Ránki György (szerk.): Hungarian history, world history - Indiana University studies on Hungary 1. (Budapest, 1984)
Peter F. Sugar: Comments on the Papers Dealing with the Ottoman Period in Hungarian History
significance. Just as the first Muslim expansion was halted in 732 at Tours by the Franks, so the second was stopped by the Hungarians at Beograd/Nándorfehérvár in 1456. This interpretation of the event has hardly changed in the last 500 years, and underlies Professor Held's paper as well. Two questions must be asked: is this interpretation correct, and, if it is not, is this victory less significant than we had assumed it was for both Hungarian and world history? To answer the first question, we must return to the conquest of the great city on the Bosporus. For the Ottomans this was a crucial event. Mehmed Fatih (the Conqueror) was determined to make the city his capital and restore to it the glamor and importance it had enjoyed in the past. He had a tremendous rebuilding task on his hands that went beyond simple physical reconstruction and involved the repopulation of the city by moving selected people from all over the empire, but primarily from the Balkans, from their homes to Istanbul. Parallel with this effort, he was reconstructing the administrative machinery of his realm. The sultan was fully occupied while facing hostile forces even south of the Danube-Sava line. He needed time for his reforms and rebuilding, and, as far as military action was concerned, his immediate aims did not go beyond the elimination of the remaining resistance in the Balkans. A new major campaign, like the conquest of Hungary would have been, was not what he was contemplating. Why, then, did he attack the fortress at the confluence of the Danube and the Sava? In modern military parlance his action would be considered a preemptive strike. Hungary was his major European enemy, the power whose support was crucial for the resistance of those who still opposed him in the Balkans. Beograd/Nándorfehérvár was the stronghold from which Hungarians mounted attacks on him as they had on his predecessors, and proffering help to his Southern Slav enemies. Eliminating this fortress was an attempt to gain the time he needed for his plans which centered on Istanbul, and on the elimination of the last centers of Balkan resistance. The attack on Beograd/Nándorfehérvár was a defensive move, not an attempt at further conquest. This fact negates the putative similarity between this battle and that of Tours, an assump-44