The Lion House by Christopher de Bellaigue

Author:Christopher de Bellaigue [Bellaigue, Christopher de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448139668
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2022-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

Guns. A non-place in north-western Hungary less than six leagues from Vienna whose name no one can agree on. Bers. Koszeg. Gins. Grinas. Schrips. An unimportant little fortress to roll over en route to the meadows of Austria, there to do battle with the King of Spain and his brother.

The garrison is headed by a Croat, Nicholas Jurisic. He writes to his master, Ferdinand. ‘I have volunteered to fight against the Turkish Emperor and his army. I fight not because I presume to equal his force, but only so as to delay him a little while to give time for Your Royal Majesty to unite with the Christian Holy Roman Emperor.’ The specialist soldiers under Nicholas’s command consist of ten knights and 28 light cavalrymen. His other assets include 1,000 local men of fighting age, a ring of low-slung walls and a moat.

Nicholas Jurisic is not the kind of commander who hands over the keys to his castle and asks to be left alone. The Turks have met several such tacticians on their way north. He is a warrior in the mould of Philippe de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam at Rhodes and Nicholas von Salm at Vienna. When the Sultan and Ibrahim arrive outside Guns with their 70,000-strong expeditionary force, they find the fields black and smoking, the wells poisoned and the neighbouring villages aflame.

Defending castles is about walls: holding them up or knocking them down. The Turk’s superabundance of men is less significant than the calibre of his cannons. In this respect, Jurisic is in luck. In the course of its northwards advance the Turkish baggage train took a wrong turn into the mire near Lake Balaton and the heavy guns that were shown in so formidable a light on the plain of Belgrade got stuck and had to be abandoned.

Hostilities start as they always do, with a barrage. Missing their big guns, the Turks bring up small artillery pieces which lob out gunpowder-charged Biscayens the size of goose eggs. They bounce off the walls. Jurisic has drilled his men well. Whenever the Turks mine a section of wall the defenders immediately sap the mine with a countermine.16 The Turks bring up their siege engines, towers of faggots leering over the defenders. But Nicholas’s men have had the foresight to fill barrels with sulphur, tar and tallow, which they set alight and tip onto the engines, turning them into infernos. Inside the castle supplies are running low but Turkish casualties are heavy and the besiegers are running out of bread.17 And the rain isn’t helping.

This is ridiculous, they’re thinking in the Sultan’s tent, worse than Vienna: a river stopped by a thumb.

After two weeks of fruitless assaults a Turkish delegation comes to tell Jurisic that Ibrahim Pasha is feeling kind. Pay an annual tribute of a florin per household – that or a one-off payment of 2,000 ducats to the Janissaries – and Guns will be spared. Nicholas replies that there’s no money and it’s not his castle to surrender.

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