During the 1660s and 1670s, the Ottoman Empire reached the peak of its expansion with military invasions of Ukraine and Habsburg Hungary, parts of central Europe that had traditionally been regarded as beyond the Porte's horizons. Many Ukrainians and Hungarians welcomed the Ottomans as liberators; they saw the sultan as a more benevolent ruler than the Russian tsar, the Polish king, and the Habsburg emperor. This article reconstructs the political, social, and religious dimensions of pro-Ottoman hopes as well as the popular revolts that resulted from these hopes. Comparing Ukrainian and Hungarian engagements with the Ottomans reveals the divergent and overlapping aspects of a largely forgotten historical reality, that is, the quest of many Orthodox and Protestant Europeans to consider a Muslim alternative to the Christian empires that oppressed them. The article draws on a treasure trove of little studied sources, both archival and published, in multiple languages.

In March 1674, Hungary's Lutheran and Calvinist clergy stood collectively accused of fomenting rebellion against the Habsburgs and seeking protection from the Ottomans. A widely publicized tribunal in Pozsony (Bratislava, Pressburg) resulted in systematic expulsions, incarcerations, and the sale of forty-two pastors as galley slaves. A voluminous body of historiography has been dedicated to the victims of the tribunal and their tribulations. It is commonly assumed that the accusations against the Protestant clergy were fabricated. This article shifts the focus from martyrologies, sermons, and narratives written after the year 1674 to eyewitness accounts in inquisitorial records, letters, petitions, official reports, and military dispatches from the years leading up to the Pozsony Tribunal. These unstudied testimonies in the Hungarian and Austrian archives reveal that a significant number of pastors participated in popular resistance and revolt against a brutal Habsburg Counter Reformation. Many put their hopes in the Ottomans whom they considered protectors against the destruction of their religion. These little-known developments shed light on important larger historical realities that have been eclipsed by Habsburg and Central European historians, namely, Hungarian popular hopes for liberation from the Habsburgs by the Ottomans which culminated in two major revolts in 1670 and 1672.