Solyman’s ambitious schemes looked for still wider fields of conquest, and in 1529 he marched towards Vienna, in order to attack King Ferdinand in his own capital. The city, however, was successfully defended. In 1532 Solyman advanced again upon Vienna. The sultan’s progress was unopposed until he reached Köszeg (German, Güns), in the neighborhood of the Austrian frontier. The keys of sixteen fortresses and fortified cities lay at his feet; Köszeg alone refused to do homage, and arrested the sultan’s triumphal march. Michael Juricsics was its commander; he was just about to remove his small garrison, consisting of twenty-eight hussars and ten cuirassiers, to Vienna, for whose defence all the available forces were being called in, when the Turks appeared beneath the walls of Köszeg. On beholding the approach of the immense Turkish army, Juricsics took a bold and noble resolution. He determined to hold the fortress, and to die rather than surrender it to the enemy. He immediately took measures to defend the place; he repaired the walls and bastions, armed seven hundred peasants who had sought refuge in the city, and purchased with his own money gunpowder and provisions. The Turkish army arrived under the walls of Köszeg on the 5th of August, 1532; a few days later the sultan himself joined them, and the siege was prosecuted at once with the utmost energy. The outer fortifications had already fallen into the hands of the enemy, the guns and mines had effected a breach sixteen yards wide in the main wall of the citadel, of its seven hundred defenders half had fallen, and on the 24th of August Juricsics had but one hundred weight of gunpowder left. Yet the plucky reply he gave to the sultan’s summons to surrender was: “As long as I live I will not surrender.” The Turks thereupon directed a fresh assault upon the citadel, and the garrison again lost many lives, while Juricsics himself was wounded. The Turks pressed into the city, but the inhabitants, at their approach, broke out into such dreadful howling and wailing that the frightened assailants retreated, and the city was once more miraculously spared. But Juricsics himself saw now the impossibility of further resistance; he had no more gunpowder, and most of the garrison were like himself wounded. For the purpose, therefore, of sparing the lives of the remaining inhabitants, he finally permitted the Turkish flag to be hoisted over the city. Solyman, seeing the Turkish flag floating over Köszeg, thought he had captured the citadel, and retired from under the walls on the 31st of August. But it was not towards Vienna that he directed his steps, but homeward. He had been delayed nearly four weeks near Köszeg, and during this time a powerful army had been collected in Vienna which the sultan had not the courage to face. Juricsics had thus, by his heroism, saved Vienna from a siege, the issue of which might have been calamitous to that renowned city of Christendom.