A medieval bridge crossing - 14th century - Royal 20 C VII f 136v
In part two of our series on Osman of Timisoara, the prisoner of war attempts to ransom himself.
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Sources:
Osman Agha of Timisoara. Prisoner of the Infidels. Edited, translated, and introduced by Giancarlo Casale. University of California Press, 2021.
Finkel, Caroline. Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire. Basic Books, 2005.
Script:
When last we visited with our Osman of Timisoara, he was departing the military camp of his captors in the year 1688. It was the 28th of June when last we saw him, and he and four others were heading out toward the money which they needed to ransom both themselves and those who had remained behind as their guarantors. They were bound for the Ottoman city of Timisoara, in the west of what is now Romania.
The journey there to that city seems to have gone relatively smoothly. There was some guesswork as to the way once they’d passed Arad, there being no clearly marked path for them to follow, and there was the necessity of spending the night in the forest for fear of then going any farther. “Most of the peasants in the vicinity had either fled or had been chased away,” wrote Osman, “and with their lands abandoned, the whole region was completely insecure.”
Still the little group reached their goal safely enough, each one of them going their separate ways and Osman reaching his home where “overwhelmed with [quite understandable] emotion,” he informed his brothers of “all the disgraces that had befallen [him],” the indignities accrued by those of the losing side of these things.
In this brief window of about four days, Osman was visited by friends and by relations, all overjoyed to see him safe and sound. He had time to raise the money needed for his freedom and purchase gifts, including some pricey handkerchiefs, but soon, painfully soon for him I would think, he was headed back the other way with those same travel companions. None of them had succumbed to what must have been quite a test of character: the temptation to simply remain in Timisoara and thus abandon their guarantors to whatever unpleasant fate that would have entailed.
The group reached Szeged on the seventh day, just meeting the deadline they’d been given on which to bring the money there, and quickly they found the target they were pursuing to be a moving one. “Your masters have arrived in Osijek,” the on-site commander informed them. “Go there yourselves and deliver your ransoms to them.” So with new travel documents along with the bread and other rations that they’d purchased for the walk, they renewed their journey.
They passed over lands which Osman observed “had been left ravaged and depopulated by the Austrian troops.” The emptiness around them formed a bleak reminder of the very recent violence that had flung them into their present circumstances, but its abandoned military camps did at least provide recently dug wells for them to drink from, and those were sorely needed.
The travellers’ days were “suffocatingly hot” and beset by tormenting flies, while at night, it was the mosquitoes that thickened the air, and then there were the larger animals, the bandits, and soon, most pressingly, the lack of food. By the time they stopped in the shade of a riverside forest, on the fifth day out of Szeged, they were already out of provisions, and that was when they saw the boat.
“Wondering if its owners might not have some bread to sell us,” Osman wrote, “we decided to send someone down to ask them, and after some discussion I was chosen for the task. If only I had known the catastrophe that was in store for me!”
Today, we will drift along in Osman’s wake and experience that particular catastrophe with him.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that generally follows the stories of historical travellers through that particular period but is currently traversing a slightly more recent one. It is, as I tend to say around this point, a podcast that is support by the good people at patreon.com/humancircus, that place where the listening is oftener, earlier, and freer of ads—completely so even—and where, whether you come aboard at a dollar a month or for as much as makes sense to you, your support is hugely appreciated. Today, I want to especially thank the quote/unquote “mysterious stranger,” for thinking of me and kindly drawing my attention to this topic in the first place. Thank you, Shaun, a mystery no longer.
And now, back to the story, to the story of Osman of Timisoara. Today, we’re going to be zooming in on the misadventures of his early captivity, and first, we’re going to be zooming on his anxiety-inducing approach of that boat.
As he walked towards it and whatever strangers it contained, you might be wondering why. Why, when travelling through territory crawling with armed and belligerent men, would you voluntarily approach, well, anyone really. And maybe “crawling” is overstating the actual levels of hostile presence here, but even so, if you were part of a small group on the way to purchase your freedom, you would think you’d do all you could to keep to yourself, to manage the there and back as quickly as possible and not relax until you were securely tucked away in Timisoara. But then I suppose that Osman and the others would say that they had done all they could, that they were worn out, hungry, and entirely out of provisions. They were desperate, so over to that boat he walked.
Out of the woods he went, leaving the others behind him and closing in on what he now saw was a group of five to ten who had tied up at the riverbank and were gathered around a fire. They were “Hungarian haiduks,” Osman says, the term which he employed for everything from army irregulars to armed bandits, and again that doesn’t sound like a group that someone in his position might want to approach, but I guess he was already committed by this point and perhaps he hoped that those travel documents they’d been given would see him safely through.
Some of the haiduks had stripped off their clothes and were busy delousing when Osman got their attention—others were others cooking fish. Speaking in Serbian, he presented himself as a captive and asked if they might have any bread to sell, but that pressing concern of his was not the first matter on the haiduks’ minds. They wanted to know where Osman had been captured, what he was doing there, and where he was headed. They wanted to know what they should do with him. Might he be a spy? Could they responsibly let him go free? Should they perhaps strip and kill him? They seized Osman, tied him up, and brought him aboard their boat.
The embroidered handkerchiefs that Osman had purchased for gifts were discovered quickly enough, same for the travel documents, those quote/unquote “guarantees of safety” which were now torn to pieces and tossed in the river. The ransom money for himself and his guarantor didn’t last much longer, its hiding place sewn into a trouser seam soon found and swiftly plundered. After that, it was only the fact that they didn’t want his blood all over their boat that kept him alive until they brought him back to dry ground and made ready to kill him.
In what could have been Osman’s final moments, he knelt in silent prayer on the riverside grass. “If it is Your will,” he thought, “that I, Your faithful servant, must die at such a young age and in such a forsaken place without having fully tasted the joys of life, then I pray that You might forgive my earthly faults.” Or that and more is what he would later write went through his mind then. He can be forgiven if his thoughts were actually less than clear as he waited for the blow to fall and wondered whether, quote, “the [blade] was sharp enough to sever my neck with one blow, and if so how much pain I would feel when it struck.”
Of course, you already know that the blade was not going to strike, not then and there, and not here and not now, or at least not in a life ending fashion. I am admittedly not always the most organized of people, but even for me it would be strange for this series to lurch to a sudden and fatal stop just a few minutes into an abbreviated second episode. Indeed, the story was going to continue.
As one of Osman’s assailants stood over him, blade at the ready, the others stood around in an enthusiastic audience to the spectacle. They hooted riotously, chanting for the head to be taken, but then one of them stopped. It was the man who had thus far acted as an interpreter who fell silent, and evidently in a very impactful way. Enough so for the would-be executioner to also stop what he was doing and look to his comrade, to ask him what was wrong. Was something the matter? Yes, the interpreter answered, yes, something definitely was the matter.
If they killed their prisoner, then what of his travelling companions? If those companions were heading to the same Austrian camp, would they not simply denounce them when they reached it? They would, it was agreed, and the solution soon arrived at was to find those companions and to kill them also. Who then would be left to speak against them?
Their attention returning to Osman, the haiduks demanded to know who had been with him and where they were, and essentially, he told them everything: four fellow Muslim prisoners in the woods, all carrying ransom money, who hadn’t rested in four days and four nights—they had sent him to buy bread and would surely be waiting for his return. Inwardly, he assumed or at least hoped that they would be doing no such thing. They must have seen what had befallen him and would surely already be in flight, but mostly he hoped for a, quote, “few more breaths of this transitory life.”
When the haiduks’ first search of the forest proved unsuccessful, Osman talked his way into a couple more of those breaths, asserting his companions must be watching even now from hiding places among the trees, and if they saw him killed, they would surely be too afraid to come out. Surely they would show themselves if he was simply allowed to go ashore himself and call for them, and so he was allowed to do, calling out their names and, in a Turkish his captors couldn’t understand, adding that there was grave danger and that his friends should run for lives while they were able.
When this also somehow failed to produce those other ransom bearers, he bargained with the haiduks for just one more breath. The other Muslims were definitely still hiding out there or else they had maybe even fallen asleep. Why didn’t they go back to have just one more look? This time he knew for certain that when they came back, they would kill him, so once they were out of sight, he tore himself free from the grip of the remaining guard and went sprinting away.
Down a path he ran with a chorus of shouts rising up behind him, the screams and howls of a pursuit that he compared to the way “a pack of hounds would chase a rabbit, firing a few rounds as they ran.” For a full half hour he says this went on, himself completely exhausted, those hounds at times as close as ten paces behind him, and he with his hands still tied behind his back, a bit of a damning indictment as to the pace of those pursuers, to be honest, though perhaps I judge them and their running too harshly.
In Osman’s telling, his escape ended just before he would certainly have been caught. It ended with him reaching a brook, plunging desperately in, and trying to reach the shelter of a bed of reeds, but his hands were still tied behind his back. He sank below the water, only occasionally managing to break the surface, and when he did, he was still able to see those haiduks. On the bright side, they were worried about getting into the deep waters themselves, seem for some reason to no longer have been shooting at him, and besides, already had all the money they were going to get from him. He found a slightly shallower spot among the reeds where he could wait them out, and eventually they just left him alone. Getting up the slippery bank proved to be a bit of a problem with no free hands, but after a time underwater his bonds loosened, and he was able first to free his arms and then haul himself out, horribly exhausted, soaking wet, and still hungry, but also no longer being chased by angry men with weapons.
He ran for another hour then, the threat of those men still far too imminent for rest. He ran until he came to a hilltop near the ruined orchards of Sombor, now found at the northwestern corner of Serbia, and he looked out at an emptied vista with “neither a living soul nor even a ghost to be seen anywhere. Even the sun,” he wrote, “was just an hour or two from disappearing.”
Osman settled into bitter contemplation of his lot, and what now seemed the cruel turn of fate by which he had escaped the quick death by the blade only to instead suffer further. “Better [one blow of the sword],” he wrote, “than mosquitoes piercing me with their poisonous needles until my whole body swells and I die the death of a thousand cruel torments!” He was a young man who was clearly feeling quite sorry for himself, for which one cannot really blame him too much. He was still there weeping on that hilltop when he looked west and saw a flicker of movement beneath a tree and went out to see what it was, for what did he have to lose, whether it be, as he put it, “a man, a ghost, or just an animal.” And if it were a man, he wrote, “Then let him be an enemy! … I have nothing left to be stolen, so he can kill me straightaway!”
But again, you know that he didn’t. “He,” as it would turn out, was actually Osman’s travelling companions. Once our traveller had struggled through “ditches, brambles, and thorny patches,” to be able to see them, he was filled with surprise and delight, and once they got over their initial fright and had stopped running away from the naked and bloodied form that rushed their way, they were also very pleased to see him. What had happened, they wanted to know, but he only wanted them all to get as far away from that place as they could, and as fast as possible.
“As long as there is life, there is hope,” he reflected. “Property can be retrieved when lost, but the head on your shoulders cannot.” It’s the sort of lesson-learned out of the whole thing that I rather suspect came later on, and not right then as he dragged his increasingly bedraggled body over the landscape, freshly reunited with his companions but in very rough shape and now without that ransom money, both his own and that of his guarantor. Still, his head hadn’t been cut off, and that was going to be important for him and his story.
We’ll be getting on with that story, but first we’ll take a quick break.
…
As Osman and the others travelled on, they did so in the tracks of Austrian soldiers, picking up what had been left scattered in their wake. Hay, by the hitching posts, which they burnt against the “evil of the mosquitoes,” a rain cape, from an unattended cavalry horse, which Osman took, leaving the pistols and other contents of the saddlebag that he didn’t want to risk being caught with, bread crusts that had been thrown aside, “sodden and covered in yellow mold… Some were bitter, some were sour, and some were downright poisonous,” he wrote, “but we ate every one.” Eventually they actually encountered some of those soldiers, and after everyone but Osman presented their papers, they were directed toward a causeway that was being built over the Danube.
In what sounds like a scene of total chaos and also a logistical nightmare, the river had flooded, spilling out a full hour’s distance from the beginning of the causeway and necessitating that the army’s wagons be brought through it from five to ten separate collection points. Osman soon lost his companions in the confusion of all that toing and froing of people, animals, and baggage all bustling about to be taken to the crossing, and at some point he just found a wagon to throw his clothes in, that rain cape joined by a shirt he’d found and a lamb-skin cap missing its top. Then naked, he half-walked and half-swam his way along, clutching to the wagon side until it had reached the causeway.
No one challenged Osman in the camp on the other side of the Danube, which was good—he was barely clothed and totally lacking in papers or money—but he found no sign of either his fellow-travellers or the man who he was supposed to be bringing that money to. He was sinking into a state of deep melancholy when he happened to glance down at the boats along the bank and recognized one that was just preparing to dock as that of his recent assailants. “If I can just find either my master or my companions,” he thought, having made note of the boat’s location and rushed away, “I’ll sort all of this out.”
It was an optimistic thought, one that hardly seemed supported by how things had gone so far, and some of that optimism must have soon slipped away over the hours that followed. He searched until nightfall in the camp, unsuccessful and generally unwelcome as a near-naked stranger, often chased away by blows and finding no luck as he peered into any tent that looked like it might be the right sort. It was only when he gave up and was heading away down the road that he saw his Lieutenant Fischer, and it was only after the lieutenant had first fended him off with his whip that the man actually recognized his prisoner and wondered where his money was. That part would take a little longer, Osman’s attempts at explaining the whole debacle by gestures and signs—and I’m not quite sure where you’d even begin with that—having understandably come up short.
When a translator had been arranged and the lieutenant finally understood the situation, Osman found himself headed back to that boat but this time with the lieutenant and a military escort. They found the Hungarians asleep, and Osman himself rushed aboard to wake the one who’d especially urged his death, giving him a kick to the head and a stern “Get up, you soul of a devil!” It was about to get much worse than that for the haiduks.
As Osman watched, the lieutenant and his soldiers ruthlessly beat the Hungarians with the butts of their guns, bloodying and searching them before snatching away whatever gold they could find, and because Osman, having suffered cruelty and near death at the Hungarians’ hands, had deliberately exaggerated how much gold they had taken from him, the lieutenant’s men were ever disappointed with whatever they found, striking the Hungarians all the harder for amounts of gold they had not taken to begin with and thus could not cough up. One of them didn’t wait around to be beaten, instead choosing to dive overboard and swim for it, but he was shot and his dead body hauled out with boat hooks to be searched before being tossed back in the waters to drift away.
It was a jarring spectacle, one which played out in front of many witnesses on boats and land, several thousand people as Osman has it, and he also has them reacting in a kind of chorus scene as the surviving Hungarians were taken away in chains. They’d gotten what they deserved, some onlookers said, for mistreating the captive Osman so badly. They certainly had gotten what they’d deserved, others opined, for not taking the opportunity to simply kill their prisoner with no one the wiser, though not, we know, entirely for lack of trying. That’s how Osman describes the moment at least. I’m not sure how much crowd reaction he could have actually picked up on, there in the heat of the moment and struggling with language barriers, but either way, his immediate problems were over.
His money having been recovered, though not so much as he’d claimed to have lost to the Hungarians, and his clothes having been returned to him, though perhaps still just the ones he’d put on to dampen the ransom demands, Osman was ready to talk about freedom. He’d kept his word, managed his end of the bargain in extremely trying circumstances and somehow returned with the amount that had been agreed upon, so now, surely, he should be headed back to Timisoara and this time to remain there? But no, or not quite yet.
He went over his Hungarian-related misfortunes with a patrol officer who provided him with food and drink, but despite the hunger of a man who had all too recently been subsisting on moldy crusts, he would accept only some “very fine bread,” cheese, and what he describes as “quite delicious cinnamon water,” an interesting option under the circumstances. He waited in nearby Osijek for three days, while “the main army of the Austrian emperor, under the command of the duke of Bavaria and many other dukes and generals, was assembling in preparation for the march on Belgrade.”
Finally, he went to Fischer, and “communicating through hand gestures, [he] said to [him], ‘You have now been paid my ransom money and then some! So issue the necessary papers of emancipation and set me free.’” Fischer, however, would not be doing that. He was “wily and deceitfully disposed,” Osman would write, but that was perhaps an opinion arrived at only in retrospect.
In the moment, what we see is that Fischer, speaking through a translator, acknowledged Osman’s payment in full and assured him of his wish to send Osman home—he wished it were that simple, but it was not. Left on his own, the lieutenant observed, Osman could never cross the lands between them and Timisoara. The road had lengthened with the army’s movements since the last time Osman had gone back that way, and this time he would be without company. No, Fischer said, he would never make it, not even, he rather colourfully added, “if [Osman] had a thousand lives and a thousand heads—the Hungarians would surely catch him and do him in.”
After his recent unpleasantries, our traveller was inclined to grudgingly acknowledge that this was true. It would indeed be extremely difficult for him to make it to Timisoara by himself, probably prohibitively so, but then what about Belgrade? Could he not go there instead? But the army itself was headed for Belgrade, he was told, so that was out as an option, and really, there were no others. He would just need to wait, to be patient, and on no account to attempt to escape, for if he tried then he would most assuredly be captured or killed. He just needed to wait, for Fischer was soon to be dispatched to Bosnia, and there he would be granted his freedom.
Our traveller, though he was going to really be kicking himself later on, was going to accept the lieutenant at his word. He didn’t actually trust the lieutenant or his words—he just felt that he had little other choice.
Escape was a possibility, it was true. He would write years later of the march southwest to the Sava River and the Ottoman forces on the other side, the exchange of carbine and artillery fire, and the chance that night to slip away. “But my swindler of a master pretended to be very well disposed to me,” he wrote. “Under the guise of friendship, he advised me not to flee, and I foolishly listened to him.”
He would have time, so much time, in which to mull that particular decision over, to ponder that point at which his story might have entirely diverged, though not necessarily for the better. But for now the dangers of escape were clear and obvious, to use the phrasing of the video assistant referee, so he was stuck rolling the dice on the hazards of imprisonment, with pretty quickly depressing results.
Through Garešnica they went, the name now attached to a Croatian town a substantial distance from any border but given then to a great forest separating Croatia from Bosnia that they required local help to traverse with their wagons. For two days they were in the trees, and like Bilbo and the dwarves going through Mirkwood, they saw “neither the sun nor the sky.”
They passed through several small forts and in another five to ten days came to Ivanić and then Sisak, “at the confluence of the Kolpa and Sava rivers” where another causeway was being constructed. Casale notes that the army’s route seems an odd one, taking them well out of the way and into wild terrain but also, crucially, well away from the still Ottoman controlled lands closer to the rivers.
They waited to gather more forces, some led by the Bishop of Zagreb, and then they crossed that causeway, heading over the plain on the other side, but soon after that, Osman’s own movements were cut short. A lieutenant arrived and gathered together the captives from Lipova and another town, 13 of them in total. He had been ordered to keep guard over a supply depot along with some soldiers who had fallen sick, and the prisoners were to remain with him. Osman’s Lieutenant Fischer, the man who had promised his freedom when they reached Bosnia, would be travelling on, but Osman himself would neither be going with him, nor to home, Belgrade, or anywhere else. As for what would happen to him, we will get to that next time.