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The Sword, the Pen, and the Scaffold: The Life and Death of Petar IV Zrinsk
On 30 April 1671, two men were beheaded in the public square of Wiener Neustadt. They had been the most powerful lords in the Croatian frontier zone, a Ban of Croatia and the heir of the great Frankopan dynasty, and their execution, conducted in defiance of the constitutional law that should have protected them, marked the moment when the Habsburg drive toward absolutism finally overwhelmed the ancient sovereignty of the Croatian and Hungarian nobility.
The Sword, the Pen, and the Scaffold is the story of Petar IV Zrinski, general, poet, conspirator, and martyr, and of the world that made and destroyed him. Drawing on the full sweep of Croatian, Hungarian, and Habsburg history, Jacob Mountjoy traces the arc of a life lived at the intersection of three cultures and three crises: the permanent military emergency of the Ottoman frontier, the creeping encroachment of imperial centralisation on noble constitutional rights, and the extraordinary cultural flowering of the Ozalj Literary Circle, whose synthetic Croatian literary standard produced some of the most remarkable prose and poetry of the seventeenth-century European world.
From the myth of Szigetvár to the farewell letter written the night before the scaffold, this is narrative history at its most searching, the story of a man who wielded the sword with distinction, the pen with brilliance, and who faced the scaffold with a dignity that three and a half centuries have not diminished.
