Deli-Marko
Serb hajduk and military commander in Habsburg service, active during the Long Turkish War
Deli-Marko (Serbian Cyrillic: Дели-Марко, "Wild Marko"; fl. 1596–1619) or Marko Segedinac (Марко Сегединац, "Marko of Segedin"), was a Serb hajduk and military commander in Habsburg service, active during the Long Turkish War.
He was mentioned for the first time after 1590, as a youngster commanding a band of Serb soldiers in the service of Sigismund Báthory, the Prince of Transylvania. Báthory's army which headed to liberate Timișoara included notable Serbs, such as Đorđe Rac, Deli-Marko, and Sava Temišvarac. The army managed to conquer the Serbian part of the town. These Serb leaders, including Starina Novak, fought as part of the Transylvanian Army, but carried out independent raids south of the Danube, into what is today Bulgaria and Serbia, even managing to raid as deep as Plovdiv and Adrianople. Deli-Marko's bold maneuvers in Ottoman territory enraged the Ottoman government. He raided merchant caravans and ships, and even went as far as across the Balkan Mountains and to the Maritsa river. The Serb commanders mainly operated outside Transylvania, with the support of the Emperor. The Serb soldiers and refugees were taken care of by the War Council in Vienna.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Deli-Marko” as serb hajduk and military commander in Habsburg service, active during the Long Turkish War. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as serb hajduk and military commander in Habsburg service, active during the Long Turkish War. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 26, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q28059660. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1596, 1619 and 1590.
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This entry incorporates text from “Deli-Marko” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.