In later audiences with the grand vizir, Hobordanacz expressed the hope that Ferdinand and Charles V and Sultan Suleiman might become good friends and neighbors. Ibrahim inquired scornfully how such a friendship could come about! Hobordanacz declared that it was his mission to offer friendship, and it seemed to him that Ibrahim’s influence should be able to bring about advantages for both sides. Ibrahim again urged him to indicate the method of procedure, saying, “Your king has seized upon our kingdom, and yet he asks for friendship; how can that be?” The nuncio said he knew all things at the Porte were done by Ibrahim’s will and authority; he believed that he could serve their cause. Ibrahim then proposed peace on condition that Ferdinand should abandon Hungary. Hobordanacz on the other hand asked for a definite truce for a term of years and requested the restitution to Ferdinand of those portions of Hungary taken by Suleiman, giving a list of twenty‐seven fortresses. This aroused Ibrahim’s bitter wrath. “It is strange” said he “that your master does not ask for Constantinople.” He tried to make the ambassadors acknowledge that Ferdinand would attempt to take these forts by force if they were not conceded to him. “With what hope does he ask for these forts,” he further inquired, “when he knows that the sultan took them with great labor and much bloodshed?”
The question of compensation for these forts being opened, Ibrahim exclaimed indignantly that the sultan was not so poor that he would sell what his arms had won. Dramatically opening a window he said “Do you see those Seven Towers! they are filled with gold and treasure.”[126] He then turned to the question of skill in war, and after praising the prowess of the Germans, he said, “You know the arms of the Turks, how sharp they are, and how far they have penetrated, for you have fled before them many times.” Hobordanacz gave a qualified assent, but praised his master’s warlike skill. Ibrahim finally broke in, “Then your master wishes to keep those forts?” Hobordanacz suggested a middle course, but the grand vizir said decisively: “There is no other way but for your king to abandon Buda and Hungary and then we will treat with him about Germany.” Upon Hobordanacz’ refusal to consider such terms Ibrahim stated, “I conquered Lewis and Hungary, and now I will build the bridges of the Sultan, and prepare a way for his Majesty into Germany.” He closed the interview by accusing Ferdinand and Charles of not keeping faith and said he would give the nuncios a final reply in three or four days.
The third audience was held in the palace, with Ibrahim presiding, and Suleiman at his window, and was conducted on similar lines to the other audiences. Ibrahim informed the Hungarians that their master had just been defeated by Zapolya with an army of thirty‐six thousand men, which statement Hobordanacz took the liberty of doubting, saying that if Zapolya added all the cocks and hens in Transylvania to his army, he could not make up the number to thirty‐six thousand. The nuncios and the grand vizir could not agree on terms of alliance; to the Austrian demands, Ibrahim impatiently exclaimed: “The Emperor Charles and your master, what do they want more? to rule the whole earth? Do they count themselves no less than the gods?” Naturally nothing was accomplished by such recrimination, and finally Suleiman ended the audience, dismissing the ambassadors with the threat: “Your master has not yet felt our friendship and neighborliness, but he shall soon feel it. You can tell your master frankly that I myself with all my forces will come to him to give Hungary in our person the fortresses he demands. Inform him that he must be ready to treat me well.”
So ended the mission of Ferdinand for peace. There had been no possibility of success from the beginning. Suleiman and Ibrahim were not to be won to friendship for Ferdinand, and had they been, the rude, independent Hobordanacz was not the man to gain Oriental favor. One feels that Ibrahim enjoyed the opportunity to sharpen his claws on an enemy, and to show Europeans his own power and that of his master. The envoys must have been very uncomfortable, and their discomforts were not yet at an end, for a Venetian enemy of Ferdinand’s told Ibrahim that they were not ambassadors but spies, and urged their detention at the Porte. For five months they were kept in close confinement, after which a long journey lay between them and the anxious Archduke who had hoped so much from the embassy.
This treatment of royal ambassadors as though they were spies was not uncommon at the Porte. The King of Poland had been forced to complain of the rough handling of his envoys by Sultan Bayazid (Suleiman’s grandfather), saying they were not only detained for months before they were given audience, but were thrown into prison, and instead of being lodged like the envoys of a king, who would naturally feel that it accorded with his honor to send only the sons of the noblest families to represent him, were treated as criminals, and that promises made to such envoys were often broken.[127] Busbequius, himself an ambassador, who was detained for months and sharply watched, recounted another instance, that of Malvezzi, whom the Sultan held responsible for the broken faith of his master Ferdinand, and threw into prison when Ferdinand took Transylvania in 1551.[128] It was a Turkish maxim that ambassadors were responsible for the word given by their masters, and that in their capacity as hostages they must expiate its violation; moreover power was often conceived to reside in an ambassador, who therefore was kept in durance in the hope that he could be brought to terms. Such treatment, however naïve and unjust, is nevertheless an improvement on the reception by Hungary of the ambassador sent to announce the accession of Suleiman, whose nose and ears were slit. Further illustrations of the way ambassadors were liable to be treated in Europe were the assassination of Rincon, envoy of France, connived at by Charles V, and the murder of Martinez, a Spanish ambassador to the Porte, instigated by Ferdinand.
Ibrahim’s usual way of opening an audience was to brow‐beat the ambassador, and he indulged in frequent sarcasm and scornful laughter. To the envoys of Ferdinand in 1532 he railed at Ferdinand and “his tricks” and gibed at his faithlessness. “How is a man a king” he said “unless he keeps his word?”[129] To Lamberg and Juritschitz (1530)[130] he spoke of the quarrels among Christian rulers, twitting his auditors with Charles’s treatment of the Pope and of Francis I, declaring that the Turks would never do “so inhuman a thing,” and following this by a long talk “full of scorn and irony.”[131]
Ibrahim was enormously inquisitive, seeming to look upon a foreign embassy as an opportunity for gaining all sorts of general information. Sometimes he asked about such practical matters as the fortification of certain forts; at other times he asked such trivial questions as how old the rulers were, and how they pronounced their names. He once remarked that a man who did not try to learn all things is an incompetent man. Several times he boasted that in Turkey they knew all that was taking place in Europe.
His manner, as we have seen, was usually sharp and rude, but he could be elaborately courteous when he wished to please, as when he received an embassy from “our good friend” Francis I, and the Hungarian embassy of 1534. He was invariably boastful; during the earlier years he bragged of the sultan, his power and treasure; in the later embassies he boasted of himself.
One of the most important documents about Ibrahim that we possess is the account of the peace embassy sent by Ferdinand in 1533, the report being written by Hieronymus von Zara in Latin in September, 1533. This shows Ibrahim in a sharper light than we have had elsewhere, and brings out some traits in his character that have been growing steadily since his rise to such great power: his ambition and his towering pride.[132]