Europe's Leonidas: Miklós Zrínyi, Defender of Szigetvár (1508–1566)

In September 1566, within the space of just a few days, Kanuni Sultan Suleyman (I) and Count Miklós Zrínyi both died under the walls of Szigetvár Castle in the central area of the Kingdom of Hungary. This event immediately became a global public sensation. There had been many horror stories of the goals of the sultan's campaign circulating in Europe, and people were afraid that this time the padishah would soon be taking his horses to the Rhine to drink. So it was with great relief that they learned of the death of the feared sultan, which in turn drew attention to Miklós Zrínyi, the defender of Szigetvár – the man who chose to rush out to a certain death rather than surrender the fort.

Within a few years the educated Western European public learned of the circumstances of Zrínyi's death from the Latin, German and Italian translations of the report by Ferenac Črnko (Cserenkó Ferenc), while Bernard Karnarutić, of Dalmatian extraction, wrote a heroic opus about the fall of Szigetvár, which was also widely distributed. In the middle of the 17^th century the great-grandson of the hero of Szigetvár, and a no less eminent figure in Hungarian history in his own right, Miklós Zrínyi, famed as a general, politician and poet, also paid homage to his ancestor. In his work, ‘The Siege of Sziget’ (Szigeti veszedelem), the captain of Szigetvár Castle was portrayed as victorious over the sultan, devictus vincit, rendering in the public imagination their duel a kind of Christian incarnation of the story of David and Goliath. The Hungarian and then the European literature of the Baroque turned Zrínyi into a European Christian hero; it must have been in the knowledge of this that Cardinal Richelieu can have written in his diary that in 1566 the valiant knights of Szigetvár saved the whole of European civilization from destruction. Official Habsburg imperial communications from the 18^th century saw Zrínyi as no less than a hero of the imperial dynasty, as evidenced by Johann Peter Krafft's monumental 1825 painting The Attack of Zrínyi.

19^th-century Hungarian romantic literature and painting turned the European or at least imperial martyr into a Hungarian national hero who sacrificed his life for his country's independence. Zrínyi's dramatic sortie was painted by the greatest artists of the era; thanks to them, this to this day is the most portrayed Hungarian historical event, its popularity directly on a par with the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin in the year 895. In the Romantic period Croatia also discovered Miklós Zrínyi for itself – as Nikola Šubić Zrinski – but Croatian public thought was unable to integrate his self-sacrifice at Szigetvár, and so less of a cult developed around him than around his other great-grandson, Péter Zrínyi (Petar Zrinski), executed in Wiener Neustadt (Bécsújhely) in 1670.

In the late 19^th century, the golden age for romantic nationalism and the nation-state, respect for Zrínyi narrowed in scope; after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, it became almost entirely concentrated in Hungary. Although the nimbus of Zrínyi, who gave his life for his homeland, overarched the various political eras of the 20^th century, his memory was all the more restricted to Szigetvár itself; the internationalism of the socialist state apparatus would in fact only maintain the cult status of the national hero at the local level.

After 1990 respect for and research into Zrínyi would come into an entirely new light. Thanks to international political trends, conferences and scholarly works would mostly treat him as a joint hero of Hungarian and Croatian history. The Hungarian–Turkish Friendship Park established on the edge of Szigetvár in 1994, and decorated with enormous statues of Zrínyi and Suleyman, attempted to embody the peaceful relations between Turkey and Hungary in the national memory, along the lines of Franco–German historical reconciliation. The culmination of this change will be the meeting of the highest public dignitaries from Hungary, Croatia and Turkey at Szigetvár in September 2016, to pay respects to Zrínyi's memory. But who exactly is this man capable of exerting such an effect after 450 years? The goal of the present volume is to follow Herodotus' advice and to tell of the grand and noble acts which made the name Miklós Zrínyi an immortal one.