Osman’s early years of captivity, years of "toil and misery," he would say, along with hunger and sickness, but also of surprising moments of friendship and intimacy.
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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.
Büsching, Anton Friedrich. A New System of Geography, Volume 4. A. Millar, 1762.
Finkel, Caroline. Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire. Basic Books, 2005.
Script:
“By the end of the summer of 1688, just two years after the fall of Budapest,” our source today notes, “Belgrade, the crown jewel of the Ottoman Balkans (and Osman’s father’s ancestral home), fell to the Holy League. The complete expulsion of the Ottomans from continental Europe—something almost unimaginable just a few years before—was now a serious possibility.”
As Giancarlo Casale, our translator, writes, “Osman of Timisoara [had been] captured by the enemy at precisely this moment of deep imperial crisis, the circumstances of his surrender directly reflecting the panic and confusion of the long, hot summer of 1688.” It was a tumultuous time for the region, was so beyond that really, given the sprawling nature of the parties involved, and it was also a busy time for our protagonist.
Osman had been snatched up after the surrender of Lipova. He had overcome tremendous difficulties in order to purchase his own liberty at the agreed upon price, and though frustrated in that, he had moved about the zone of conflict both in and out of captivity. He had forgone opportunities for escape and faced broken promises of freedom. He had been told he couldn’t go to Belgrade, for much of the army was going to be headed there in conquest. He had dragged himself naked and exhausted across one great river and then been transported over another before being abandoned under guard at a supply depot while his Lieutenant Fischer had marched on. He had foregone those earlier opportunities, but he wouldn’t do so again. He was finally going to attempt an escape, but for his troubles he would find himself in an even worse situation when it failed.
He and his fellow prisoners were locked away in a barn on a meager ration of bread every two days, and they agreed that they should make a hole in the building’s low roof and sneak through it at night. They agreed that the eldest should be boosted out first, for those eldest had feared they wouldn’t be able to get out on their own if left to last and threatened to expose the others if their needs were not accommodated, an agreement that they’d soon regret.
Osman and the others waited until darkness fell and only one guard remained at the door. They finished making their hole with what tools they had managed to acquire, and they began their escape. But when the three oldest among them were out there on the roof, one of them could not contain a cough and the sound alerted that lone guard. Two of those elderly escapees still managed to get away, but the third froze and swiftly recaptured, spending the rest of the night with Osman and the rest under arms and torchlight, before being brought to a more secure location.
Removed from the relatively friendly confines of the barn, Osman and his fellow unfortunates now found themselves behind the tightly locked gates of a fortress. Even worse, their feet were soon shackled and they were confined to that fortress’s dungeon. “If I had to describe it,” wrote Osman, “the best way would be to simply say that it is a wonder what a man can endure in this transitory world.”
That may indeed have been the best way to describe it, but he would have much more besides to say for himself and his story, for what he and the other prisoners endured then and thereafter, and for the circumstances in which he may or may not have bravely battled temptation before more definitively finding himself bound for the city of Vienna. Today, we will follow him in that direction.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast which traverses that world through the stories of its travellers, and it is, you will be shocked to learn, a podcast with a Patreon. “Why has he not mentioned this before?” I hear you asking, and truly, I have no answer. But back to the specifics, it’s a Patreon where you can listen a little earlier, a little more often, and do so with a lot less advertising. Thank you very much, all of you who are already aboard!
And now, back to the story, back to the story of Osman of Timisoara. We rejoin him in the dungeon of that fortress.
The fortress in question was the one at Sisak in central Croatia, southeast-ish from Zagreb, and it's still around and available for you to visit now, or, if your travel budget resembles mine and you’re not yourself currently in Croatia, accessible through online photos. There you’ll see the fortress sitting crowned with three conical towers and with one of its three sides facing the river. You can visit the museum there, though it may or not be presently closed for construction that may or may not still relate to damage from a past earthquake. You cannot, apparently, find any sign of the dungeon that Osman described, but then he did at least describe it, so we are not totally lost.
We read that the space in question was “something like a room,” a chamber elevated on a frame made up of thick wooden planks. We read that the ceiling was too low for anyone to stand beneath it, that there was a hatch in the floor that took two people to lift open, and that this chamber was always guarded, but it seems that this last fact hardly mattered for much of the time. Two wooden stocks ran the length of the room, one for heads at one side and one for feet at the other. The captives’ heads were fixed in place with iron bolts and locked tight, their feet equally secured, with heavy chains passing through the foot shackles and fastened to rings on the ceiling, and their wrists, though it hardly seems necessary, were also cuffed.
So it was every day from about the hour of afternoon prayer until the following morning, with the one set of keys held by the fortress’s head priest and only available at the appointed time. So it was for six months on a sparse allowance of bread and “bitter well water” in “misery and torment,” and so it may have been for much longer than that still if it weren’t for a bit of luck, if it weren’t for the fact that the vile Lieutenant Fischer had gone and sold Osman, sight unseen, to some Venetian merchants.
Admittedly, this did not sound all that much like a lucky turn, and indeed it might not have been, though it would have at least resulted in Osman’s removal from that dungeon, but it just so happened that another lieutenant, the one who was in charge of the captives, was there at the fortress when Osman was being dragged out to complete the transaction, and when the priests, who understood his shouts of protest, told this officer what Osman was complaining about, the man took up his cause.
The lieutenant was fully aware that Osman had indeed paid for his freedom and was disgusted that Fischer should not only have failed to honour his agreement and confined Osman but then attempted to sell him. It went “beyond all law and custom,” he insisted, and when the Venetians themselves also insisted, on the above-board nature of their purchase, with the presentation of a receipt and the bodily pulling at Osman, the lieutenant grabbed hold of the Timisoaran with one hand while threatening to strike at the Venetians with a cane with the other. Osman would not be going with them. Instead, he would be joining the lieutenant who’d interceded on his behalf, first taking his place in the guardhouse next to the man’s quarters, and then, when that officer received new orders, on the journey with him. Osman wasn’t going to Venice or anything like that, but he also still wasn’t going home.
The lieutenant’s fresh orders took him east through Croatia, and for a few different reasons progress was slow. For one thing, those orders empowered the lieutenant to claim food and drink from the local authorities all along the way at their expense, and he was not especially motivated to cut that experience short, travelling only three or four hours each day before setting up camp. For another, he was also charged with responsibility for over 150 invalids, and besides those his soldiers did not enjoy the same generous diet he did, relying only on bread and water and often suffering from diarrhea.
Those who fell sick would shout to a healthy comrade to help them down from the wagon when needed, but because this happened so very often, the caravan would barely have moved at all if they’d waited. Instead, the healthy soldiers would rain threats and pike blows down on their sick friends to hurry their business up so they didn’t both get left behind. Between the illness and the beatings, many were so weak they were barely able to get back to their wagon, and some actually died, their bodies brought along to be stripped and buried when they made camp at end of day.
Hardly anyone remained healthy, wrote Osman, some of them apparently overindulging in food and drink, perhaps having gained access to the lieutenant’s privileges, many presumably just sick with whatever was spreading around among the soldiers. Sometimes, places were exchanged, with the ill regaining their health and their previously robust tormentors losing theirs. Those who only recently had lurched in helplessness from wagon to diarrhea and back beneath their comrades' violent words and hands now took their revenge and meted out that same merciless treatment upon their abusers. It was quite an unpleasant scene, and “To see [the soldiers] laying waste to one another in such a senseless fashion,” their captive would write, “was truly a marvelous thing to behold.” It’s unclear whether this was meant in the sense of being a wonder to see or simply “very good,” perhaps both, but one could forgive Osman a little satisfaction on his part if that was what he felt.
One incident from this leg of the journey that does indeed sound marvelous to behold was that of the resurrected man, though the actual circumstances were more mundane than that sounds. The man in question had been incredibly sick, too much so to climb off of the wagon on his own, and when his comrades had roughly pulled him out by the legs, he had fallen, struck his head, and been immediately knocked unconscious. In itself, that was quite some distance from ideal, but his situation would still have been salvageable, were it not for the fact that those “comrades” thought he was dead. One gets the sense that things were falling apart a little here and maybe nobody was looking all that closely. The other soldiers stripped him down to his underclothes and buried him—maybe one of them just really liked something he’d been wearing—but that was not his final appearance in this story.
There were scavengers who followed the caravan of wagons, people who hoped to pick up whatever of worth that the soldiers might let fall, and when they came across a fresh grave with protruding legs that kicked and twitched about, they were very easily able to identify its occupant as merely sick, and not dead. They bled the man a little, which was probably not helpful, and they fed him with “soup, wine, and other nourishing foods,” which sounds a bit more more so. They very generously provided him with “a large loaf of bread, a gourd of wine, and a walking stick,” and they sent him on his way. Of course, when he then showed up in camp a few nights later, wearing only an undershirt along with that walking stick, his comrades were perplexed. The guards actually ran off to report the matter, telling their officers that quote, “So-and-so, whom we left dead and buried, has risen from the grave! What are your orders?” The resurrected man was seized and kept under guard for several days alongside our traveller, bringing our traveller his unfortunate story and somewhat foreshadowing Osman’s own situation to come.
As for Osman, he had not been doing well, but then nobody had. Bread rations had been halted and flour distributed instead. The advantage that Osman claimed was some knowledge of what to actually do with the stuff, having learned a little baking in his time. He whipped up a few flatbreads, and when the soldiers around him sampled his work, they wanted him to make some for them also. Soon, all the guards were coming to him with their flour, giving him a share in exchange for making theirs something edible. “And so it was,” he wrote, “that I became a baker, working all night without sleep,” and accruing a fair bit of extra flour in the process. But it was only a bit, insufficient to entirely insulate him from misfortune.
Winter was coming—Belgrade, taken in September of that year, must have fallen by this point—and the body of troops that Osman was attached to was waiting for the arrival of other forces in Brod, back by the Sava River, though not at its same point. The commander was nicely set up in a large house there, but Osman and the seasonally underdressed guards were stuck out on the ground out front. As illness began picking them off, those who remained healthy wouldn’t even wait for the sick to die before dumping them on a rubbish heap, so when the prisoner was sick, he of course fared no better.
Time may have slipped away from Osman here, and fair enough. He was several days incapacitated on the ground, feverish for the last few of them. He wasn’t actually buried, but he was, he says, ten days on a manure pile without food or even a sip of water, with more refuse tossed over him with each passing day. Finally, he regained himself enough to first beg for water from passersby, to crawl into the house and its kitchen to ask for a little food, and then to leave with the soldiers when they moved on.
This part of Osman’s story becomes a kind of catalogue of miseries visited upon him. There’s the weakness that forced him to cling to the wagon side as they went. The harshness of bare feet, first in the snow and mud and then on the blood shedding rocks. The inability to contribute to the firewood gathering that resulted in him being driven back from the warmth of the fireside. Then, when they reached Požega and an infantry regiment met them there, the return to Osman’s life of Lieutenant Fischer, or really, I should say, the return of that life to the lieutenant’s hands. There was initially disagreement between Fischer and the officer who had sheltered Osman from being sold to the Venetians, violent blows even, that ended with Osman’s, quote, “cursed rogue of a master taking a blade a span deep in his belly and falling to the ground.” But despite that outcome, the end result was still Osman returning to the wounded Fischer’s possession. The result was still Osman staying with the convalescent officer and looking after his horses and belongings for the month that recovery took. And again, there were examples of Fischer’s foul personal character.
There had been an attempt to intercede on Osman’s behalf, to plead for his cause and improve his lot, the would-be benefactor a fellow Muslim who had been taken in the siege of Vienna and then freed in a prisoner exchange. The man, unnamed but identified as having been a “high-ranking sipahi in the Ottoman imperial cavalry,” had been waiting for an opportunity to travel and was in the care of a local general who he promised to speak to on Osman’s behalf. But that seems to have just resulted in a severe beating from Fischer, after which Osman was again shackled and jailed.
A picture starts to emerge of Fischer here as a kind of frustrated loser, his career hindered by injury and perhaps his own personality, his power over his captive ineffectual despite his violence. “If you give up the idea of going back [to Timisoara], I’ll get you out,” he told Osman after a few weeks in a cell. “Otherwise, you’re stuck here!” When Osman replied that it was all the same to him whether Fischer killed or released him, Fischer did the latter, and it was only a few days after that when the lieutenant resigned his position and preparations were made to leave for Vienna.
Maybe that frustration influenced how they finally parted ways, him and Osman. Maybe that helps explain how at a certain point when Osman concealed himself in town, Fischer fairly soon gave up any hope of finding him, telling the local general that should Osman resurface then that general could have him. Whatever else the future held for our protagonist, it was going to include change and an end to his time with Fischer, a welcome prospect in itself, given how that time had gone.
As to exactly what else that future would hold, we will be getting into that ourselves after this quick break.
…
So far in Osman’s story, you’ve heard about his many woes and miseries, a time of sickness, hunger, hardship, and the cruelties of the unpleasant Lieutenant Fischer. But Osman was not completely isolated or entirely without human connection. There were moments of camaraderie to be found here and there in his captivity, even unexpected intimacy.
There’s pleasant conversation with Ahmed, a man who approaches him while he’s seated outside the house, a fellow-Muslim, though Osman doesn’t initially recognize him as such. They talk together of their respective hometowns and how they came to be in their shared circumstances. There are five other Muslim prisoners when Fischer has him jailed, and Osman lists them by name and the place where they were captured: Hasan, taken from a Bosnian fortress; Mustafa, who had been a muezzin in Pécs; another Mustafa, who was from Croatian Valpovo; Ahmed, from northwest of there in Miholjac; and Mahmud, the place unnamed.
At one Croatian village where Osman stayed for a time, the locals were extremely friendly. “A Muslim Turk has come to our village!” they exclaimed and eagerly invited him to gatherings or into their homes to share in their food and drink. Osman fended off their offerings of pork dishes—something the translator notes he was careful to make clear that he still abstained from—but happily accepted a daily measure of wine to wash down his food.
In that same village, he claims to have also fended off the advances of the local women, with whom he spent hours in their private rooms. He kicked himself over the many missed romantic opportunities and was often “overcome with regret,” but also reasoned that given the unfamiliar rules and customs of the place he was probably better off avoiding whatever trouble they may cause. Between that reason and what he termed his own bashfulness, he held himself back, or was held back, depending on where that balance of reason/bashfulness really fell.
Osman was only 18, he noted at this point, and thus at an age when, quote, “it is no easy task to keep control of oneself,” and perhaps that also helps explain why he accepted so many invitations that he was no longer actually keeping up with his work. But there are, I should note, some discrepancies around his age, perhaps just the result of errors introduced to the text, placing him closer to 30, when it ought to be a much easier task to keep control of oneself. Whatever the truth of his age, we shall soldier on, as did Osman.
With Fischer out of the picture, Osman was General Stubenberg’s man now. Count Otto VIII von Stubenberg, of old Austrian nobility. That was who Fischer had left Osman to when he’d gone, and that was who imprisoned him once he’d been found under a pile of sacks behind an oven.
Osman’s story and imprisonment took him next to the Croatian fortress at Ivanic, east of Zagreb. He was there on a measure of bread every two days and at first given unpleasant tasks such as disposing of dead animals, dumping the smallish ones like cats and dogs outside the walls and made to skin the larger sort like horses and cows before doing so. Then, once the general happened to see his way with horses, he was unshackled and attached to Stubenberg’s stables but given so much extra work by everyone from the household cook to the head waiter that he was exhausted, couldn’t keep up with his own job, and was beaten for not doing the one thing—carrying horse fodder say—when another person had him busy on the other, like turning the meat as it cooked or fetching ice. Soon, Osman wrote, he came to regret “that [he] had ever been freed from shackles.”
Few pages pass during this section of the narrative, but there are indeed passages of time: “countless days passed in … toil and misery,” to quote Osman, then four months, then three, another two, and then a year, all before he went to work in the stables. There is the coming of winter and with it the movement of Stubenberg’s household toward his estate in Kapfenberg. There is a sense, that after page after page of detailed accounts pertaining to a day here or a week there, Osman’s life was passing along in a more ordinary unexamined way, and I suppose that makes sense, with the time of escape and adventure for the moment having slipped away.
The city of Graz in southeastern Austria was “truly grand,” Osman wrote, “unlike any other that [he] had ever seen before,” and that was after he had experienced the “many [other] cities and towns along the way.” By the next century, the German geographer Anton Friedrich Büsching would note it was “well fortified, and contain[ing] some fine streets and houses.” It sat on the west side of the river, while on the east were suburbs which, quote, “exceed[ed] the town in bigness.” Most notable for Büsching was the church, ceded to the Jesuits in the late 16th century and featuring in its yard a chapel that was “worth seeing for the fashion of its building and its statuary work.”
The walled town of Kapfenberg, some 60 kilometers to the north, was, according to Osman, a “pleasant place,” on the bank of a river and the side of a tall mountain, its many houses and gardens inhabited by local artisans and notables. A road to Vienna ran through it, and the traffic of wagons and merchandise were all subject to a toll. Büsching would only say of it that near there in 1291, “a warm conflict happened between the military inhabitants of [Luadenberg and Stubenberg],” and that it belonged to the general’s family who took their name from that latter place.
It was the toll collector that Osman initially stayed with there in Kapfenberg, for lack of other available space, not that there was much of that in the toll collector’s home either. The young man, only about 15 or 16, had just a bed to himself and that barely wide enough to squeeze in both he and Osman, but he didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary, he was highly friendly and welcoming, taking off his clothes and hopping in before calling out for Osman to do the same. He, quote, “began the most wide-ranging of conversations, asking [Osman] about the unnatural vices of the Turks that he had heard spoken of and wondering aloud what these must be like… For my part,” wrote Osman, “I used every means to control myself, and while I was at moments aroused, I did not lose my composure to the point that this became obvious.” As it had with those Croatian girls, the moment passed.
In a more literal sense, quite a few moments had been passing. When the general went away to Graz for his yearly round of “drinking and debauchery” there, he fell ill and died shortly after, and as it was a death that is recorded in the year 1691, we can place Osman in his third year of captivity. Soon, in his account, we would hear about a fourth.
Following Stubenberg’s death, Osman stayed on as part of a diminished staff to the general’s wife, Countess von Lamberg-Ortenegg who was much closer to his age than Stubenberg’s, and it sounds as though he was treated very well in her household. The work itself wasn’t bad, was very light labour by comparison to what he'd been used to, and there was no shortage of either food or drink, but still he was dissatisfied and not just with his inability to travel freely and return to his home. It sounds more like he was bothered by the backwater nature of Kapfenberg, a somewhat out-of-the-way place on the road between two more important ones. To be fair, that is a lot more than some places have, or had, going for them, but Osman did not see it that way. He was not content with a quiet life of greater ease than he’d enjoyed in quite a while. “Was I destined to spend the rest of my days in Kapfenberg?” he wondered and worried.
Osman implored the town steward to intercede on his behalf, citing his having already paid for his freedom once, only to receive “tyranny and cruelty” in return, and having, quote, “spent four years serving the crown in various capacities, or suffering dungeons.” The steward did speak to the countess for him, and when that didn’t work, he spoke for himself, but at least in his depiction, the countess simply did not want him to go. Was there anything that he was without, she tearfully wished to know, some absent good or reason for his unhappiness. Was it to do with “food, drink, or clothing somehow lacking” or else had someone hurt him? But of course they hadn’t. It seems to have been nothing like that. He was taken aback by her words, her concern, and likely her show of emotion, and he went away confused from that conversation only to be pressed on the matter by other members of the little household. Why did he want to leave them?
It was a question asked more forcefully by one of the countess’s handmaidens named Margot, who woke him up one morning at his spot in the stable with kisses, announcements of love, and despair that he should soon abandon her. “My god,” he wrote. “What am I to make of this?” “In the end,” he continued, the, quote, “passions of the flesh take hold,” but as ever, he insists, he did not “sin to excess,” whatever specifically he meant by that, even locking the stable door, though that would be a few Margot-visits later. He would always assure his readers that he had not entirely succumbed to temptation, something which one may or may not believe. He would often tell them/us, of how very well-liked he was by the women and girls he encountered through this period of his captivity, something which we, again, may or may not believe. And when the countess gave up on keeping him there in her household, we might wonder whether he really received such a shower of adoration as he describes.
“As I left,” recorded Osman, “the Almighty preordained that all of the palace staff, men and women alike, broke down in tears at my departure. Most of them then accompanied me all the way to the edge of town and waved and clapped their hands a thousand times as they sent me off.”
And maybe they did, maybe they did. But it does all sound at least a bit unlikely for seeing off the captive stable man.
However he was sent on his way, whether or not it really was with letters of recommendation and money from the countess along with a carriage to take him on his way, Osman was once more to be on the move.
Next time on the podcast, Osman of Timisoara will be headed for Vienna and we’ll be going there with him. Until next time, thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you then.