The Origins of the Thirty Years War? 7Sweden and Poland thus had both a territorial and a dynastic basis,
as Sigismund did not give up his claims to the Swedish crown, and
Russia was also involved. To further complicate the situation Charles
managed to provoke Denmark, under its new young King Christian IV,
who declared war in 1611, but Charles died soon afterwards, leaving the
problems to his young son, the barely seventeen-year-old Gustavus II
Adolphus. The war was lost, and the price of peace was a huge indemnity
to be paid to Denmark, which was raised through heavy taxation and
borrowing until the last instalment was paid in 1619, leaving Gustavus
free to turn once again to Poland and to war in Livonia.
Europe, and the Habsburg lands in particular, had long been
under pressure from the Turks in the south east. During the hun-
dred years from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries the
Ottoman Empire expanded in several directions, particularly round the
Mediterranean, but also into the Balkans and beyond.^8 In one respect
the Habsburgs were beneficiaries, as Ferdinand, Charles V’s younger
brother and later his successor as emperor, managed to gain election
to the crown of the Bohemian lands when the last Jagiellon king fell
at the battle of Mohács in 1526, during Sultan Suleyman the Magnifi-
cent’s advance into Hungary. The crown of Hungary was also elective,
but in the aftermath of the defeat two contenders both secured a form
of election. One of these was Ferdinand, who was only able to take pos-
session of a strip of the northern and western parts of the country, while
his rival sought Ottoman protection and controlled much of the rest.
In the wars which followed Suleyman dramatically but unsuccessfully
besieged Vienna itself in 1529, as well as invading Austria a second
time in 1532, while in 1541 Ferdinand made his own incursion into
the Ottoman part of Hungary. This was a failure, as a result of which
the Habsburgs had to accept a truce on humiliating terms, including
payment of an annual tribute to the sultan for their part of Hungary.
In 1568, two years after Suleyman’s death, a more permanent treaty
was agreed, although the tribute continued, as did the split of Hungary
into three parts, one Habsburg, one Ottoman, and the third the prin-
cipality of Transylvania, a nominally independent but tributary buffer
state supported by the Ottomans to keep the Habsburgs away from their
own borders. Although relative peace then lasted for 25 years until the
Long Turkish War of 1593 to 1606 there were numerous incidents, and
the need to maintain defences against the Turks was a constant drain
on Austrian finances. The wider ramifications of what Murphey calls
‘the complex matrix of intersecting spheres of Ottoman and Habsburg
influence’ is well illustrated by the unlikely sounding alliance between