The Siege of Sziget
Hungarian epic poetry, 1651
The Siege of Sziget or The Peril of Sziget (Hungarian: Szigeti veszedelem, Latin: Obsidio Szigetiana) is a Hungarian epic poem in fifteen parts, written by Miklós Zrínyi in 1647 and published in 1651, about the final battle of his great-grandfather Nikola IV Zrinski (Miklós Zrínyi in Hungarian) against the Ottomans in 1566. The epic was originally published within the book Siren of the Adriatic Sea (Hungarian: Adriai tengernek Syrenaia) where it was accompanied by several lyric poems.
Narrative and style
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 Zrinski'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 Zrinski killing Sultan Suleiman I, before being gunned down by janissaries. Being in the epic tradition, specifically modeled on the Iliad and Gerusalemme Liberata, it opens with an invocation, though not of the muse, but of the Virgin Mary, and often features supernatural elements; Cupid even appears in Part XII. Zrinski is compared to Hector several times in the text.
The verse is dodecasyllabic, typically but not exclusively with a caesura after the sixth syllable, resembling the alexandrine verse, organised into quatrains with AAAA rhyme scheme:
Én az ki azelőtt iffiu elmével
Játszottam szerelemnek édes versével,
Küszködtem Viola kegyetlenségével:
Mastan immár Mársnak hangassabb versével
Title
The book is today best known under its long-standing Hungarian title, Szigeti veszedelem, literally "The Peril of Sziget." Zrinski's original Latin title, however, was Obsidionis Szigetianae, literally "The Siege of Sziget." This discrepancy is explained by the fact that 17th-century Hungarian had no distinct word for "siege" (the paucity of contemporary Hungarian vocabulary is, in fact, lamented by Zrinski in the epic's foreword) the modern-day "ostrom" ("siege") was taken from the German sturm at some later date, at which point "veszedelem" took on the exclusive meaning of "peril," thereby changing the apparent meaning of the title. The 2011 English translation was published as The Siege of Sziget, based on the original Latin rather than the later Hungarian title.
Summary
Prologue
The book begins with a short introduction in prose.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q286150. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1647, 1651, 1566 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Siege of Sziget” 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.