The Duke of Mercoeur's Campaign in Hungary
It is to be hoped that the long debate about the location of "Olumpagh" has
been ended, as far as John Smith's career is concerned, by the recent publication
of a monograph on the fall of Nagykanizsa, which includes a map of
the Turkish movements along with Mercoeur's and an exhaustive lexicon
of Slovenian place-names, and by the personal inspection of the suggested
sites by the editor. There were, and are, two towns formerly known in German
as Limbach: Upper and Lower, with Hungarian equivalents. Both
were objects of Turkish raids. Upper Limbach, in the hills to the north, has
been ruled out as the site of "Olumpagh" since it has no sizable river nearby
and no heights from which signals could be seen at any distance. Lower
Limbach (modern Lendava, Yugoslavia), on the other hand, fits Smith's
description perfectly, and a record exists of a raid there in 1601.
Regarding the later "liberation" of Szekesfehervar (Smith's "Stowllewesenburg";
German, Stuhlweissenburg) by Philippe-Emmanuel de Lorraine,
the duke of Mercoeur, there are detailed accounts in German, and the
subject is treated at some length in the editor's Three Worlds of Captain John
Smith.
