ABSTRACT
Soliman and his household troops only reached Constantinople on December 16, 1529; the feudal horse had been dismissed and permitted to make their way home on November 11, after the retreating army had passed the Danube at Belgrade. As the weather was abominable—snow and rain alternating—the losses during the last month of the campaign must have been very heavy, during the passage through the defiles of the Balkans. There was no prospect of being able to reassemble an army such as that which had failed before Vienna during the oncoming spring of 1530, and the Sultan let the summer pass by, while useless negotiations were being carried on with ambassadors whom the Archduke Ferdinand sent to Constantinople. As the Austrians suggested that Soliman should recognize their master as King of Hungary, while the Sultan’s vassal Zapolya was actually in possession of its capital and three-quarters of its counties, there was not much to be hoped for from such debates. Meanwhile the war continued, and the Archduke, seeing that he was not being attacked, took the offensive. His army recaptured Gran and several other places on the Hungarian border, and pushed as far as Buda, which it failed to reduce, owing rather to the desperate resistance of the Turkish garrison than to any help given it by Zapolya. When Ferdinand’s troops had retired, the Pashas of Bosnia and Serbia ravaged Carniola and the parts of northern Hungary which were not in Zapolya’s hands—but all this was inconclusive fighting. In 1531 the Sultan took in hand preparations for a second serious attack on the Empire, which was delivered in 1532, with forces perceptibly larger and better organized than those which had appeared before Vienna in 1529—this time there was none of the expectation that Charles V would be distracted by a French war, as Soliman had imagined during his earlier venture. That his 679brother had been proclaimed ‘King of the Romans’ in 1531 made little difference—it gave Ferdinand no real authority over the discontented Protestant princes of Germany.
