Detail of Buda (and Pest) in Braun & Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum
A departure from our usual historical period for the 17th-century story of Osman Agha of Timisoara, an Ottoman soldier taken prisoner in the years after the Battle of Vienna.
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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:
Today on the podcast, we’re stepping a little outside our usual time, straying over the borders of the medieval and into the modern, and maybe that’s stretching the possibilities of the word “straying” to say so when our destination is the late 17th century.
Today, we’re following a story that in some ways really echoes the first one I did for this podcast—Ottomans, a prisoner held for a long period of his life, intriguing details of a life abroad—but then there are also some pretty important deviations. It’s similar but different you might say, if introducing a bad compare and contrast essay at some point in school.
There’s the centuries, to start with, “Ottoman” being a term that spans quite a few of them, from the time of the Eastern Roman Empire all the way up to the Soviet one, which I always find really striking. There’s also the role reversal of the characters involved, for Johannes Schiltberger, my episode one subject who I first encountered in Caroline Finkel’s Osman’s Dream, was a German captured by Ottomans after the 1396 Battle of Nicopolis, while our protagonist here is going to be an Ottoman captured by Austrian soldiers in the years following the 1683 Battle of Vienna, an Osman in fact.
That latter battle is often referenced as a key moment in the entire Euro-Ottoman encounter, a real high point in the whole “Fearsome Turk at the Gates of Europe” kind of thing, though in truth they were some distance past the gates by that point, having already toured the gardens, ambled inside, and visited the second floor. It can also be seen as a high-water mark for Ottoman expansion, that water having lapped up in fairly recent years to take in Crete, with its fortress of Candia having been the 21-year subject of intractable siege that only ended in 1669, and parts of Ukraine that had been surrendered by the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the mid-70s.
Our traveller was born around 1658, during what has been called the “general crisis” that was the 17th century, but also, and more locally, during what Giancarlo Casale terms a “‘silver age’ of stability and relative prosperity” in the Ottoman Balkans. That was where you could find our protagonist, there in the city of Timisoara, in what is now western Romania. That was where you could find Osman Aga of Timisoara, our subject for this series.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that roams that world in the tracks of its travellers, its saints, soldiers, friars, merchants, and diplomats, its adventurers, grooms, and pastry makers, its captives turned trusted assistants to counts, and many of those labels will apply to today’s traveller. This is, as I like to say at this point, a podcast that is supported by a Patreon, one where the listening is early, more often, and in the absence of advertising, all for as little as one dollar a month or more, should you wish it.
At this point, I do want to send my thanks to the person who kindly brought this topic to my attention. I’m really not on Twitter these days, but I’ll have to dig back and see if I can find out who that was before we get to the end of the series. Until then, thank you, Mysterious Stranger. I hope this finds you well!
All that having been said, let’s get back to the story, to the story of Osman of Timisoara and the book that’s current translated edition carries the title Prisoner of the Infidels. It’s a book about a life swallowed up by war and spat into enslavement, and about cross-cultural encounters, though hardly in the best of circumstances. It’s a book in which, to quote the back copy, “Adrift in a landscape far from his home and traded from one master to another, Osman tells a tale of indignation and betrayal but also of wonder and resilience, punctuated with queer trysts, back-alley knife fights, and elaborate ruses to regain his freedom.”
We will begin, as I often like to begin, with how the author does.
Quote:
“Allah, He of immense glory, has alone brought His servants from nothingness into existence, and through His might has preordained the lives and the circumstances of all. Anything that may befall a person—be it for good or for evil—is already known to Him, the Possessor of Might and Majesty. And so it is that I, a poor wretch from Timisoara, who fell into hopeless captivity in the hands of our enemies, now wish to reveal some of my secrets, by relating in the form of a story a share of the many adventures that have befallen me.”
What Osman was doing here was unusual, even quite groundbreaking in its time as an Ottoman Muslim’s autobiographical book, the story of a life told by the one who lived it, not in the poetry Ottomans more often used when they wrote about themselves, not a dream log, diary, or travel narrative but very much a recognizably modern memoir. After that opening preamble, he started his autobiography with his parents.
“Let me begin with my dearly departed father,” he wrote, an Ahmed Agha, son of Mahmud, from Belgrade. Ahmed and his three brothers had settled in Timisoara about 100 years earlier, he said, meaning 100 before Osman was writing, reaching the city around 1620. Ahmed had been married one or two times before and had brought children with him. He would marry again, would be made infantry commander of Timisoara’s janissaries, and with Osman’s mother had nine children. Of the mother we learn only that she was from Slankamen, a Serbian village on the Danube.
By the time Osman’s mother was dead, and his father only two months later, only three boys and two girls still lived, the oldest 16, Osman himself only 9, or so he says. There are, as we shall see, issues with some of the dates and ages he offers.
Orphaned at quite a young age, Osman and the others were not neglected. Ahmed Agha’s deathbed wishes saw the eldest boy given a military commission, the eldest girl a marriage to a protege of his, the younger siblings receiving their inheritance in trust and staying with their married sister until their brother also married and they lived with him, all the while learning to read and write from a number of teachers.
To whatever extent you can say so of children who have suffered the deaths of their parents, they were relatively fortunate, comfortable, and, as Casale writes, “just the sort of people best positioned to benefit from the peace and stability of the Ottoman Balkans in the middle decades of the 17th century.” But quickly in Osman’s account, that comfort, that “life of relative ease” as he puts it, “came to an end.”
War engulfed the lands at that time, with the siege of Vienna and its fallout that had seen the Grand Vizier put to death in punishment. The Ottomans had proven themselves sufficiently threatening to prompt the forming of the Holy League alliance among the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Most Serene Republic of Venice, and, soon after that, the Russians. Word reached Sultan Mehmed IV from his commander in Hungary that, in the words of Caroline Finkel:
“Muscovy … was planning an attack on the Crimea, while the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth hoped to regain Podolia and seize Wallachia; Venice would mount attacks in Bosnia, against Crete in the Mediterranean, and against the coast of Rumeli and the islands of the archipelago in the Aegean; Sweden, France, Spain, England, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, Genoa and the Papacy were also party to the alliance.”
Strongholds in Dalmatia, Greece, and Hungary were falling, including, by 1686, the city of Buda, which had been then Ottoman for around 150 years and the birth and death of multiple generations. Entirely uncharacteristically, having never had need for such a thing, the Ottoman Empire sought peace with its European belligerents but found none.
Our Osman felt the impact of all of this, seeing his oldest brother sent away to what is now the Hungary-Romania border region and to present-day eastern Slovakia. Closer to home—perhaps a result of the famine and disorder all this warfare had caused, perhaps not—his two sisters had both died, leaving only three surviving siblings among whom the sisters’ property was divided.
When Osman received his share, he kitted himself out for war, buying a horse along with weapons and all the other necessary equipment. He’d grown up with weapons and horses around him, he wrote, what with his brother and brother-in-law both in the military, and he’d always been fascinated with “horseback riding and swordplay” when he was little. I guess I was too, but it just meant a lot of playing in the woods with sticks and a somewhat lucky retention of both eyes. For him, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, it meant joining the local unit and showing his potential in a series of raids and skirmishes, enough so, along with a family connection through a friend of his late father’s, that he was made a cavalry squad leader.
In Osman’s depiction, the war was made up of a series of defeats and setbacks, a necessary consequence of when and where he’d entered it. A sprawling and absurdly long-lived empire was contracting, and he, in his little corner of it, was caught up in the violence of that moment.
Osman writes of General Heissler, the Hungarian count and Habsburg marshall, attacking, emptying, and burning towns in what are now the western reaches of Romania, killing or capturing the soldiers and sending the residents fleeing south and southeast to Timisoara. He writes of a General Wallis, a descendent of Irish Walshes, emptying valleys of Serbian peasants who allied themselves with the invaders, arming themselves to act, depending on your view, as bandits or freedom fighters, mercenaries and irregulars who then attacked Timisoara and carried off everyone from travellers to field workers to be subject to ransom or to death. Not that Osman’s own side was passive here. He writes that they formed small raiding parties, that they struck at villages and plundered everything that they could find. This may have been early in, or just before, the Timisoara governorship of a man who would later in life return to earn the nickname of “hot-blooded graybeard” when he offered single combat to his substantially younger adversary in order to decide their 1696 siege, a detail too good not to include here, even if it does fall a little outside of our timeline.
The turning point in this part of Osman’s story, the novelistic inciting incident, would come early in the summer of 1687. It was a bad time for the empire, as they say in Shogun Assassin/Liquid Swords. That year saw a terrible defeat near Mohacs, where Suleiman the Magnificent had won a famous victory back in 1526. As Finkel writes, “News from other fronts was similarly disastrous: the Peleponnese was lost to he Venetian Navy under the command of Francseco Morosini, … who in September blew up the roof of the Parthenon in Athens when trying to evict its Ottoman garrison.”
The Mohacs disaster sent the Grand Vizier fleeing for Belgrade, itself to fall in a couple of years, and eventually sent him into hiding, disguised in some parkland near the Bosphorus where he was found and executed, his head offered in an attempt to calm the unhappy elements of the army that had risen in revolt.
Those unhappy soldiers were going to see Sultan Mehmed IV removed from office to be replaced by his brother Suleiman II, though Mehmed seems to have been allowed to live in some manner of retirement, and surely some manner of imprisonment, to at least die of natural causes years later. It was an end to his story that would not always have been permitted in centuries past, but the return of the field army to Istanbul to see to his deposal only worsened an already dire situation for those garrisons that remained behind to fend off attacks. In some places, those garrisons would rise up to murder their commanders, and one of those places was actually Timisoara, though it was just after Osman’s time there, within the following couple of years.
For Osman, the year 1687 saw the arrival of money from the Ottoman treasury, quite a bit of money intended to pay the garrison of Arad. It was the kind of money and now-hostile region that was going to need a military escort, and as you might have guessed, Osman’s unit would be the one to provide it, at least for part of the way. Their task was to see the money safely to Lipova, some 30 kilometres downstream from Arad, and that part they would carry out without issue.
Osman describes assembling his men, some 80 or so of them, on Baba Hussein Field about an hour short of sunset, how they received their inspection, the money, and a prayer for safety, and then they went. They rode all night without dismounting, pee-breaks for the horses only, and delivered the money successfully to Lipova. They were warmly welcomed there but not, as it would turn out, well informed.
Lipova, as Osman notes, was famous for its orchards and its gardens, for the cherries that were just then filling the markets, and he and his men exclaimed to one another “Let’s stay an extra day and enjoy the cherries!” The mood was clearly light as they enjoyed the hospitality of their hosts, the men each given a place in the houses of the city, but that night the mood would be spoiled by an outburst of musket fire followed by a single cannon shot to raise the alarm, for Hungarian horsemen had been at the walls. Sounding their muskets and attempting to lure those inside into an ambush, the raiders had almost succeeded, but Osman and the other pursuers who set off after them were warned of the danger ahead by some local villagers and managed to return safely to the city. The next morning, there would be a more substantial disturbance.
This time it was not musket fire but horns that were heard in the air before daybreak, “Austrian battle horns,” the text reads—“Austrian,” as the translator notes, standing in here for a Slavic word meaning “mute” or “German speaker” that Osman applies in a broad variety of ways. Again Osman and his men took to their horses to rush forth, that seemingly being how they tended to respond to these things, but the gates were closed and they could not get out. This time it was not just a small party of Hungarian horsemen out there but General Caraffa, the Neapolitan Habsburg commander, and the 18 regiments of his main army along with armed irregulars, far more than could reasonably be resisted by those inside Lipova, already weakened by recent events.
Apparently there had been plenty of recent fighting in the area, which can hardly have been a total surprise to Osman, but he does seem to blame the locals for not being more open with him about the situation. Maybe he and his men would have turned and immediately ridden right back home upon delivery if they’d known that there’d been repeated recent attacks and that the garrison now numbered a mere 300, slightly strengthened by his presence and that of the similar cavalry unit that had arrived to take the money the rest of the way. Maybe it wouldn’t have made much of a difference, but again, he does cast some blame in the direction of the local notables. They “should have been more forthcoming,” he complains, “but instead they kept quiet and concealed the truth.” Surely the direction his story would take after this had a great deal to do with his grumbling.
We’ll get to the consequences of that concealment and to the events which Osman was, as a result, there to be surprised by, but first we’ll take a quick break.
…
In the confusion of that morning with the enemy at the gates, figuratively at least for now, Osman and his men scrambled for another way out. There was a bridge to be tried, but when they reached it, there were thousands of the enemy in sight, and they burned the bridge rather than crossing it. There was a “citadel” to be fled to, and they would, but it wasn’t much of one, just a wooden plank stockade and a small moat, just a smattering of cannons against the Austrian siege lines and large guns that were set against them. Holes were blown in the city’s outer walls, and the defenders rushed to fill them with “earth, tarps, and mattresses.” Attackers moved to reopen the breach, and as those inside rushed to defend it, other besiegers raised ladders round other sections of the walls, pouring in to break down the gates from within. There were just too many outside for the defenders to respond—there were soon too many inside for them to do so—and they fell back to that citadel, Osman among them, fighting their way through masses of Serbians and Hungarians in the streets and losing many as they went.
Even having secured themselves within the citadel, the situation was desperate. By nightfall, the attackers were in complete control of the surrounding city, and that city was burning, fires set here and there by attacker or defender even spreading over the citadel’s small moat to houses and towers so that those within, a great press of animals and people, cried out that they would die in the flames. People were sent out on the roofs to try to control the fire, but they were quickly picked off by snipers. Meanwhile, the besiegers had set up mortars in a nearby stone warehouse that had lost its own roof to fire, and for the next three days they bombarded the defenders with mortar and musket. The situation inside being untenable, a decision was made to raise the white flag, a process which Osman gives his readers a good look at.
“What are your intentions?” asked an Austrian officer, when the flag had been seen and a ceasefire ordered. The Lipovans expressed their willingness to surrender and asked for Austrian hostages so they could begin the process. Two captains from each side were exchanged, and a black horse from the Lipovan commander’s personal stable sent out with his representatives as a gift to General Caraffa. “What are your intentions?” came the question a second time, and those representatives responded that they wished to surrender the city in exchange for safe passage of people and property to Timisoara. That, Caraffa quickly and firmly made clear, was never going to be happening. “Come out of the citadel unarmed,” he told them, “accompanied by your families but without any of your property. If we so wish, we shall then set you free. And if we so wish, we shall take you prisoner instead.”
The terms were tough to take. How can we possibly accept them, asked the Lipovans, but the general was supremely unconcerned. “Then go back inside and fight!” he dismissed the negotiators, sending them and their gift horse back to the citadel. A day and a night of bombardment later, the Lipovans again raised the white flag, and this time, having no other options, they surrendered unconditionally.
From his position up in the bastion, Osman looked down at the distressing proceedings which followed. He saw the slow emergence of the city’s people in little groups and families, their weapons, if they had any, given up at the gate, saw the Austrian soldiers two rows deep on either side of the road between their camp and the citadel. As the people made their way through this gauntlet, the soldiers at their sides leapt forward, hitting them and stripping them of all they had, clothes included. Any who resisted were promptly killed and many had their bellies slit open to see if they’d swallowed any coin or other valuables. Osman saw Austrian officers trying to prevent all of this, saw mounted officers even shooting their own men in the act, “but this,” he wrote, “did not prevent the rest, who [only] continued as before.”
When Osman himself came out from the citadel, it was in the company of about 60 of the town’s notables and a mounted escort of high-ranking Austrian officers. “Even so,” he wrote, “there were still soldiers who approached us, pulling some of us from our horses and taking what they could.”
“In the end,” he wrote, “General Carrafa enslaved virtually every Muslim from the town of Lipova… The only exceptions were around one hundred very poor old men and their wives, who were loaded on wagons and sent to Timisoara.” That was what the general’s whole “maybe I will, maybe I won’t” had amounted to. Osman the others who went out with him were counted up and divided, designated as spoils of war to this officer or that. He and another captive were sent to a tent where two lieutenants had been assigned a captive each. Unable to agree who should receive which man, they argued and eventually threw dice to decide the matter. The winner of the game made his choice, and the loser took Osman.
It was an interesting choice, under the circumstances, Osman being an educated young man of military position, but then probably the other captive was too, or perhaps the answer lay more in how Osman had prepared himself for surrender.
The city at this time was full of abandoned valuables, doors and storage chests flung open, with people understandably thinking first of themselves and their families rather than their belongings. But some who surrendered with Osman, some “few imbeciles” as Osman characterized them, apparently found time to snatch up some of those valuables, packing on as much as they could carry. The lieutenants’ first choice was one of those, and of course his new captor promptly found all those valuables and took possession of them, then having him strip searched to ensure that nothing was missed.
Osman, by contrast, far from taking anything extra along had shed all indications of his military service. Reasoning that his uniform would only make him a target for those aforementioned irregulars, he had left behind it and his weapons, instead taking on the costume of a civilian: “a green felt cloak of the kind worn by the local peasants, a red peasant belt of braided cords, and a wool hat of the same colour turned inside-out [along with a rain cape].” He even smeared dirt over his face and eyes, but all of this didn’t stop his new captor from also strip-searching him for valuables, the lieutenant himself getting into the groin area, before leaving him chained up under a wagon for the night.
That captor appears in this text as a “lieutenant,” but Casale notes that this is a translation of an Ottoman rank without direct equivalent, a “flag steward” to be entirely literal if not descriptive. Osman’s own officer out of the pair was a Lieutenant Fischer, a man who Osman writes was “very short in stature and of such evil disposition that he confirmed the proverb ‘All tall men are half-wits, and all short men are devils.’” It’s a proverb which I wasn’t personally familiar with, but one which does have a bit of a nice ring about it. I don’t know if those men in the average, in between range, escape unscathed or are damned as both, being “half-witted devils.”
Osman writes of being set to work here, of the scrubbing and the washing and the chores at Fisher’s behalf, but you also get a little sense of difficulties around culture and language, particularly when dealing with a hostile party on the other side of that divide. As the army moved west into what is now Hungary, Osman was assigned to drive Fisher’s carriage, and it was not made easy for him. He had a hand and a foot still in irons, and he had to sit on one horse while also holding the reins of the one beside it, all while having no idea of how to say the verbal commands or exclamations that the horses would respond to. He was not set up for success, and he suffered many blows to add to his difficulties. But he was also offered an opportunity to regain his freedom.
Ransom was to be his way out, and there was some discussion/disagreement over the number, carried on with difficulty through Fisher’s servant girl who Osman says knew a little bit of the pre-Romanian Vlach language. Then, once they had settled on a price of 60 gold pieces, they had to sort out the logistics of how that gold was actually going to get to Fisher. The money wasn’t in recently conquered Lipova, where it would have very easily been had if it weren’t already taken—it was back in Timisoara, which aside from still being Ottoman held, was simply not where Fisher’s orders had him headed. Other arrangements would need to be made, and if Osman was to go get it himself, then what was to say that he’d ever come back?
Fortunately for Osman, he was not alone in his predicament. He found another captive from his unit, and it was agreed that the other man would stand as his guarantor while Osman went and also collected the man’s ransom money from Timisoara. Then he found four more Muslim captives who’d all made similar arrangements. It was agreed that the five would go together for some degree of security and promised that they would return to the army, meeting it in the southern Hungarian city of Szeged with their money and that of their guarantors, and doing so in one week, a rather harsh round trip that Casale notes amounted to about 200 kilometres, or 125 miles, in 7 days, on foot, and at risk of being attacked on the road. To stave off at least some of that risk, Osman was issued an “official document, affixed with a large seal and written in both German and Latin,” to see them safely past any soldiers they might encounter along the way.
With that promise of safe passage, and their own promise to be back soon, Osman and the other four departed. He had ridden out from Timisoara escorting some money just recently. Now he walked back for more under very different circumstances, heading home with plans to ransom himself and with the hope of renewed freedom. As the series continues, we’ll see how that went, but given what I’ve said already, I’m sure you can guess that it did not go well.
Next up on the Patreon, I’ll have a little bonus listening up on the end of Mehmed IV. Next time on the main feed, we’ll be following Osman Aga of Timisoara as his travels and troubles continue. Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you then.