBID 89

- Pearsall 32 -
 The boom in stock raising, however, is what made these towns into such attractive

places for Hungarian refugees. The economic prosperity generated through the cattle

trade created many jobs for the refugees, both in the cattle business and as servants and
go
laborers for the Hungarian families that had prospered from the cattle trade. As these

towns grew, they also attracted refugees due to the protection they offered from the

constant raiding and wars between the Ottomans and the Austrians. Finding strength in

numbers, these towns avoided much of the destruction visited on the rest of

Madjarist^.®^

Christianity

The cattle towns of the Hungarian Plain also served as a refuge for the

Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After the Ottoman conquest

Hungary was ripe for the Reformation. The Catholic hierarchy had been destroyed at the

battle of Mohses, where most of the prominent bishops of Hungary had fought and died.

With the head of the Catholic Church in Hungary removed, and the Ottomans not anxious

to allow new, Rome appointed bishops into Madjaristm, the local priests found

themselves free to break with Catholicism. Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Reformaiionism

all found Isirge followings in Madjaristan.’® By the beginning of the seventeenth century

** Zimany 46
P6ter, Katalin: The Later Ottoman Period and Roval Hungary 1606-1711. A History of Hungary. Edited
by Peter F. Sugar. Indiana University Press: Bloomington. 1990: 102
Ruzds, Lajos: The Seige of Szeetvar of 1566: Its Significance in Hungarian Social Development. From
Hunyadi to Rakoezi: War and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Hungary. Edited by
Janos M. Bak and Bela K. Kiraly. Brooklyn College Pres: New York. 1982: 257

- Pearsall 33 -
up to ninety per cent of the Hungarians under Ottoman rule had converted to some form

of Protestantism.^’

The growth of Protestantism provided for some of the few bright spots in

Hungarian literature during this period. In the fifteenth century Hungary had developed a

rich literary tradition geared almost totally towards religious writings. The Ottoman

invasion destroyed this tradition, and in general Hungarian literature would not begin to

recover until well into the seventeenth centuryThe Protestant reformation, however,

did provide for a few literary achievements during this time. In 1541 the first Hungarian

Bible in the world appeared in Madjaristan, and in 1585 a Protestant priest named Istvan

Kis published the first systematized grammar of the Hungarian Language.’^

The Protestant Reformation also had another important effect in Madjaristan; it

kept Christianity vigorous despite the Ottoman conquest and the destruction of the church

hierarchy. In previous centuries these same events in the Balkans had opened the door

for relatively large-scale conversions of the local population to Islam, but this did not

happen in Madjarist^. Instead, the local Hungarians remained almost totally Christian.

Instead of converting to Islam they converted to Protestantism, and when the Jesuits

entered Madjarist^ in the seventeenth century they converted back to Catholicism.

Islam never gained a foothold among the Hungarians.’"^

” Szakdly 94
Domonkos217
Szakdly 94

- Pearsall M -
 The Muslim Community in Madjaristan

Perhaps the greatest reason that so few Hungarians converted to Islam, however,

lay in the weakness of the local Muslim community. For a territory in which the Sultans

in Istanbul had invested so much effort to take and hold, it is remarkable how

unsuccessful they were in establishing a large Muslim presence. When the Ottomans had

conquered the Balkans in the fourteenth century they settled their new acquisitions with a

significant number of Turkish colonists from Anatolia. These Turks formed a nucleus

around which a local Muslim community could form, and consequently served to Turkify

at least the upper classes of the Balkans and integrate these territories into the Ottoman

Empire. This did not take place in Madjaristan. Perhaps because of the distance of the

Hungarian provinces from Istanbul, or perhaps because the Ottoman Empire no longer

had the manpower reserves necessary—very few Turks settled in Ottoman Hungary.

Instead, the vast majority of Ottomans in Madjaristan were Bosnian converts, while only

the most important imperial officials were ethnic Turks from Anatolia.^^ The Bosnians,

while being loyal Ottomans and Muslims, were not Turks and they proved unable to form

that nucleus for a local Turkified community could form. Because of this, the general

society of Madjarist^ never integrated in the larger imperial society. Instead, the

Muslims existed as an imported society almost totally cut off from the culture of the vast

majority of people around them.

While the Muslim community in Madjaristan did not integrate itself with the local

Hungarian culture, it became a very vibrant and successful frontier community in of

itself. Considering their relatively brief rule and the constant warfare they had to deal

^ Agoston 182
Sugar 71

- Pearsall 35 -
with, the fact that Ottomans created a viable Muslim society in Madjaristan was quite

remarkable. This community took root in the major cities of the former Kingdom of

Hungary: Buda, Pest, Pecs, and Szeged.^^ During the Ottoman conquest these cities had

been sacked and ruined and whatever residents had not fled to Austrian Hungary or

Transylvania were removed by the Ottomans. In their place came the Muslim soldiers

and administrators who ruled the provinces. In the city of Buda the Christian population

dropped from 5,000 in 1500 to 1,000 in 1547, to only 70 by 1627, while two thousand

Ottoman soldiers and functionaries moved in to take their place.*^^ When the Ottomans

captured Szeged the forced all of the inhabitants to move outside the walls, and reserved

the inner city for Muslims alone.^* In this way urban Muslim enclaves were carved out in

Madjaristan.

The local Muslims concentrated themselves in their own separate towns for their

own security. Even in the countryside, the local Sipahis and their retainers lived in

fortified villages or in garrison fortresses. They dared not live on their estates and seldom

even visited them. The need for elaborate security precaution also extended to travel

between settlements; the local Ottomans always traveled in well-armed convoys when

they moved from fortress to fortress.^ Despite the fact that the Hungarian and Austrian

armies had been driven out of Madjaristan several times, the Ottomans never securely

held the territory outside their fortresses and cities. Not only did they have to fear raiding

parties from Austrian Hungary, but also their own Hungarian subjects, for many peasants

’‘ibid 88
” IBID
’* Bayerle [31 15
” Szak^ly 88

- Pearsall 36 -
had turned to banditry to survive.The diplomatic letters between the Pasha of Buda

and Vienna are filled with complaints about Hungarian attacks on Muslims. In a letter

dated June 10, 1592 the Mehmed Pasha filed a protest regarding a merchant named Ali

being robbed of 4,000 Florins by raiders while attending a county fair.'®* In a letter dated

October 24, 1591 the Sinan Pasha complained that “Christian raiders scurry in all

directions or lie in ambush over the main highways.” He went on to say that “soon the

Turkish garrisons will not be able to open their own gates lest they are attacked by these

Muslim Religion and Education

While life outside of their Muslim enclaves was dangerous, inside these towns

Islamic society flourished. This society, as was to be expected, came to center around

religious life, and more specifically the cdmis, or cathedral mosques. In the cdniis the

Muslim communities gathered for Friday prayers, and in the cdmis most major

community events took place.The Ottomans located most of the cdmis in Madjaristan

either in converted churches or in rather hastily built wooden structures, nevertheless

several new structures were built in Madjarist^, mostly in Buda. Sokollu Mustafa.

Pasha of Buda between 1566 and 1578 sponsored many of the public buildings in Buda.

In addition to endowing several religious institutions and building some public baths.

Mustafa Pasha hired the architect Mi’mar Sinan—the builder of the Sinan Mosque in

Bayerle [3] 59
'®' Bayerle [4] 145
IBID 128
Agoston 183

- Pearsall 37 -
Istanbul—to design and build the canu of Buda.'^ In general, however, unless a pnvate

benefactor presented himself, most communities had to make due with much less

grandiose buildings, because the Ottoman government made very little public money

available for constructing buildings in Madjarist^.

While not usually grand buildings, the cdmis did serve their purpose as anchors of

the Muslim communities well. In addition to serving as the central mosque for their

community, most cdmis also attached mektebs, or primary schools for the children of the

Ottoman soldiers and administrators. The Ottomans guaranteed every Muslim child in

Madjaristan—as in the rest of the empire—a free basic education that covered reading in

Arabic the Qu’ran and the Hadiths, simple math, and reading and writing Turkish.’®^ By

the years 1660-1666 the Ottomans established approximately 165 separate mektebs in

Madjarist^. While most mektebs concentrated on providing the basic knowledge

needed by all Ottomans, some like the mekteb in Mitrovica also covered the basics of

Islamic law (fikh) and Ottoman inheritance law (fard

For a more in depth study of these subjects, however, most students attended

medreses, or secondary schools. Each of the major Muslim cities in Madjaristan had

several medreses, mostly of the lower ranking meddris-i resmiye type. The teachers in

these schools received a very low wage, from twenty to forty aqdes per day. This did not

attract many good teachers, and the level of education available did not go beyond the

bare basics. Most of these medreses relied on local wakf endowments for support, but

often the wakfs did not usually provide enough money to hire quality teachers. Ideally,

IBID 184
IBID 187
IBID 188
IBID 183

- Pearsall 38 -
the state would have then stepped in to help fund the schools, but because virtually all ot

the money collected in Madjaristan went towards defending the border, the schools were

unable to get much support.

A few higher ranked medreses existed in Madjaristan, however; all located in

Buda and endowed by Mustafa Pasha. The medrese attached to the cami built by Mi’mar

Sinan became the most prestigious medrese in Madjaristan. The head instructor there

doubled as the Mufti of Buda—one of the most important people in Ottoman Hungary.

Despite the distance from Istanbul the instruction in religious law remained current with

the latest imperial trends, and in addition to the standard curriculum of law and theology

students could study subjects such as geography, astrology, music, medicine, and
109
architecture.

Despite the modest educational opportunities in Madjarist^ for the local Muslims

a small intelligentsia did exist. The Qadis and religious leaders in the provinces had

reasonable access to both religious and secular literature from Istanbul, and several wrote

religious tracts that gained some circulation outside of Madjarist^.”® A relatively large

amount of Persian scholarship took place in the south, especially around the city of Pecs,

where a number of the residents spoke Persian."' Finally, while it may not have been on

the cutting edge of imperial style, local Muslims could watch performances of a great

number of Turkish folk songs and epics in the coffee shops of Buda, showing that at least
112
in a few places, traditional Ottoman culture did take root in Madjarist^.

IBID 190
IBID 192
"®Budun 1286
'' ‘ Agoston 202
Budun 1286

- Pearsall 39 -
 In Madjarist^ a very strong Sufi community existed alongside of the mainstream

Islamic culture. Originally the Sufis had come to the frontier with the goal of converting

the Hungarians to Islam, and while they did not succeed in this they did play a very

important role in keeping Islamic culture strong among the local Ottomans."^ All of the

major tarikats, or Sufi orders, were represented in Madjaristan, and three major sites rose

to prominence among the local Sufis. The first, located in Buda, was the Giil Baba tekke

(monastery) of the Bektasi Dervises. Mehmed Pasha founded the tekke some time

between 1543 and 1548 around the ttirbe (mausoleum) of a Sufi named GUI Baba. This

site became an important local Muslim pilgrimage site, and the attached tekke served as a

hostel for needy travelers who needed a bed and a hot meal.""^

The second major Sufi site in Madjarist^ grew up around the tiirbe of Suleyman,

near the town of Szigetv^. Sultan Suleyman died there in 1566, and before his advisors

took his body back to Istanbul, they buried his internal organs there. Because of this, a

major holy site drawing people from all over the Ottoman Empire near Szigetvar. The

Ottomans built both the tomb and an accompanying mosque in 1576. This was the

holiest site in Madjaristan, and the Turks considered it so important that a special

garrison of troops was paid to guard the tiirbe and mosque from anyone who might try to

vandalize it.“^ Because of the holiness of the site, and also probably because of the

protection to specially garrison provided, the tiirbe of Suleyman attracted Sufis from all

over Madjarist^, as well as the rest of the Empire. While most of the Sufis at

Suleyman’s Tekke were of the Halveti order, the most famous Sufi to live there was a

Agoston 204
"MBID 197
"*IB1D

- Pearsall 40 -
man named Mirek Muhammed of the Naksbendi**^ order. While slaying at the tekke in

1613 he wrote a commentary on some Persian poetry that was an immediate hit

throughout the Ottoman Empire, and was periodically reprinted up through the 1800s."^

In the mid-seventeenth century, the city of Pecs became the third major Sufi site

in Madjaristan. As Ottoman power began to fade in Hungary, the Mevlevi-hane order of

Sufis founded a chapter in the city. In the year 1680 a man named Ahmed Dede became

^eyh of the order. Dede wrote several widely read books, including one discussing the

beginning and the end of the universe that proved popular enough to be printed as far

away as Egypt. Eventually, Dede left Pecs to become the chief ^eyh of the Yenikapi

Mevlevi-hane order in Istanbul."*

While these Sufis failed in their original mission to convert the Hunganans to

Islam, they did succeed in implanting a strong—if small—Islamic presence in

Madjarist^. Without these Sufi centers, the local Muslims would have been almost

completely detached from the greater Islamic World. As it was, the Sufis managed to

established Islam in the provinces to a great enough extent that in certain places, such as

the Gill Baba shrine, the Islamic presence survived the withdrawal of the Ottomans in the

seventeenth century."^

Conclusion—The Decline of Madjaristan

As the Ottoman occupation of Hungary entered the seventeenth century, it began

to crumble quite fast. Despite having defeated the Austrians a number of times, and even

"*The Naksbendi Order was a major Sufi order in the Ottoman Empire, and remains very
strong up to the present.
IBID 200
"* IBID 202

- Pearsall 41 -
adding territory in 1608, the Ottoman hold on Madjaristan was very weak. The Ottomans

inability to solidify their position in Madjarist^ led to this weakness. The Hungarians

never accepted their position as subjects of the Turks, so in addition to defending the

border against the Austrians they had to occupy the whole country to keep it under their

nominal control. Madjaristan was also very far away from the Ottomans power base in

Anatolia, which made it very expensive for them to defend it. Eventually the stress on

the Ottoman military presence in Madjaristan intensified, and the Turkish occupation of

Hungary crumbled nearly as fast as it had occurred one hundred and fifty years earlier.

The difficulty that the Ottomans would face in defending Madjarist^ became

evident quite soon after their initial conquest. Technically, the Sipahis made up the

backbone of the Ottoman garrison. They made up the cavalry of empire, and that was

their major reason for existing. Not enough Sipahis immigrated to Madjarist^ to

adequately defend the border against Austrian raids, much less the occasional full-scale

invasion. Because of this the Ottomans had to post, at great expense, a large contingent

of mercenary troops along the border. Through the last half of the sixteenth century the

number of Bosnian and Albanian mercenaries continued to rise in response to the

increasing devastation caused by the constant Austrian raiding. By the 1593 the number

of mercenary soldiers totaled at least 18,000 men. Add to this seven thousand mounted

Sipahis and their retainers and the total military presence in Madjarist^ was over 25,000

soldiers.By the early seventeenth century, after the end of the Fifteen Years War, the

total garrison had dropped to around 19,000, but now the Ottomans had to station several

IBID 197
Hungarian-Ottoman Military and Diplomatic Relations in the Age of SUlevman the Magnificent. Edited
by G6za D^vid and Pal Fudur. Hungarian Academy of Science, Institute of History: Budapest.
1994: 143-45

- Pearsall 42 -
thousand Janissaries in Madjaristan to make up the difference. Considering that the total

military in the Ottoman Empire (excluding Egypt) numbered approximately 38,196 at

this time, the huge military commitment to Hungary becomes apparent.'^*

The number of troops in Madjarist^ grew continuously throughout the Turkish

period, the money that the Ottomans tried to keep from spending more money than was

absolutely necessary. In the sixteenth century the central government in Istanbul only

provided the money for 10,000 soldiers, the rest had to be paid for locally. The local

provinces, however, did not have the cash on hand to pay all of the necessary soldiers, so

the Pashas of started granting timars to soldiers in place of regular pay. By the 1570s

the practice of paying infantry soldiers with timars had become widespread, and the

Sultan even made it official policy to pay as many soldiers as possible with land.

Eventually, almost 40 per cent of all soldiers received their pay in this fashion.

While paying mercenary soldiers with timars solved the problem of how to pay

for all of the necessary soldiers, it did this at the expense of the Sipahis. The granting of

land to so many infantry mercenaries undermined the confidence and military readiness

of the Sipahis, who saw their hereditary rights being eaten away. The giving of timars to

mercenaries signaled the beginning of the collapse of one of the two pillars of the

Ottoman army. After the Fifteen Years War in 1608 the Ottoman administration realized

this and reverted to paying the mercenaries in cash, but by then the Sipahis had almost

collapsed as an effective military force.

IBID 148
IBID I4I
IBID
IBID 146

- Pearsall 43 -
 The disintegration of Ottoman control in Madjaristan began with the end of the

Fifteen Years War. Despite being the nominal winner, from that point onward the cost to

the Ottoman Empire to defend the border became prohibitively expensive. By the middle

of the seventeenth century, the expense of defending Madjaristan equaled the total

income from the province of Egypt. Furthermore, the amount of income the Ottomans

received from Hungary dropped off significantly. The Ottomans became too weak to

make good on their threats against the peasantry, and increasingly peasant villages

refused to pay their taxes to the Ottomans, and instead only paid the taxes due to their

Hungarian lords.'^^ Because less money was coming in, the Ottoman administration took

more directly from the Sipahis. Both the drop in tax income and the increased

assessments from the government served to crush the Sipahis as an effective military

force. Many fell into poverty, and many others abandoned their status as Sipahis to

become private mercenaries themselves.

As the Sipahis disintegrated the Ottomans turned to the Janissaries to serve as the

backbone of the border defense. The Janissaries, however, proved to no longer be the

crack force that had spearheaded the conquest of Hungary a century earlier. The

increased responsibilities given to the Janissaries meant that the corps had to be expanded

significantly, but again the Ottomans did not have the money to pay for the expansion.

As early as 1590 the Ottoman government in Buda had problems paying the Janissaries

stationed there, which resulted in a brief mutiny and the murder of the Pasha.By the

middle of the seventeenth century the Ottomans had resorted to paying the Janissaries

Madjaristan 1022
'^‘^P^ter 106
Bayerle (11 235
'“ibid 236

- Pearsall 44 -
with timars, which only served to further weaken the Sipahis. Also, by this time the

Janissaries had lost their edge over the Austrians as an elite fighting force. Because of

the high losses they experienced defending the border the Ottomans loosened the

requirements on who could be a Janissary.As the Austrian threat grew in the latter

half of the seventeenth century the Ottomans had no effective military force to act as the

backbone of their army.

As the Turkish army weakened, the rest of Ottoman society in Madjaristan also

started to fall apart. By the 1630s the majority of the mosques in the provinces had fallen

into serious disrepair, and those that remained in decent shape often became barracks or

warehouses for the military.'^® The collapse of the Ottoman administration manifested

itself most noticeably in the upkeep of the sanjak registers. Since the establishment of

the vilayet of Buda in 1541 the Ottomans meticulously kept these registers, and

constantly updated them. By the seventeenth century, however, the Ottoman provincial

government lost the ability to update the registers. The Ottomans conducted the last

complete census of Madjarist^ in 1591. After that point whenever the Ottoman

government conducted a census, they merely copied the results of the 1591 register.'^*

Towards the end of the seventeenth century only Austrian incompetence allowed

the Ottomans to remain in Madjarist^. In 1682 the Turks second siege of Vienna ended

in total disaster and the destruction of much of the Ottoman army. This made it very

clear to the Austrians that Hungary could be taken back from the Ottomans. Soon after

the defeat at Vienna, the Austrians drove the Ottomans out of Buda (1686) and Belgrade

IBID 237
Agoston 185
Kdldy-Nagy 189

- Pearsall 45 -
(1688). While the Turks gained back some territory later, all vestiges of Madjaristan

disappeared by the early 1690s.

After the Austrian reconquest of Hungary nearly all evidence of the 150 years of

Ottoman rule disappeared. The Hungarians destroyed virtually all of the Turkish-built

buildings, including the mosque built by Mi’mar Sinan. Almost every Muslim in

Madjaristan either fled south into the Balkans or died at the hands of the invading

Austrian and Hungarian nobility. While it would be some time before the threat of

another Ottoman conquest completely subsided, from this point onward Austria ruled the

Kingdom of Hungary as part of its empire. The era of Ottoman rule in Hungary, which

marked the end of a great kingdom and the zenith of Turkish power, had ended.

Sugar 199

- Pearsall 46 -