Siege of Bihać (1592)
| Siege of Bihać | |||||||||
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| Part of the Ottoman wars in Europe Ottoman–Croatian Wars |
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 Bihać around 1590 |
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| Belligerents | |||||||||
 Ottoman Empire
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.svg){kind=small} Kingdom of Croatia
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| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
| Telli Hasan Pasha | Joseph Lamberg 
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| Strength | |||||||||
| 5,000 soldiers | 400-500 soldiers | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| 2,000 civilians killed 800 civilians taken captive |
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The Siege of Bihać (Croatian: Opsada Bihaća) was the besieging and capture of the city of Bihać, Kingdom of Croatia, by the Ottoman Empire in June 1592. With the arrival of Telli Hasan Pasha as the Beylerbey of the Bosnia Eyalet in 1591, a period of peace established between Emperor Rudolf II and Sultan Murad III ended and the provincial Ottoman armies launched an offensive on Croatia. Bihać, a nearly isolated city on the Una River that repelled an Ottoman attack in 1585, was one of the first targets. Thomas Erdődy, the Ban of Croatia, used available resources and soldiers to protect the border towns, but the Ottomans managed to take several smaller forts in 1591. As the offensive gained pace, the Croatian Parliament passed a law on a general uprising in the country on 5 January 1592.
In early June 1592 Hasan Pasha led his troops towards Bihać, which was defended by around 500 soldiers and commanded by Captain Joseph von Lamberg. The siege lasted from 10 June to 19 June, when Lamberg surrendered the city due to a lack of reinforcements and an insufficient number of defending troops. Lamberg was for this act later tried for treason. Although under the terms of the surrender its citizens were to be allowed to leave or remain in the city without harm, more than 2,000 civilians were killed and 800 were taken captive after Hasan Pasha's troops entered Bihać. The offensive lasted until June 1593 when Hasan Pasha was killed in the Battle of Sisak, which was the cause for the Long Turkish War (1593-1606).
From the 1520s the Ottoman advance into Croatia gained pace. The Croatian nobles elected Ferdinand I of Habsburg at the Parliament on Cetin in 1527 as the new monarch, but continuous Ottoman incursions resulted in a significant loss of territory. In 1537 the fall of Klis meant the loss of the last Croatian stronghold in the south of the country. In the 1540s the Ottomans advanced into Slavonia and in the next three decades through western Bosnia in the direction of Zagreb. By the late 16th century Croatia lost two thirds of its pre-war area and more than half of the population. It was reduced to 16,800 km² of free territory and had around 400,000 inhabitants. The remaining land was referred to as the "remnants of remnants of the once great and renowned Kingdom of Croatia" (Latin: reliquiae reliquiarum olim magni et inclyti regni Croatiae).
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