The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (14 page)

It was generally held that the natural defences, at least on the southern side of the Danube, were very strong. If the enemy ever got across the Rába (and its right-bank tributary, the Marcal) at any point more than twenty miles upstream from Györ, he was likely to find himself trapped in the immense wilderness of marshes which in those days stretched for miles westwards, until they merged into the waters of the Neusiedler See. The course of the Rabnitz was one long swamp. It practically surrounded a firmer tract of ground known as the ‘island of Rába’; to the north-east communications with Györ through the marsh were reckoned difficult, and impossible for large bodies of troops without further bridge-building; to the south, the ‘island’ was delimited by the River Rába, here following a semi-circular course. The ‘isola Rab’ no longer appears on modern maps, because drainage during the last century has altered parts of the landscape; although, with their help, it is still easy enough for us to visualise its waterlogged character in 1683. Leopold’s military advisers knew as much as this, but no more. They examined plans of the citadels like Györ or Komárom, sketched by their engineers, but their military science did not include the mapping of the surrounding countryside, so that they only hazily took into account distances, contours, and the position of fords and marshes—all factors more readily appreciated by their children and grandchildren. It remained for a solitary Italian volunteer in the Györ garrison to begin to remedy this deficiency at the end of 1682, by sallying out to survey and sketch the course of the Rába above Györ. He was the young Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli,
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one of the great geographers of the next generation.

The government also put too much confidence in the territorial magnates of this region. The wealthiest of them, Paul Esterházy, was undeviatingly loyal, and for the best of reasons. Before 1670 his lands were already extensive on both sides of the Neusiedler See. Since then Leopold had granted him rich neighbouring properties confiscated from Nadasdy, a leader of the great Magyar conspiracy of that year; and the daughter of another conspirator, Zrinyi, had married Thököly.
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Esterházy certainly stood to lose by the triumph of ‘King’ Thököly, and spared no expense to raise forces for the defence. By contrast the Draskovich family, which owned lands and subjects along the middle course of the Rába, and Christopher Batthyány, whose domain bordered the Turkish frontier still farther south, were differently placed. True, they were Leopold’s subjects and they co-operated with the War Council early in 1683, asking for money and technical advisers to help them in fortifying the line of the river. But they would also be the first to suffer if Kara Mustafa advanced, and therefore tried to insure against possible
disaster by keeping secretly in touch with Thököly; and this weakened their determination to resist either him or his frightening ally.
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They were by no means so committed to the Habsburg cause as Esterházy.

When Herman of Baden came to survey the general situation in Hungary, he appears to have left out of his military calculations the whole territory of Upper Hungary lying to the cast, and even the mining towns in the Carpathians. His papers
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showed him that there were still Habsburg garrisons in these areas, with 1,700 men far away in Szatmár (Satu-Mare), and perhaps 3,000 more dotted about in smaller groups, but they could offer no real hindrance to Thököly’s forces. The Turkish danger made it impossible to spare troops to reinforce them; and it had always been Herman’s personal policy to advocate the appeasement of Thököly at any price. The effective frontier between Leopold’s power and that of his opponents, therefore, ran from north to south and south-east, from the Jablunka pass (which led over from Hungary to Silesia), then down the Váh valley until it reached the Danube at Komárom, then to Györ, and from here south-westwards up the River Rába, and into Croatia as far as Varasdin; then from Varasdin to the fortress of Karlstadt and the Adriatic coast. The greater part of this immense frontier, with forces and fortified points on each side sufficient to check the other’s more dangerous threats, had stood since the Ottoman conquest of Hungary in 1541. But if the frontier was always one of the great permanent preoccupations of the War Council, in 1682 Herman of Baden and his colleagues—perhaps with their gaze too often fixed on Germany—failed to grasp early or clearly enough that the arrival of Kara Mustafa’s grand army was bound to upset the existing balance of forces in Hungary; and that this would be the case even if the principal Habsburg citadels in the crucial area below Pressburg were strengthened, and the whole line was stiffened with extra troops. To man the frontier zones Baden at first reckoned on a corps of 10,000 under General Schultz, to cover the Váh from Leopoldstadt northwards. From Leopoldstadt, past Komárom and Györ up the Rába to Körmend, the Magyars under Esterházy and Batthyány were to be posted with perhaps another 10,000; 1,600 horses and 3,000 foot would hold the next part of the line as far as the River Mur. From there to the Adriatic, the defence depended on forces at the disposal of the Ban of Croatia and the government of Inner Austria.

This was totally inadequate. Gradually, both Emperor and War Council came round to the view that the chain of existing fortresses needed the support of an independent army in the field.
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Once the Turks had committed themselves (it was argued) to a particular line of advance or point of attack, it would be possible to use this army to good effect. Then the argument was pushed a step further forward: if the regiments were ready for the field well before Kara Mustafa reached Hungary, they could take the initiative, and thereby disrupt his plans by compelling him to turn aside in order to retrieve or avenge what had been lost by the Turks early in the season. There can be no reasonable doubt that a determination to put a field-army into Hungary
at the first opportunity was one reason for the issue of commissions to raise eight new regiments in January 1683. They would replace, in the Rhineland and elsewhere, troops now to be sent to a rendezvous in Hungary.

The discrepancy between an Austrian force of 30,000, and an invader whose numbers were never calculated at less than 100,000 remained very great. Some Viennese politicians certainly still hoped, against the evidence, for a change of sides by Thököly. Failing that, the majority of Habsburg advisers had to pray for a campaign in which the aggressive power of their field-army, and the defensive power of one or more of their fortresses in Hungary, would combine to check the enemy. The interaction of relieving armies, besieging armies, and besieged garrisons, was a favourite and obvious theme in the military science of that period. In the end these Habsburg advisers were right; but it was the very last of the fortresses which they considered in danger, Vienna itself, which held out, while the relieving army needed the heaviest reinforcement from Leopold’s allies.

Few middle-aged men in Vienna could forget the sense of panic and crisis in the city twenty years earlier, before the battle of St Gotthard. Now something had to be done, not only because of the real risks of the situation, but to calm public fears. Highly placed officials began to realise what was afoot in the Ottoman empire. From the beginning of October 1682 orders and instructions streamed out from the various offices of the court and municipality.
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Parts of the moat were cleaned. Several hundred workers were employed on the main works, and they reinforced the wall adjoining the Hofburg, as well as the defences of the Rotenturm-gate, which faced the Canal. By the end of the year there was an undoubted improvement along the whole line from the Burg-gate in the south as far as the New-gate at the north-west corner of the city. Contracts for munitions were discussed; and Starhemberg had already prepared a detailed memorandum of certain essential requirements, which included 250,000 pieces of timber of different specifications (above all, 200,000 palisades for the moat), 400,000 sand-bags, and 300,000 fascines.
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It was decided that the magazines in Vienna must be on such a scale that they could comfortably supply both the garrison and the army in Hungary. There were prolonged debates, at last, on a scheme for building a proper bastion across the Danube at the north end of the bridges, one of the most vulnerable points in the whole landscape round the city. It was also considered that an attempt would have to be made again to divert more water from the main streams into the Canal. At meetings of the War Council in December the agenda on Vienna fairly overflowed.
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Paper resolutions are one thing, but it is of course difficult to discover how much was actually achieved during the last three months of 1682. Many delays occurred owing to the haphazard arrival of supplies.

Timber, for instance, proved a singularly difficult problem. Abele had applied to the Habsburg Forest authority (the
Waldamt)
in the Wiener Wald, which declared that it could not possibly supply more than a fraction of the amount asked for, advising that the balance should be taken from private owners of woodland.
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We do not know what happened next, how much was bought from whom, or whether the treasury officials set aside too little money for this item; but in February 1683 the government solemnly appealed to the Estates of Lower and Upper Austria for help. Lower Austria grumbled hard, as usual, before placing an order with three timber merchants to deliver wood for 80,000 palisades by the middle of June. Some supply must have reached the city before this. The government also found that there were not enough labourers at work on the defences, and it had asked the Estates to arrange for the compulsory attendance of 3,000 men for eight weeks. The municipality of Vienna at once declined to produce its own share of this quota, 300, but agreed to find accommodation for the rest.
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In March the Estates, city and government came to terms; 2,700 countrymen were brought in slowly and fitfully, according to the distances they had to come, and were set to work. Half an infantry regiment, the Alt-Starhemberg, arrived from winter quarters in Moravia to help them; but they left for Hungary at the end of April. Half another regiment, the Kaiserstein, took their place. Even then, the maximum numbers employed in this way can never have been more than 4,700.

Less was accomplished on the other side of the Danube. When both time and supplies were running short, it appears to have been a most difficult technical question to decide how best to protect the bridges over the river, or the islands between them. Rimpler looked at the site in October and early in 1683 Peter Rulant, another expert, was summoned from the Rhineland to give an opinion. He came, saw, and recommended that blockships should be built. This meant getting special types of timber from places far up the Danube and the Inn. Unluckily, as news-letters from Vienna to London tell us,
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the winter was very severe and the ice melted late, so that transports coming down the river were held up and Rulant’s ships were never built. Starhemberg also tried hard to have the inlet cleared which led from the Canal into the Arsenal. When the spring came and the ice had gone, a picked detachment of workers was ordered to contrive, by dredging, the diversion of more water into the Canal—and so into the Arsenal’s dock, and into parts of the moat round the walls. They had little success.

Another awkward problem was demolition. Now, more than ever before, the experts were perturbed by the ease with which a besieging army would certainly find shelter close to the counterscarp. In January a commission representing both military and municipal authorities inspected the glacis, and drew up the itemised lists so dear to bodies of this kind. It scheduled all the walls and buildings which ought to be destroyed at once. Vested interests soon gathered hotly in protest. An imperial resolution, signed on 22 April, sought to enforce the commission’s will; but as late as May and June little
had been done—to the despair of soldiers arriving hot-foot from Hungary in July.

Of the high-ranking officers, Starhemberg left Vienna in April in order to take command of the artillery in the field. He was replaced by Colonel Daun, who apparently lacked the fire and pertinacity of his predecessor. The change came at a moment when in any case the energies of the government burnt rather low, because the success of its diplomacy abroad (especially a new alliance with Poland), seemed to guarantee effective assistance from other quarters; a mistaken optimism was now satisfied by the slow tempo of improvement in the defences of Hungary and Austria. But the name of Ferdinand, Marquis Obizzi, must be honorably mentioned. This officer had earlier been Starhemberg’s deputy as commander of the City Guard. In December he also took charge of the Arsenal where the stores, foundry and workshops were really the heart of Vienna’s defence; but they had to supply an army as well as a city. In a number of respects, to equip one meant depriving the other. On 21 April Leopold reviewed in the Burgplatz sixty-four cannon and their crews under Starhemberg’s command—then off they moved towards Hungary, and Obizzi naturally deplored their going. The casting of more and heavier pieces for use on the walls was begun at this time, but (according to critics) never in sufficient quantity. Obizzi also fretted over the supply problems of shipping. He needed fireships, warships, pontoon-boats. More ordinary types of craft were requisitioned in towns up and down the shores of the Danube, and commissioned from the wharfs at Linz and Gmunden.

Ball and bullet were ordered mainly from Steyr; iron ore, at least, was plentiful in the Austrian duchies, and not too far distant from Vienna. Merchants in Breslau had to supply 300 handmills for the manufacture of powder in Vienna. Time pressed, much larger quantities were required, and the flow of munitions preoccupied Abele himself. Evidence on the whole business is scanty,
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but the most important contractors were Böhm (of whom absolutely nothing certain can be said), and John Mittermayer, Administrator of the Habsburg mercury and copper mines in Istria and Hungary. He was a brother of the Master of the Vienna Mint. One document refers to a total expenditure of 521,800 florins on munitions in 1682 and the first six months of 1683. A second describes Böhm’s contract as an agreement to supply 6,000 hundredweights of powder, and Mittermayer’s as one for 4,000 hundredweights; and the third states that only ten per cent of Böhm’s consignment was delivered by August 1683. A meeting of senior officials was held on 9 March to question Mittermayer. Those present learnt from him some of his difficulties in trying to scour the market. Cash in advance was often demanded; Hamburg and Amsterdam were remote but essential sources of supply; while the greater their distance from the Danube, the higher the cost. By June reasonable quantities of powder, bullet and ball were assured, but without freeing the administration from continual anxiety. There was a
distinct possibility that either the army in the field, or the Hungarian citadels, or Vienna (if besieged), ran the risk of running short. Fortunately, as things turned out, Vienna itself was the main base for supplies.