TEXELI (more properly, Tokely), Emmtic, Count, a celebrated Hungarian patriot, was descended from a noble Lutheran family, and was born at the castle of Kasmark, in the county of Zips, in 1656. His father, count Stephen, had been implicated in the conspiracy of Zriny and Ragotsky to free Hungary from the rule of Austria; and after his death, and the execution of Zriny and others, young Tekeli sought an asylum in Poland, where he had large possessions. After vain endeavors to recover from the emperor his patrimonial estates, he repaired to the court of Abaft prince of Transyl vania, who put him at the head of an army of 20,000 men, with which, in 1678, he invaded Hungary. by numbers of the malcontents, he rapidly extended his conquests, made predatory inroads even into Austria, Styria, and Moravia, till Leo pold I. was forced (1681) to temporize with the insurgents, and thus gained over a por tion of them. But Tekeli, distrusting with good reason the emperor's sincerity, refissed to disarm, and being joined by the Transylvanian prince and the Turks, he was declared by the sultan Mohammed IV. (1682) king of upper Hungary, and again recovered most of the country. Tekeli joined Kara Mustapha in his celebrated inroad upon Austria; but after the failure of the expedition many of his followers fell off from him, and his patron, the sultan, being prejudiced by his enemies against him, he was twice imprisoned by the Turks; and during his detention Hungary was wholly overrun by the Austrians, and Transylvania separated from the Turkish alliance. Tekeli, however, was favored
by a brilliant though ephemeral change of fortune in 1690, when, at the head of a Turkish force, he burst into Transylvania, routed the combined Austrians and natives repeatedly, and woke up the energies of his partisans in Hungary; but the imperialists, under the markgraf of Baden, routed his allies, the Turks, at Salankemen (Aug. 19, 1691), and under prince Eugene of Savoy, so completely demolished them at Zenta (Sept. 11, 1697), that they gladly agreed to the peace of Carlovits (Nov. 14, 1697), by which all aid to the Hungarian malcontents was withdrawn. From this time Teleki lived in retirement in Turkey, at first being munificently entertained by the Turkish government, but afterward so completely neglected that he was forced to adopt the occu pation of a vintner. He died at Constantinople in 1705.—His wife, Helena, the widow of Ragotsky, was celebrated over all Europe for her beauty, but was no less distinguished for her heroic gallantry, as was proved by her obstinate defense of her castle of Mon gatz (Hung. Munkacs) against an army of imperialists. Forced to surrender, to save the lives of her children and the property of her (Ragotsky's) family, she was afterward exchanged for an Austrian general whom Teleki had captured ; and joining her husband at the cost of abandoning her children, shared the vicissitudes of his fortune, and died in 1703.