Agria 38. (Az Egri Múzeum Évkönyve - Annales Musei Agriensis, 2002)

R. Várkonyi Ágnes: Az egri győzelem és Európa

It is pointed out in this paper that in 1552 both the Ottoman world and Christendom were fully aware of the worldwide historic significance of the fact that the defenders of Eger, numbering 2000, managed to force back the army of Suleiman, the conqueror of the world, which was 60-100000 strong. The name of Eger became well-known throughout Europe, from Cracow to Paris, and from Venice to Madrid. Much was written in praise of the defenders by the Turkish Dzselálzáde Mustafa, the Italian Ascanio Centorio degli Ortensii, the English Sir Richard Morison and the German Martin Zeiler. There were several reasons for this great pupularity. At the beginning of the 16th century information in print was developing; the Christian countries were connected by a uniform language of symbols also; the 500-year-old Kingdom of Hungary was an organic part of Europe, and having fought against the Turks for a century, it had obtained the name of „the bulwark of Chistianity", and the Ottoman attack along the Mediterranean and the Danube Valley was threatening the Christian civilization with utter destruction. It is then easy to see why István Dobó commandant of the castle of Eger, was called the „Hercules of Christendom", and that in his epic Ruinae Pannóniáé the humanist Schesaeus ( 1536-1585) laid special stress on the fact that even women participated in the fighting, and the victors of Eger took the Turkish banner seized from AH pasha, the Turkish commander-in-chief, to Ferdinand I, King of Hungary and Bohemia, and this was meant to show that the Turks could be defeated. The next part of the essay tries to answer the question why recent histories of Europe fail to mention the siege of Eger, and the immense quantities of blood sacrificed by the Hungarians in their struggle against the Turks. In his admirable L'Europe, Histoire de ses peuples (1990) Professor Jean-Baptiste Duroselle seems to know nothing of this, even though he maintains that the struggles against the Turks in defence of Christendom are among those durable values the history of which ought to be included in the history of modern Europe. Such chapters on Hungarian history are equally missing from Europe: a History (1996) a large-scale work by Davis Norman, Professor of London University, as also from other works by eminent foreign scholars. The author believes that the reason why this is so is that the old romantic Hungarian historiography dealt with these topics only within the borders of the country, or attributed all victories to the Habsburg government, or regarded these simply as local and temporary successes. However, modern research tends to lead to other conclusions. After the Turks had occupied the central part, about two-thirds of the country (1526-1547), what remained of the Kingdom of Hungary and the Principality of Transylvania could check the Turkish expansion only by adopting all the achievements of Early Modern Europe; they established close diplomatic and cultural relations with the Western world, and managed to secure the substantial financial help not only of 187