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the fifteenth century (1491–1498). Istria and Friuli would
finally have been free of war, if not
for the Venetian-Turkish War that occurred from 1499 to 1503. The Turks’ last ever incursion
into Friuli took place in 1499, during this war, causing terrible damage and fear;
contemporary reports state that 132 villages were razed to the ground.
As the Ottoman empire expanded across the Balkans and its soldiers encroached on
the territory of the German empire, most of the western European religious world displayed
ignorance and a complete failure to understand a different political and religious world. In the
second half of the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth there were still regular calls for
crusades against the Turks, as well as serious, yet completely naive and unrealistic ideas that
the Ottoman rulers and their subjects could be converted to Christianity through peaceful
means. One proponent of such ideas was Pope Pius II (1458–1464), who proclaimed crusades
and stated that the Turkish sultan could convert. One hundred years later, the champion of
Slovene Protestantism, Primož Trubar, expressed the similar idea that the spread of the “true
faith” would bring those led astray to Christianity. The conviction of the power of Christ’s
teaching over Mohammadan “religious errancy” was also expressed by a figure from the
ranks of popular piety, the štiftarica Maruša Pogerlic, who believed that “the Turkish sultan
would be baptised and all the Turks turn to our faith.” That three different forms of
Christianity were fighting for power or survival in western civilisation convinced adherents of
the strength of their religion in their own environment, but could not effect a united policy
against the conquerors from the south-east. As early as the second half of the fifteenth century,
even before the supremacy of the Catholic Church was challenged, the formation of early
modern states was started or anticipated by the creation of independent foreign policies by
European monarchs, which decisively revealed that it was no longer possible to speak of the
‘solidarity’ of Western Christianity. This was confirmed by the disputes between Matthias
Corvinus and Frederick III; not only did they fail to put together a great army against the
Turks, they even prevented effective defence through the war they started against each other
at the peak of the Turkish incursions, which lasted over ten years (1479–1490).
The controversy caused by the desire of Emperor Frederick III to make the archbishop
of Esztergom, who had fled from the Hungarian king,
archbishop of Salzburg, brought
Hungarian troops into Lower and Inner Austria. The archbishop of Salzburg, who disagreed
with the emperor’s decision, turned for protection to Matthias Corvinus, who
‘magnanimously’ sent an army into Salzburg possessions in lower Styria and Carinthia in
1479. After the Hungarian king had occupied some strategic towns there, he went on in the
following years to occupy part of Carniola, and reached as far as Ljubljana. The Carinthian
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Estates were forced by their military weakness to sue for peace and recognise the authority of
the Hungarian king over the Salzburg possessions, while pressure on the Carinthian nobles
from the emperor’s mercenaries saw them paid off with money and linen. Hopes of spoils or
old grievances also led some Styrian, Carinthian, and Carniolan nobles to join the ranks of the
Hungarians’ mercenaries. One such figure was the Carniolan noble, Erasmus Lueger (known
as Erazem Predjamski in Slovene after his famous castle in a cave), whose impetuosity and
personal arguments with the nobility at home and at court led him to the rebel side. He was an
archetypal medieval knight, and met his end in 1484, killed when his let down his defences at
his Predjama castle near Postojna.
Matthias Corvinus held the military initiative throughout, and in 1485 marched
ceremonially into Vienna in triumph. He added Lower Austria to his kingdom (he already held
the Czech crown), as well as much of Styria and Carniola with Rijeka. The Habsburg
resurgence had to wait for his death in 1490. Maximilian, son of the ageing Frederick III,
could not prevent a Jagiellon ascending to the Czech-Hungarian throne (Matthias Corvinus
died without an heir), but he did manage to quickly regain all of the recently lost Habsburg
possessions.
The fate of the Slovene-populated Länder, subject to constant warring throughout the
second half of the fifteenth century, depended far more on internal relations within the states
offering a military threat from the south and east than on their own defence capacity. Joint
meetings of the Carinthia, Carniolan and Styrian Estates became more common, but they still
could not organise an effective defence. The taxes that had been approved were spent on
mercenary units, and fortifying towns and market settlements, and the few open battles
against the Turks without exception saw the inflexible noble cavalry defeated (such as at
Bizeljsko ob Sotli in 1475). While the Turkish incursions into these Länder were repelled to a
slight extent by extensive valley defence works, embankments, and forest belts, towns were
protected by sound walls. Most towns had their defences renewed, while the award of a town
charter gave some exposed settlements near the Slovene-Croatian border the right to
completely new defences (Kočevje 1471, Lož and Krško 1477, Višnja Gora 1478).
Of all the fixed and extraordinary duties to the feudal lords that burdened the peasant
population, bonded labour (
tlaka) grew most due to the fortification of towns and castles, yet
they had the least protection. In order to protect themselves and their possessions, the bonded
peasants began to build rural strongholds – tabori. After 1460, when a tabor was first
mentioned as a fortified shelter in rural areas, around 350 such fortifications were built on
Slovene ethnic territory in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the form of fortified