Radical Protestant Propaganda of the Thirty Years' War

Bethlen Gabor: Historical Introduction
Humble Beginnings and Hungarian Division
Bethlen Gabor of Iktár was born in 1580 in Marosillye, Hungary, a small region now known
as Ilia that belongs to Romania. His father was an advisor to the Prince of Transylvania
Sigismund Báthory and his mother belonged to a noble Hungarian family. Despite these
favourable circumstances, Bethlen found himself orphaned at thirteen years of age. But this
did not hinder his political career because he grew up at the court of Weißenburg in the
capital of Transylvania 50 and gained an awareness of Hungarian politics early on in life by
witnessing the power struggles between the Turks, the Austrian Habsburg Emperor and the
prince of Transylvania, each of whom fought for control over parts of the country. This
conflict marked his early life and in 1602, he was forced to flee from Transylvania to Turkey
in order to escape the military terrorism of the imperial commander-in-chief Basta. 51
As is evident from the reference to a trio of powers vying for control over the country,
Hungary was at this time loosely divided into three parts. Roughly speaking, the west and
the northern territories of the country were under Catholic Habsburg control. Next to this
area lay a triangular, central-southern patch of land which was administered by the Turks.
And in the very east of the country, bordered on three sides by the Turkish Empire, was the
principality of Transylvania. The division of Hungary into three parts was the result of battles
between the Habsburgs, the Hungarians, and the Turkish Empire in the sixteenth century. 52
50 Katalin Péter, ‘Die Blütezeit des Fürstentums. 1600-1660’, in Kurze Geschichte Siebenbürgens
(Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1990), pp. 311-19 (p. 315). Henceforth Péter.
51 Dominic Kósary, ‘Gabriel Bethlen: Transylvania in the XVIIth Century’, The Slavonic and East
European Review, 17, 49 (July 1938), pp. 162-73 (pp. 165-6). Henceforth Kósary.
52 Miklós Molnár, A Concise History of Hungary, trans. by Anna Magyar (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), p. 118. Henceforth Molnár. See also section ‘A Country Divided’, pp. 100-6.
Henceforth Molnár.
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