Siege of Sziget

Szigeti veszedelem (Latin: Obsidionis Szigetianae, English: Siege of Sziget, Croatian: Opsada Sigeta) was the title of the Hungarian epic poem in fifteen parts written by Miklós Zrínyi in 1647 and published in 1651 about the final battle of his great-grandfather Miklós Zrínyi against the Ottomans in 1566.

The poem recounts in epic fashion the Battle of Szigetvár, in which a vastly outnumbered Croatian-Hungarian army tried to resist a Turkish invasion. The battle concluded when Captain Zrínyi's forces, having been greatly depleted, left the fortress walls in a famous onslaught. Approximately four hundred troops forayed into the Turkish camp. The epic concludes with Zrínyi killing Sultan Suleiman I, before being gunned down by janissaries. Being in the epic tradition, specifically modeled on the Iliad, it opens with an invocation of a muse (in this case, the Virgin Mary), and often features supernatural elements; Cupid even appears in Part XII. The characters of Deliman and Deli Vid are roughly analogous to Hector and Achilles in the Iliad, although the positive and negative roles of protagonist and antagonist are here clearly defined.

Kenneth Clark's renowned history Civilisation lists the Szigeti Veszedelem as one of the major literary achievements of the 17th century. While John Milton's Paradise Lost is often credited as resurrecting the classical epic, it was published in 1667, a full sixteen years after the Veszedelem. Petar Zrinski, the author's brother, published a Croatian version of the epic in 1652. This version, however, has never been reprinted, and is accessible today only in the national library at Zagreb. The first English translation was published in 2011.