The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent

"Vienna had been besieged before, just after the Battle of Mohács in 1526. Three years later, the Turks did reach the outskirts of Vienna, but they only had a fairly short fighting season, and their supply lines were very stretched, so they abandoned the siege. This time, in 1683, they were determined to succeed. The Ottoman army tramped all the way from the Sublime Porte, gathering all their vassals and Tatars from the Crimea and Hungarians from Transylvania who were in rebellion against Habsburg rule. They enrolled them in a massive army: some estimates say there were 100,000 men, others 170,000. They brought their harems and everything with them, lock, stock, and barrel. They needed huge sustenance, so 16,000 head of cattle came along too. It took the Ottoman army two years to get to its destination, which was an advantage for the Habsburgs, who had spies at the Sublime Porte and knew what was going on. This time, Vienna was prepared. They had built huge new fortifications all around the city, with enormous bastions, which are illustrated in Stoye’s book. They were built by an Italian architect, rather in the style of some of those big, fortified, North Italian cities whose inhabitants were always besieging each other. They also added a Glacis in front of the city, which was a steep, extended ramp, so that they could more easily attack the Turks as they advanced. The Ottomans, however, were well prepared with knowledge about the fortifications. By the way, one country that was not cooperating with the defence of Christendom was France . This, I’m afraid, followed a long and undistinguished pattern, because the French actually wanted—and only Napoleon de facto achieved it—to become Emperors in Europe. At the time of the siege, Louis XIV was focused on acquiring Alsace and Lorraine, not on saving the Christian West. The Pope had declared, ‘This is the Holy League, we’ve got to save Christendom,’ but Louis XIV was unimpressed. The French even undermined the Austrians, because they had advisors and engineers at the Sublime Porte, and possibly even a few French troops accompanied the Ottoman army. Let me read a passage from the book—it’s very vivid, detailed, good stuff. “While the ring of fortifications buzzed with activity inside Vienna, the civilian world struggled to survive under conditions of siege. The schools had closed, the churches soon opened again. Stocks of food were still ample and prices steady. The flurry of excitement which had first called out the burgher guards and companies recruited from artisans died down, and the siege began to follow an orthodox course.” The Ottomans encircled most of Vienna and started digging tunnels; then they put explosives in the tunnels to try and blow up the city. But the defenders were alert, and they could work out where the incursions were from the sound of digging. A baker became famous for reporting the sounds of the Ottoman saboteurs right under his bakery, whereat explosives were laid to stop them. Charles of Lorraine was the official leader of the Holy League. He was later joined by Jan Sobieski, King of Poland, who reckoned that, as a king, he was superior and insisted on being the first to lead his troops down from the Kahlenberg (just to the west of Vienna) as the counter-attack was launched. “The civil administration was, in fact, being pulled into shape. It had a very good defender, Count von Starhemberg. A number of useful measures were agreed. When incendiary bombs began to fall in quantities, fire brigades were used and did their work admirably. All the householders provided themselves with buckets, barrels or skins kept filled with water. They had to dismantle roofs made of shingles in order to lessen the risk of fire, and there were other instructions to scour the streets, to remove the refuse of dead animals and so on and so forth.” This is quite remarkable, considering that Vienna had only just recovered from the worst plague they ever underwent only four years earlier, in 1679. There was a good Dutch doctor who came and tried to implement an enforced lockdown, not entirely successfully. The Viennese were decimated, with huge loss of life, but those who survived were pretty tough and stoical. The emperor, Leopold I, took to his heels and went off to Linz until it was all over. He was greeted on his return by Sobieski at Schwechat, who said, ‘I am honoured to have rendered Your Majesty this small service’—which was perhaps diplomatic speech, for ‘Where were you?’ Sobieski had arrived late and then insisted on taking charge. He was supposed to come with a Lithuanian army, a reminder of the scope of Central Europe. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which still existed, was a huge tract of territory. Norman Davies says it was the largest tract of single-ruled territory in Europe at that time, stretching from the Baltic down to Ukraine. Anyway, they didn’t turn up in time. There was also some tension between the arriving troops, because some of them were Protestants, and we must remember how bitter the struggle was between the new Protestants—who had managed to obtain a lot of property and establish themselves, particularly in Bohemia, where there had been proto-Protestants known as Hussites after their first leader, Jan Hus—and those trying to maintain the authority of Catholicism. Incidentally, the Ottoman leader, the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa, retreated as far as Belgrade, where he was murdered in the traditional manner with a silken cord. That was how they got rid of people who’d failed in those days: no failing upwards, like today—you most definitely failed downwards."