To return, therefore, to the troubles in Hungary, which gave occasion
for French intrigue and for the interference of the Porte. The Turks,
reinvigorated by the policy of the late Vizier Kiuprili, but directed no
longer by his cool experience and judgment, were now not slow to take
advantage of the difficulties of Austria. After their defeat at the
hands of Montecuculi at St. Gotthard in 1664, they had consented to a
twenty years' truce, by which they were still left in possession of the
greater part of Hungary, and of that part where the pure Magyar
population most prevailed. This truce had not expired when the
oppressions exercised in the part of their country remaining to the
Emperor drove the Hungarians to arms, and Count Tekeli to seek aid from
the Sultan. Ordinarily scrupulous in the observance of their treaty
obligations, the Turks were on this occasion overcome by the
temptations held out to them of an easy extension of their frontier and
of their influence. With the active aid of the Hungarians, and with the
tacit consent of France, they deemed it possible to deal a mortal blow
at the house of Austria. The Sultan, Mahomet IV., was perhaps not over
ambitious, but he was spurred on by the zeal of a servant. The Grand
Vizier, Kara Mustapha, though a nephew of the great minister Kiuprili,
owed his advancement more to the beauty of his person and to the favour
of the Sultana Validé, or Queen Mother, who ruled the ruler of Islam,
than to other connexions or to ability. His ambition, however, was
believed to aim at no less than a dependent kingdom for himself in
Hungary or at Vienna. Here, at all events, and not against the Poles or
Russians, did Kara Mustapha determine to gather his laurels and his
booty. He had, indeed, already essayed a Russian campaign with little
profit. A more striking success and greater glories, more abundant
plunder with fewer toils, seemed to be promised by a campaign in the
valley of the Danube, than by one among the marshes and forests of
Poland, or of the Ukraine.
Too late, in 1681, the court of Vienna attempted a conciliatory policy
in Hungary. The spirit of rebellion had been aroused, and the offers of
redress and justice made by the Emperor were distrusted as a veil for
treachery, or despised as the confession of weakness. Tekeli defied the
Emperor, and assumed the offensive even beyond the borders of Hungary.
Neither was the Porte to be propitiated. In vain an Imperial Embassy to
Constantinople sought a prolongation of the truce, which was on the
point of expiring at the end of the stipulated twenty years. The demands
of the Turks rose with the progress of their preparations. A
principality for their ally, Count Tekeli, in Hungary; extension of
territory, with the strongest border fortresses for themselves; a great
war indemnity--such were the terms which implied a determination not to
negotiate. The ambassador, Count Caprara, was compelled as a prisoner
himself to witness the departure of the Turkish hosts for the frontier.
At the end of the year 1682 the main body were drawn together at
Adrianople. Mahomet IV. encouraged his troops by his countenance in the
camp, and beguiled the tedium of winter quarters by his favourite
pastime of hunting. The sport was carried on upon a gigantic scale with
thirty thousand beaters, many of whom perished by exhaustion. "No doubt
they have spoken ill of me, and God hath dealt them their reward," was
the reasonable conjecture of the Sultan upon their fate. This mighty
hunter, however, relieved his army of his presence when the spring of
1683 saw it finally set in motion for the Danube. Kara Mustapha was
invested with complete command. Accounts vary as to the precise point
where Mahomet left his army. The ambition of his Vizier perhaps was
interested in removing so soon as possible from the field the Sultan, to
whom the glory of success would have been necessarily ascribed. Similar
motives had, according to M. de la Guillatière, caused others before
this to keep the easily persuaded prince back from the camp, whither his
first impulse would have led him.
Oriental exaggeration is prone to magnify the hosts which Asiatic
despots can command for their service. The muster-roll, found in the
tent of the Grand Vizier after his defeat, affords a better basis for
calculation. We find there, in round numbers, 275,000 fighting men
enumerated, as the original strength of the Turkish army. Judging by
the analogy of our Indian armies, the attendants and camp followers of
all descriptions must have doubled these numbers. In Hungary, the Vizier
effected a junction with Count Tekeli, who was at the head of nearly
60,000 men--Hungarians, Transylvanians, Turks and Tartars. Even French
officers and engineers were to be found in Tekeli's ranks; and the
character of his cause was vindicated by coins which he caused to be
struck with the inscription, _Pro Deo et Patria_. Half a million of men
probably, of all creeds and races that lie between the Carpathian
mountains and the Arabian deserts, were arrayed under the standard of
the Prophet in the valley of the Danube. Again, according to the Turkish
returns, of these 50,000 men perished in the operations before the
decisive battle that relieved Vienna. Of the whole vast multitude not
more than 50,000 it was computed, ultimately regained the Turkish
frontier.
But even if drawn up with the best intentions, the accuracy of such
returns and estimates can never be more than an approximation to the
truth. It is sufficient that hundreds of thousands were marshalled
beneath the Crescent to burst in a storm of desolating war upon the
Christian lands.
For the struggle between Turk and Christian was not of the character of
those operations to which the term of civilized warfare is
conventionally applied. Prisoners were seldom made. The Christian
slaughtered; the Turk, if he spared, sold into slavery his captives;
prisoners we cannot call them to whom future release was denied. Far and
wide before the Turkish armies, the Tartars and the irregular horsemen,
whose sole pay was plunder, whose diversion and whose business at once
was rapine, spread in a desolating cloud over the country. The whole of
the unconquered Hungary, the Austrian duchy, the plains of Moravia and
the mountains of Styria were swept or threatened by the scourge. Poland
they had long held to be their licensed field of plunder, and now
Bavaria, and Bohemia even, trembled at the terror of their approach. The
painful curiosity of their friends has attempted an estimate of the
numbers of Turkish captives taken in this invasion. 32,000 grown
persons, the great majority women, 204 of whom were maiden daughters of
the nobility; 26,000 little children were, they tell us, carried off
into slavery. This return seems to make no mention of lads, nor of elder
girls, who would perhaps form the majority of those spared for the
slave-market. How many of these perished under their hardships, or by
the Turkish disasters; how many others tasted death, but before slavery;
how many others may have lost home, wealth and honour, must remain
beyond enumeration or even conjecture. It is said that in lower Austria
and on the frontiers of Hungary alone, 4936 villages and hamlets were
given to the flames in 1683.
To meet this torrent of devastation, the Emperor Leopold could muster
but scanty forces. A full half of the territory now united under the
Austro-Hungarian monarchy was in the hands of the Turks, or of the
Hungarian rebels; or then formed part of the territories of Poland. The
finances of Vienna have never been a source of strength. "Business men
laugh at our finance, for my part I weep over it," said Eugene to the
Emperor not long afterwards, lamenting the want of the sinews of war.
The Imperial influence of Leopold in Germany was small. The German
princes were distant, jealous, slow to move. Brandenberg was irritated
over the Silesian claims, that fruitful source of future war. France was
all but openly hostile. Spain was powerless. Venice, a shadow of her
former self. Poland alone, under her heroic monarch, John Sobieski,
might give present and substantial assistance. Yet all knew that to lean
upon the support of Poland was to risk leaning upon a bruised reed
indeed.
Poland was, indeed, to all appearance, still a great country. The
Russian province of Poland, Lithuania, Gallicia, Posen, part of Prussia
proper, were Polish. Roughly speaking, her frontiers stretched from the
Dneiper to near the Oder, from the Baltic to the Carpathians. But a
great territory does not make a great nation. The approaching fall of
Poland was foreshadowed by her fortunes, even in the seventeenth
century.
The extraordinary calamities of that country should not blind us to the
means by which she brought some of her misfortunes upon her own head.
Her constitution seemed skilfully contrived to unite the vices of
aristocratic and democratic governments with the virtues of neither. Her
people were turbulent without freedom, proud without steadiness of
purpose. She lacked the equality and the popular support proper to a
republic, as she lacked the fixed succession to the highest office and
the consistent policy which are supposed to be the advantages of
monarchy. A mob of tens of thousands of armed citizens pretended to form
a deliberative diet. Their convention was always a signal for confusion;
their dissolution was often the prelude to civil war. In the huge
concourse a single _veto_ could stay proceedings, unless indeed the
malcontent paid for his opposition with his life. An attempt to
introduce representative assemblies was always resented, and the
experiment restricted, by the jealousy of the citizens. Delegates, not
representatives, came to the meetings. They were vigilantly observed,
and strictly cross-examined on their return, by self-constituted judges,
as to the performance of their mandate. Real debate and deliberation,
free judgment and rational decision, were as impossible in one kind of
assembly as in the other. Below these citizen-nobles, the people were
slaves. The two halves of the state, Poland and Lithuania, were set
against each other continually. The monarchy became purely elective in
the sixteenth century. The king was the nominee of some foreign court,
or of some domestic party, or family. Factions nourished from abroad
were thus kept alive. Once elected, the king found his power curtailed
on every side; and was generally as solicitous for the advancement, and
future succession perhaps, of his family, as for the good of the state.
He might be a stranger, or he might owe his position to the support of a
foreign power. He seldom or never could be more than the nominee of some
faction, the king of a party to the end of his days.
John Sobieski, the Polish king, and himself once a Polish nobleman, was
not a candidate put forward by France for the Polish crown, but was
generally supposed to lean towards a French connexion. His wife was
French; he had passed some of his earlier years in France, and had
served in Louis' musketeers of the Guard. His most formidable rival for
the crown had been Charles Leopold of Lorraine,[6] the Austrian
candidate, who was now commanding the Imperial armies. An ill omen for
any unity of action in the future, between the two, against the Turks.
Sobieski had fought his way to royalty. He had contended against the
enemies, from Sweden to Turkey, with whom Poland was continually
embroiled. His medals bore the proud device of a sword piercing three
laurel crowns, with on its point a royal diadem, and the truthful motto
below, _Per has ad istam_. Poland had been afflicted by Cossack
insurrection, Tartar devastation and Turkish conquest. The king,
Michael, had signed the disgraceful peace of Buksacs, by which the Poles
became Turkish tributaries. Sobieski and the other nobles repudiated the
treaty; and at Choczim, in 1673, Sobieski overthrew the Turks with such
slaughter that "the turbans were floating thick as autumnal leaves upon
the Dneister." The crown of Poland rewarded his victory; but the
turbulence and inconstancy of his subjects prevented his reaping the
fruits of success. At the most critical moments he was left destitute of
men and of money, in the face of a host of Turks and Tartars. At Lemberg
before his coronation, and at Zurawna after it, he was glad to have
successfully defended the remainder of his country. The peace named from
the latter town, left part of the Ukraine and nearly all Podolia with
the fortress of Kaminiec, in Turkish hands.
The Turks scrupulously observing their part of the agreement, believed
that they thereby secured the neutrality of Poland. Sobieski had
suffered injuries and affronts at the hands of Austria. The punctilious
pride of the Emperor was likely to add to the difficulty of forgetting
these. At the last moment only would Leopold consent to address the man
who was to save his empire by the title of Majesty. The Poles either
were loth to begin a new Turkish war at all, or represented the
advantage which might be gained by holding aloof, till both combatants
were exhausted. If they fought, Podolia, not Hungary, the recovery of
Kaminiec in the former, not the relief of Vienna, should be their
object. The Lithuanians were specially jealous of Sobieski, and slow to
move. The Cossacks were not to be depended upon. The country was
exhausted of men and money by former campaigns. The French ambassador,
Forbin, Cardinal de Janson, was instructed to work upon the king by
promises of the future support of Louis, of visionary crowns in Hungary,
and of lands in Silesia as the price of his inactivity. No means were to
be spared to detach Poland from Austria. The Cardinal worked
cautiously, being an old friend and in expectation of future favours
from Sobieski; but a special agent who was with him, the Marquis de
Vitry, spared no pains to foment jealousies and to excite fears, and
distributed money among the partisans of a peace policy. An abortive
scheme was entertained for supplanting the king himself by another, more
amenable to French influence. But the conspiracy was discovered, and the
effect was disastrous to the French faction. The Poles rallied round the
victor of Choczim and of Lemberg, and the authors of the intrigue
against him were thrown into prison, or left the country. The French
agent, Vitry, himself retired from Poland. Fortunately also for
Christendom, and for the house of Austria, the wife of Sobieski, Marie
Casimire de la Grange d'Arquien, a Frenchwoman, had determined to thwart
the diplomacy of her native land. The failure of an intrigue, by which
her father, a needy Marquis, was to have been converted into a wealthy
Duke; a refusal of the French court to receive her, a French subject by
birth, as an equal should she revisit France;--these causes made her an
Austrian partisan. Sobieski, at the age of fifty-three, still burned
with youthful ardour for his wife of forty-one, though scandal would
have it that this King Arthur had his Lancelot in the Field-Marshal
Jablonowski, one of the foremost of his officers. "His incomparable
Maria," as the king addressed his queen in his frequent letters, was at
all events vain and intriguing, and seldom influenced for good the
husband whom she also adored. Yet on this occasion her persuasions
seconded the arguments which would undoubtedly have swayed Sobieski
apart from her. His true atmosphere was that of the battle-field. His
most glorious victories were won over the infidels. The danger which
menaced Austria was a common menace to Christendom. Warsaw itself would
not be safe if Vienna fell. The foremost champion of the Cross would not
be wanting in such a crisis. In his enthusiasm he deemed it possible to
unite the jarring elements of European society in a grand crusade.
Visions floated before him of a great League, including the Christian
powers and the Persians, by which the Turkish Empire should be
overthrown, Constantinople recovered, Moldavia and Wallachia united to
the Polish crown, and a republic of Athens and the Morea established. A
scheme too great for accomplishment in the face of the selfishness of
France and Austria and the inherent weakness of Poland.
But a general subscription was needed to put any army into the field at
all. Rome and Italy were foremost in contributions; even ecclesiastical
property was allowed to be mortgaged in the cause. The Pope, an
economical reformer in Rome, as befitted the member of a banking family,
the Odescalchi, was able to provide two million _scudi_. Christina,
ex-Queen of Sweden, bestirred herself to increase the fund. The Regent
of Portugal sent money, and sanctified the gift by a simultaneous
holocaust of Jews. 1,200,000 florins were to be advanced by the Emperor
to pay the Polish troops. The Pope undertook to guarantee the repayment,
and contributions were expected from the King of Spain. Both these
latter alike were swayed by the double motive--fear of the Turks, and
the desire to set free the Empire to act against France again. Leopold,
as his contribution to the harmony of the allies, had condescended to
yield the title of "Majesty" to the King of Poland, and had held out
hopes of a marriage between the son of Sobieski and an Austrian
Archduchess, which might ensure the succession of the former to his
father's throne. A dispensation from the Pope released the Poles from
the duty of keeping their oaths to the Turks. The Emperor and the King
exchanged oaths not to resort to such a dispensation from their
engagements to each other. The treaty of alliance was signed; but before
the Polish troops could be mustered in any numbers, the Turkish armies
had united with those of Tekeli, and were pouring across the frontier.
FOOTNOTE:
[6] The Duke of Lorraine had married the Emperor's sister, the widow of
the late Polish king, Michael. The French had driven him from his
hereditary states, and he found employment at the head of his
brother-in-law's armies, against them and the Turks.