{"product_id":"9780813218618","title":"The Siege of Sziget","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 1566, Croatian Count Miklós Zrinyi defended the Fortress of Szigetvár against an overwhelming Ottoman siege for 33 days. In the end, with troops and supplies exhausted, he led the remainder of his men in a last charge into the enemy lines, killing thousands before being killed themselves. Almost a hundred years later in 1651, Zrinyi's great-grandson, also Miklós Zrinyi and himself a famed general, composed an epic poem of some 1,500 stanzas recalling in vivid and often fantastic detail the events of the siege, the heroes on both sides, and the climactic final sortie that led to defeat for the Hungarians and painfully empty victory for the Turks.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e The epic, written in the fashion of Homer and Tasso, does not content itself with just a historical retelling, however. Written when the Ottoman threat was again looming large over all of Europe, the poet sought to marshal his countrymen, and indeed all Christians, against the cause of the overwhelming forces from the East. He framed his story, therefore, in the larger context of God's burning anger against the apostasy of his followers, which he uses the Turkish invasion to punish. It is only with a return to piety that the Christians can restore God's favor, but if they do - woe to their invaders! The hero, Zrinyi, is one such believer, who is as likely to give a moving speech on the righteousness and supremacy of God's will as he is to massacre those who would assault his home. God rewards him with a martyr's death, but not before giving him the glory of finishing off Sultan Suleiman himself, as the demons summoned by the Sultan's wizard battle the angels who have come to claim the defenders' souls.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePart chronicle of war, part theological treatise, the poem also has episodes of romance and adventure, as each side is at once humanized and made larger than life. The work is today considered to be one of the cornerstones of Hungarian literature, and one of most important works of the seventeenth century of any language, but has been virtually unknown and entirely inaccessible outside of Hungary - until now.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLaszlo Korossy completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the Catholic University of America and is pursuing a Ph.D. in public policy at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Count Miklós Zrínyi was a brilliant soldier and a statesman renowned throughout seventeenth-century Europe, though in Hungary he is revered above all as the author of the last great European epic. László Korössy is to be congratulated for making this remarkable work available in fluent yet nuanced modern English, thus revealing a Hungarian classic as not only a gem in the crown of the European Baroque but a vital and profoundly human document of the continent's engagement in the contest between Christendom and Islam.\"—Peter Sherwood, László Birinyi, Sr., Distinguished Professor of Hungarian Language and Culture, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Catholic University of America Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47016719253744,"sku":"9780813218618","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780813218618_p0.jpg?v=1763743449","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780813218618","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}