Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations.
See 56023-h.htm or 56023-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/56023/pg56023-images.html)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56023/56023-h.zip)
Images of the original pages are available through
Internet Archive. See
https://archive.org/details/viennahistorycons00mald
VIENNA 1683
The History and Consequences of the Defeat
of the Turks before Vienna, September 12, 1683
by John Sobieski, King of Poland
and Charles Leopold, Duke of Lorraine
by
HENRY ELLIOT MALDEN
London
Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1, Paternoster Square
1883
"Think of that age's awful birth,
When Europe echoed, terror-riven,
That a new foot was on the earth,
And a new name come down from Heaven
When over Calpe's straits and steeps
The Moor had bridged his royal road,
And Othman's sons from Asia's deeps
The conquests of the Cross o'erflowed.
* * * * *
"Think with what passionate delight
The tale was told in Christian halls,
How Sobieski turned to flight
The Muslim from Vienna's walls;
How, when his horse triumphant trod
The burghers' richest robes upon,
The ancient words rose loud, 'From God
A man was sent whose name was John.'"
LORD HOUGHTON.
(_The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved._)
PREFACE.
The historical scholar will find nothing new in the following pages; but
I have thought it worth while to tell to the general reader a story
worth the telling, and to explain not only the details, but the wider
bearings also, of a great crisis in European history, no satisfactory
account of which exists, I believe, in English, and the two hundredth
anniversary of which is now upon us.
My principal authorities are "Sobieski's Letters to his Queen," edited
by Count Plater, Paris, 1826; Starhemberg's "Life and Despatches,"
edited by Count Thürheim, Vienna, 1882; "Campaigns of Prince Eugene, of
Savoy," Vienna, 1876, etc.; Schimmer's "Sieges of Vienna;" Von Hammer's
"History of the Turks;" Salvandy's "History of Poland;" "Memoirs of
Eugene," by De Ligne; "Memoirs of Charles, Duke of Lorraine, and his
Military Maxims," published late in the seventeenth century; "Works of
Montecuculi;" De la Guillatière's "View of the Present State of the
Turkish Empire, etc.," translated, London, 1676, etc.
I have been obliged to reject some statements of Salvandy's, such, for
instance, as that the _crescent moon_ was eclipsed on the day of the
battle before Vienna.
I regret that I have been unable to use the account of the campaign of
1683 published in Vienna, by the Director of the War Archives, since
this went to press. Some of the matter of it is, I believe, contained in
the "Campaigns of Eugene," published under the same authority mentioned
above, and in Schimmer's work.
KITLANDS, 1883.
SYNOPSIS OF EVENTS.
1663. Ahmed Kiuprili Grand Vizier.
1664. Montecuculi defeats the Turks at St. Gotthard. Twenty years'
truce with Austria, by which the Turks retain most of Hungary.
1669. The Turks take Candia from the Venetians.
1671. Conspiracy in Hungary against the Emperor crushed.
1672. French attack upon Holland provokes a general war. Treaty of
Buksacs between the Turks and Poles. Poland cedes most of Podolia
and the Ukraine, and pays tribute to Turkey.
1673. The Polish nobles break the treaty. Great victory of Sobieski
over the Turks at Choczim.
1675. Sobieski crowned King of Poland.
1676. Treaty of Zurawna between Turks and Poles; the former retain
most of their conquests.
1677. Death of Ahmed Kiuprili. Kara Mustapha Grand Vizier.
1678. Tekeli heads an insurrection in Hungary against the Emperor.
The French intrigue with him.
1678-79. Treaties of Nimuegen between the French and the allies.
1681. Louis XIV. seizes Strassburg and makes other aggressions upon
the Empire. Treaty between Holland and Sweden against France.
1682. Treaty of Laxenberg between the Emperor and the Upper German
Circles against France, followed by similar treaties between the
other Circles, the Emperor and Sweden. The Turks openly aid the
Hungarians.
1683. League of the Empire, Poland and the Pope, supported by other
anti-French powers, against the Turks. Turkish invasion of Austria.
Siege of Vienna. Defeat of the Turks by John Sobieski and the Duke
of Lorraine, September 12. The French attack the Spanish
Netherlands in the autumn.
1684. Truce of Ratisbon between France and the Empire.
1686. Buda recovered from the Turks. League of Augsburg between the
Emperor and the Circles of Western Germany, joined ultimately by
Spain, Holland, the Pope, Savoy and other Princes of the Empire,
against the French.
1688. The English Revolution secures England for the side of the
League, which she joins next year. General war with France follows.
1696. Death of Sobieski.
1697. Treaty of Ryswick between France and the allies. Eugene
defeats the Turks at Zenta, in Hungary.
1699. Peace of Carlowitz. The Turks cede nearly all Hungary,
Transylvania, Podolia, the Ukraine, the Morea and Azof. The first
great diminution of Turkish territory in Europe.
VIENNA.
1683.
CHAPTER I.
At the present moment, in 1883, the power of Austria is driven as a
wedge into the midst of the former dominions of the Sultan. That this is
so, perhaps that Austria even exists as a great power, and can hope to
be a greater in south-eastern Europe, is owing in no small degree to the
Polish aid which in 1683 defeated the Turkish armies before the gates,
and saved Vienna. The victor, John Sobieski, King of Poland, then
deserved and enjoyed the gratitude of Christendom. But the unequal fate
of a man great in character and in abilities, but born out of due time,
in an incongruous age and in a state unworthy of him, has seldom been
more conspicuously illustrated than in his career. The great men of the
last quarter of the seventeenth century whom we most readily remember
are men of western Europe. Louis XIV., with the resources of France
behind him, William III., wielding the power of England, of Holland, and
of Protestant Germany, are the kings who fill the stage. The half-crazy
hero, Charles XII. of Sweden, is a more familiar character than the
great Polish king, the deliverer first of Poland, secondly of Germany,
perhaps of Europe. The causes are not far to seek. The country which he
ruled has disappeared from the roll of European nations. The enemy whom
he defeated has become, in his last decrepitude, the object merely of
scorn, or of not disinterested care. It seems now so incredible that the
Turks should have been a menace to Europe, that it is no great claim to
remembrance to have defeated them. Sobieski, too, in his greatness and
in his weakness, was a mediæval hero. He was out of place in the age of
Louis XIV. He was a great soldier rather than a great general, a
national hero rather than a great king. His faith had the robust
sincerity of that of a thirteenth-century knight, his character was
marred by the violent passions of a mediæval baron. His head was full of
crusading projects--of the expulsion of the Turks, of the revival of a
Catholic Greek state, not without principalities for his own house. His
plans would have commanded support in the days of St. Louis, but were
impracticable in a Europe whose rulers schemed for a balance of power.
Poland herself perished, partly through clinging to a mediæval
constitution in the midst of modern states. Her mediævally-minded king
and his exploits are eclipsed by other memories, even upon the scene of
his greatest achievement.
For the traveller who from the Tower of St. Stephen's, in the centre of
the old-town of Vienna, looks down upon the places made remarkable by
great historic actions in the valley of the Danube, has his eye turned
first northward and eastward upon the Marchfeld. There, he is told, are
Aspern and Essling, where the Archduke Charles beat Napoleon in 1809.
There is the island of Lobau, where Napoleon repaired his forces, and
whence he issued to fight yonder the great and terrible conflict of
Wagram. The scene, not of a greater slaughter, not of a more obstinately
contested fight, than Wagram, but the scene of a battle more momentous
in its consequences, lies upon the other side. Among the vineyards,
villages, and chateaux which cover the lower slopes of the Wiener Wald,
among the suburbs of Nussdorf and of Hernals, Charles of Lorraine and
John Sobieski smote the Turkish armies in 1683. There at one blow they
frustrated the last great Mohammedan aggression against Christendom, and
set free the minds and arms of the Germans to combine against French
ambition upon their western frontier. The victory was one of those
decisive events which complete long pending revolutions, and inaugurate
new political conditions in Europe.
The treaties of Nimuegen in 1678-79 had marked a pause in a general
European contest. France and the Empire, Holland, Spain, Sweden,
Brandenberg, all retired from their active conflicts, to plot and strive
in secret, till an advantageous opening for war should again present
itself. Poland and the Porte had a little earlier concluded their strife
by the peace of Zurawna. But in the general breathing-time the eyes of
all were turned with anxiety upon Eastern Europe. So much of Hungary as
was not in the hands of the Sultan was in insurrection against the
Emperor. The insolence of the Turks, and their support to the
insurgents, were continually becoming greater. The whole East resounded
with warlike preparations, and it was without doubt evident that a great
enterprise was being prepared which might make the reign of Mahomet IV.
as illustrious for Islam, as calamitous for Christendom, as that of
Mahomet II. had been. Rome, Venice, Vienna, were the three capitals in
more immediate danger, but the whole continent was interested, and all
other designs were necessarily suspended till it became clearer where
this storm would fall, and what resistance could be made to it.
For, two hundred years ago, the Ottoman Empire still stood high among
the greatest of European powers. Spain ruled over wider territories; but
the dominions of Spain were scattered over the Old and New Worlds, and
her European lands, in the Netherlands and in Italy, were divided from
her by the sea, or isolated by the interposition of the frontiers of
powerful and often hostile neighbours.
A compact yet widely spread collection of kingdoms and of provinces
obeyed the head of the Mohammedan world. Northern Africa, Western Asia,
Eastern Europe were ruled from the Bosphorus. All the chief centres of
ancient civilization, Rome alone excepted, Thebes, Nineveh and Babylon,
Carthage, Athens and Constantinople, bowed beneath the Crescent. The
southern frontiers of the Sultan's territories reached beyond the Tropic
of Cancer, the northern touched nearly the latitude of Paris.
The modern kingdoms of Greece, Servia, Roumania were wholly his; the
kingdom of Hungary, the dominions of Austria and of Russia were in part
his also. The Black Sea was entirely encircled with Turkish or tributary
territory; no other power possessed the same extent of coast line on the
Mediterranean. Not only the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Nile, but the
Danube, the Boug, the Dneister, the Dneiper and the Don flowed for a
great part of their course between banks subject or tributary to the
Porte, and reached the sea by mouths wholly under Turkish control.
[Illustration: _Territory ceded by Turkey in 1699._]
The armies of the Sultan were unapproachable in numbers, unsurpassable
in valour, by those of the Christian powers. Their discipline and
warlike science were no longer what they once had been, the first in
Europe; but their inequality in these respects to their enemies was not
yet so marked as at present. Military and administrative skill were yet
to be found in their empire. From the first appearance of the Turks in
Europe Mohammedan rule had been, on the whole, extending. The Christian
reconquest of Spain was balanced by the inroads of this new enemy upon
the Eastern Empire. The Spanish reconquest of Grenada, in the fifteenth
century, was more than counterbalanced by the Turkish conquest of
Hungary in the sixteenth. The Turks upon the middle Danube were a menace
at once to Poland, Germany, and to northern Italy. Nor was this a mere
temporary inroad of theirs. Two-thirds of Hungary were then more firmly
held in their grasp than Macedonia is at present, and their frontiers
were not going back. In the seventeenth century the Ottoman power still
more than held its own in Eastern Europe. Though the Spaniards and
Venetians had destroyed their fleet at Lepanto in 1571, though
Montecuculi at the head of the Imperial troops had routed their armies
at St. Gotthard in 1664, though Sobieski and the Poles made the great
slaughter of Choczim in 1673, yet the frontiers of the Turks were
advanced by every war. After Lepanto, the peace confirmed them in the
possession of the newly acquired Cyprus; after St. Gotthard, they
retained the strong city of Neuhausel, which they had just won, in
Hungary, and conquered Candia; after Choczim, they were confirmed in
their possession of the province of Podolia, and their supremacy over
the Ukraine, the Marchland of Poland.
Of their soldiers the most formidable were the Janissaries. The policy
of the earlier Sultans had demanded a tribute of boys from their
Christian subjects. These children, early converts to Islam, were
brought up with no home but the camp, no occupation but war; and, under
the title of Janissaries, or the New Troops, were alternately the
servants and the masters of the Ottoman Sultans. The strength of the
Christians was drained, the strength of the Ottoman armies multiplied,
and the fields of Paradise replenished at once, in the judgment of pious
Mussulmans, by this policy. At this time the ranks of the Janissaries
were not solely filled by this levy, but it has been computed that
500,000 Christian boys may have become instruments for the subjugation
of Christendom, from the first institution of the tax in the fourteenth
century down to the final levy made in 1675. Our commiseration for the
Christian parents may be mitigated by the consideration that to sell
their children into slavery, uncompelled, was a not unknown practice
among the subjects of the Eastern Emperors, before the Mohammedan
conquest.
These Janissaries formed a disciplined body of regular infantry. In the
seventeenth century the Turks clung to the sabre, the musket, and even
bows and arrows, as their arms, neglecting the pike, "the queen of
infantry weapons," as Montecuculi calls it, just as afterwards they
neglected the bayonet. But in the use of their arms every man of the
Janissaries was a trained expert. The Turkish horsemen were famed for
their rapidity of action, being generally more lightly armed and better
mounted than the Germans or Poles. The Spahis, or royal horseguards,
were the flower of the cavalry. The feudal levy from lands held by
military tenure, swelled the numbers of their armies, and every province
wrested from the Christians provided more fiefs to support fresh
families of soldiers. Thus the children and lands of the conquered
furnished the means for new conquests. Light troops, who were expected
to live by plunder, spread far and wide before an advancing Ottoman
host, eating up the country, destroying the inhabitants, and diverting
the attention of the enemy. The Ottoman artillery was numerous, and the
siege pieces of great calibre. Auxiliaries, such as the Tartars of the
Crimea, the troops of Moldavian, Wallachian, Transylvanian, and even
Hungarian princes, made a formidable addition to their forces. These
armies lay, a terror to the inhabitants, a constant anxiety to the
rulers, upon the frontiers of Germany and of Poland;--a black storm of
war, ever ready to break in destructive energy upon them.
Whatever schism divided Turks and Persians, towards Europe at least,
from the Caspian to Morocco, Islam presented an unbroken front,
contrasting powerfully with the bitter divisions of Christendom.
Massinger, in the "Renegade," puts into the mouth of a Moslem what many
a Christian must have thought of with shame and terror:--
"Look on our flourishing empire, if the splendour,
The majesty, and glory of it dim not
Your feeble sight; and then turn back and see
The narrow bounds of yours, yet that poor remnant,
Rent in as many factions and opinions
As you have petty kingdoms."[1]
United Islam, which had preceded her western rival Spain in greatness,
seemed also destined to long outlive that power's decay.
When Spain, in the sixteenth century, had been at the zenith of her
power under Charles V., the Turks, under their great Emperor Solyman,
had been not unworthy rivals to her. Even then Solyman had penetrated to
the walls of Vienna, in 1529, and probably the lateness of the season,
October, and the absence of his heavy artillery, stuck deep in the soil
of Hungarian roads, saved the capital of the Austrian dominions more
effectually than the valour of the garrison or the relieving forces of
Charles could have done. Then the tide of Turkish power touched its
farthest limit, but the fear of its return was not destroyed till after
the lapse of one hundred and fifty years. Till after the siege of 1683,
it is said that a crescent disgraced the spire of St. Stephen's, the
cathedral of Vienna--a sign to avert the fire of Turkish gunners.
In the seventeenth century, when the great empire of Spain was fast
approaching dissolution, when France was the great power of Western
Europe, the Turks were still the great power of the East, with
territories even more widely extended than in the previous age. It is
true that, after the death of Solyman, a series of incapable rulers and
the natural decay of an eastern despotism had paralyzed the great powers
of Turkey; but the stern reforming vigour of Amurath IV. (1623-40), and,
still more, the wise administration of the first two Grand Viziers of
the house of Kiuprili, had done much to restore good government, vigour
and efficiency to the Ottomans.[2] Their empire, the speedy downfall of
which had been predicted by the English Ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, at
the beginning of the seventeenth century, had since fully recovered its
former reputation. A clever Frenchman, M. de la Guillatière, who visited
the camp of Kiuprili in Candia in 1669, formed the highest estimate of
the military genius of the Turks, and of their political insight into
the power and designs of the Christians. He judged of the greatness of
the Sultan by considering the number and quality of the persons who
feared his displeasure. "When he makes any great preparation, Malta
trembles, Spain is fearful for his kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, the
Venetian anxious for what he holds in Greece--Dalmatia and Friuli, the
Germans apprehensive for what remains to them in Hungary, Poland is
alarmed, and the consternation passes on as far as Muscovy, and, not
resting there, expands itself to the Christian princes in Gourgistan and
Mingrelia; Persia, Arabia, the Abyssinians are all in confusion, whilst
neither man nor woman nor beast in all this vast tract but looks out for
refuge till they be certain whither his great force is intended."[3] It
is a striking estimate of Turkish power, but not beyond what experience
confirmed. It was not till the second siege of Vienna, and her relief by
Sobieski in 1683, that the real instability of the power of the Sultan
was disclosed, that his armies were routed, his frontiers curtailed, his
power rolled back within the Save and the Carpathians.
Not for the first time, in the summer of that year, Europe trembled at
the progress of the Crescent. Since then, the tide of victory has run
almost uninterruptedly in favour of the Cross, and Turkey has sunk from
being the terror to the position of protégée, tool, victim, or tolerated
scandal of Europe.
The decline of her forces, the reversal of the former position of Turk
and Christian in the East, date from this great catastrophe of Islam.
For Eastern Europe at least the battle before Vienna was a decisive
battle. We must remember, indeed, what is meant by a decisive battle, or
by any other so-called decisive event. They are rather the occasions
than the causes of the transference of power. The causes lie deep which
can produce such great and such lasting results. The operation of many
influences, throughout a length of time, brings about ultimately the
striking revolutions in the history of mankind. No chance bullet which
strikes down, or avoids, a commander; no brilliant display of military
genius in the person of one man; no incapacity of a single officer, can
do more than alter the minor circumstances of great events. The great
man is not successfully great, unless his genius can seize upon the
opportunities offered by a rising tide of popular opinion, or profit by
the accumulated energy of a nation. The incapable leader can seldom
make shipwreck of a power unless it be built upon unsafe lines. The
presence of a thoroughly incapable commander argues something rotten in
his cause. The revolution, the reformation, the reaction, the
transference of empire will come; if not in one way, in another; if not
in one year, in the next, or in following years. The foundations of
success and of failure, are laid deep in the moral, religious and
political habits and institutions of nations. The invincible
determination and high political and military training of the Roman
aristocracy bore them safely through the catastrophes of a Second Punic
War and the revolt of their allies. The ordered liberty, and the
generations of successful adventure, which were the heritage of the
English nation, had won Trafalgar before a shot had been fired from the
_Victory_. The Persian host went forth predestined to choke the Gulf of
Salamis with corpses. No Kosciusko's valour could redeem the long
anarchy and blindness of Poland. Napoleon, marching from victory to
victory, but approached the nearer to that fall, which must await one
man against a continent in arms. So the Turkish myriads, victorious at
Vienna, would have fallen upon some less noble field before the skill
of some other Sobieski. But the genius and courage of individuals may
well determine the fate of armies for a day. One day's victory may call
for years of warfare to accomplish its undoing. A few years of delay may
work great changes in the fortunes of men.
It is no mistaken estimate of the relative value of causes, it is no
unintelligent interest which makes us prone to linger over the one
dramatic moment--that moment when the courses of the tendencies of ages
are declared within the compass of a day. By no hard effort of
imagination we identify our interest with that of the actors in the
scene. To them, however confident, the result is never clear; to them
the delay of a few years in the overthrow of some inevitably falling
wrong may make that difference for which no ultimate success can
compensate. It was cold comfort to the inhabitants of Vienna, or to the
King of Poland, to know that even if St. Stephen's had shared the fate
of St. Sophia and become a mosque of Allah, and if the Polish standards
had been borne in triumph to the Bosphorus, yet that, nevertheless, the
undisciplined Ottomans would infallibly have been scattered by French,
German and Swedish armies on the fields of Bavaria or of Saxony. Vienna
would have been sacked; Poland would have been a prey to internal
anarchy and to Tartar invasion. The ultimate triumph of their cause
would have consoled few for their individual destruction.
Prompted by feelings such as these we dwell upon the decisive hours,
when the long assured superiority asserts itself, for good and all. We
can hail Marathon, Salamis, Tours, or Vienna as the occasion, if not the
cause, of the triumph of civilization over barbarism, of Europe over
Asia. We must remember, too, that, if the day for a permanent advance of
Turkish power was over, yet that a temporary Turkish victory, and a
protracted war in Germany, could not have been confined in their
influence to the seat of war alone. So cool and experienced a
diplomatist as Sir William Temple did indeed believe, at the time, that
the fall of Vienna would have been followed by a great and permanent
increase of Turkish power.[4] Putting this aside however, there were
other results likely to spring from Turkish success. The Turks
constantly made a powerful diversion in favour of France and her
ambitious designs. Turkish victories upon the one side of Germany meant
successful French aggressions upon the other, and Turkish schemes were
promoted with that object by the French. The author of the memoirs of
Prince Eugene writes bitterly, but truly enough, of this crisis: "_Le
roi très-chrétien avant d'être dévot, secourait les chrétiens contre les
infidèles_ (at St. Gotthard and at Candia), _devenu pourtant un grand
homme de bien, il les agaçait contre l'empereur, et soutenait les
rebelles de Hongrie. Sans lui ils ne seraient jamais venus, les uns et
les autres, aux portes de Vienne._"
"If France would but stand neutral, the controversy between Turks and
Christians might soon be decided," says the Duke of Lorraine. But France
would not stand neutral.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "Renegade," Act. iv. sc. 3.
[2] Ahmed Kiuprili, the second Vizier of his race, was one of the
greatest ministers of his day. He was described by the Turkish
historians as "the light and splendour of the nation, the preserver and
administrator of good laws, the vicar of the shadow of God, the thrice
learned and all accomplished Grand Vizier." He seems to have really
deserved some of the praise.
[3] De la Guillatière, "Account of a Late Voyage, etc., and State of the
Turkish Empire." Trans. 1676.
[4] "If the Turks had possessed this bulwark of Christendom (Vienna), I
do not conceive what could have hindered them from being masters
immediately of Austria, and all its depending provinces; nor, in another
year, of all Italy, or of the southern provinces of Germany, as they
should have chosen to carry on their invasion, or of both in two or
three years' time; and how fatal this might have been to the rest of
Christendom, or how it might have enlarged the Turkish dominions, is
easy to conjecture."--Sir W. Temple, Works, iii. 393, edit. 1814.