The Eighth Tribe, 1974 (1. évfolyam, 1-7. szám)
1974-09-01 / 4. szám
September, 1974 THE EIGHTH TRIBE Page Seven Bethlen was above letting petty feelings of hate and revenge influence his actions. His relations with the Poles is a foremost example. When Bethlen had the Habsburgs at bay in his first campaign against Vienna, his eventual victory was prevented by the Poles, who, without any declaration of war or any warning whatever, attacked and destroyed his lines of communications at Kassa. Bethlen fervently disliked the Poles after that, but though he had many opportunities later to get even with the Poles, he never took revenge. He never let such action divert him from his main goal. When we review Bethlen’s life, we find a “selfmade"’ man sprouting out of a most unlikely soil and persevering in a most hostile climate. Though his seat of power was Transylvania (or Erdély in Hungarian), he didn’t even have the advantage of coming from aristocratic, Transylvanian forebears. His forefathers were small landowners in southern Hungary for many generations, who fought in the service of large landowners. As the southern forts of Gyula and Temesvár fell to the Turks in the late 1600’s, Bethlen’s Father, Farkas, fled to Transylvania and entered the service of Stephen Batory, the Transylvanian ruler of that time. His father subsequently married a girl from the Székely tribe, and out of that union, Gabor and his younger brother Stephen were born. By the time Gabor was 13 years old, both of their parents died, and the two boys were soon deprived of the handsome estate earned by their father. They made their way to the Transylvanian court at Kolozsvár and placed themselves under the protection of the Calvinist Bocskay, to whom they were distantly related through their mother. They fared well at the court even though Bocskay was away at Vienna most of the time. But when Stephen Batory was elected to the throne of Poland, things took a bad turn for the boys; the rule of Transylvania fell to his nephew Sigismund, and Sigismund became a tyrant discriminating against Calvinists. The Szekelys would not put up long with a situation like that, they rose in rebellion, and when that happened, Gabor, still in his late teens, but loyal to his religion and his mother’s tribe, fled the court with his brother to join the Szekelys. Sigismund could not cope with the Szekely rebellion with his own army, hut when he called in Wallachian help and the rebellion was put down: the two Bethlen boys had to flee for their lives to Turkish held territory. By this time there were a goodly number of Magyars behind the Turkish lines, many of them famous Turk-fighters previously, who had a fall-out both with the Habsburgs and the Transylvanian Stephen Bocskay rulers. Despite his youthful years, Bethlen soon became the leader of this group of exiles by virtue of the fact, that he learned to speak fluent Turkish in less than a year’s time. Under his leadership, the group made its way to the Sultan’s court in Constantinople, the Sultan having been quite interested in keeping Hungary divided by promoting a separated, anti-Habsburg Transylvania. Bethlen made influential friends at the Sultan’s court, established a secret liaison with Bocskay in Vienna, and made himself so indispensable to his fellow exiles, that they proclaimed him “ruler of Transylvania in exile” on his 20th birthday. But even at 20, he was mature enough not to let success go to his head: he declined the offer, informed them of his liaison with Bocskay, of how Bocskay is preparing to break with the Habsburgs and to clear them out of Transylvania — he urged them rather to enlist in the service of Bocskay. And the time soon arrived, that Bocskay had need of them. The counter-Reformation measures of Rudolf II, the disregarding of the Hungarian Constitution, the occupation of his home province of Tran
