Claim:
Hungarians were left to their own devices for 150 years defending Europe from the Ottomans
Rebuttal:
Most of the money needed for the upkeep of the fortresses defenting the borders came from abroad, the soldiers stationed there were mostly non-Hungarians, while contemporary many Hungarian politicians and groups actually sided with the Turks as opposed to Christian forces.
The upkeep of the fortresses was simply more than the tax income from the Kingdom of Hungary taken together. (Hungarian nobility, as opposed to those in western countries, paid no taxes, while Hungarian towns wielded no significant economic power.) Without the money provided by the Habsburgs, the defense against the Ottomans would have been unsuccessful throughout the 16th and 17th centuries.
The fortresses along the border of Hungary and the Ottoman empire were manned by soldiers from various ethnic groups – Croats, Slovaks, Serbs and representatives of western peoples too. The fort of Kőszeg, for example, was heroically defended from the Ottomans by a Croat, Nikola Jurišić, referred to as Miklós Jurisics in Hungarian history textbooks – who was an Austrian aristocrat. (Jurišić would write his own name using the Serbian glagolica script, while the population of Kőszeg itself was half Hungarian and half German at the time.) Let’s not forget that a Hungarian king, John (Szapolyai) I did actually support the Turkish campaign of 1532, while Principal István Bocskai asked the Ottomans for a crown and military assistance, which he received. The Ottomans were not actually stopped by the string of Hungarian fortresses but by Vienna, which was liberated from the Turkish siege not by the Hungarians but the Poles in 1683, while Imre Thököly actually led Hungarian troops there to aid the Turks. All in all, the Ottomans were chased out of the territory of Hungary by Western and Central European forces, with minimal Hungarian contribution.
The Hungarians were acting like this with sound reasons, yet it is just not true that Hungary was a lone last bulwark of Christianity against the Ottoman onslaught. Needless to say, all this doesn’t reduce the merit of ’our’ heroes who fought against the Ottomans, like István Dobó, György Szondi, István Losoncy or Miklós Zrínyi Senior and Junior and the others. (On the comlicated multiple allegiances of the two Zrínyis, grandfather and grandson, see: Kié Zrínyi?)
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