The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (21 page)

Another of our few witnesses had anticipated even Leopold. Pucci, the voluble representative of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, in fact began careful preparations well before that afternoon of panic in Vienna.
³³
He got a wagon and horses for the purpose of carrying all his household goods to some place of safety. When the crisis broke, almost everything had to be left behind at the envoy’s lodging in the Herrengasse, as many people as possible scrambled into the wagon and he left the city. Arrived safely at Linz, he reported that the court and government intended to fix their headquarters there. The overcrowding
was dreadful but it seemed that the Empress, for one, was anxious not to travel farther as her pregnancy advanced.

A few days later (at about noon on the 14th), a frightening rumour swept through the town of Enns that the Tartars were coming up fast. By 2 a.m. next day this news reached Linz, and caused first an alarm and then a hurried departure as panic-struck as the flight from Vienna a week earlier.
³⁴
Some forty craft were commandeered, the court went safely upstream along that perilous stretch of the Danube that coils through the mountains, and arrived at Passau two days later. Pucci and a Danish envoy travelled by land. Justus Passer, coming up behind, discovered that everything and everybody were in complete confusion at Linz. All the richer burghers had left but refugees poured into and through the town. He himself finally hired a boat, it was nearly wrecked above Aschach, and he too got to Passau. Not surprisingly perhaps, he detected a melancholy in the Emperor’s features during vespers in St Paul’s church on the evening of the 18th; and one of the questions of the hour was whether the court should move still farther up the river, possibly as far as Regensburg. An alternative discussed was a removal to Prague but at the same time there were disturbing rumours of peasant risings in Bohemia.

The manuscripts from Leopold’s library in Vienna reached Passau on the 18th, the archives of the Imperial Chancery on the 21st, and the valuables of the treasury (the
Schatzkammer
) on 22 July.
³⁵

Earlier, the choirmaster of Heiligenkreuz had been in St Pölten.
³⁶
He tells of his difficulties in trying to travel farther west and of his meeting with Jesuits, some disguised, who admitted that their most serious danger was the embittered peasantry. At Melk he saw Leopold on the point of departure for Enns and Linz, and the little Archduke Joseph given the Abbot’s blessing in the courtyard of the abbey. The first standards taken from Tartars were being set up in the church. Returning to St Pölten he found his own freedom of movement, and that of many other travellers, strangely affected by the mixture of hearsay and news handed from knot to knot of people. The Tartars were over the Wiener Wald, it was said, and they were trailing the Emperor’s treasure which a strong guard was bringing from Krems to Melk. It was therefore too dangerous for civilians to move, because of the Tartars. No, said others, the real risk came from soldiers convoying the treasure. And at the same time the truculence of the peasants appeared as serious an inconvenience as anything else during this intolerable week, in the experience of such as the choirmaster of Heiligenkreuz.

While refugees had been fleeing up the Danube from Vienna, on a course roughly parallel others were in flight from Graz and the lowland towns of Styria up the valley of the Mürz.
³⁷
North of the Mur and Mürz, the miners of Eisenerz mobbed Jesuits. Away in the eastern areas of Styria defence measures were hurried on, beacons were prepared and stockades built; the Hungarian frontier was manned. Because Batthyány had submitted to Thököly, his villages just across that frontier were raided by the Austrians. There were
reprisals, devastation, and terror in all this part of the world. For a moment it looked as if Fürstenfeld, a border town of some importance, would fall to the Magyars although an expeditionary force from Carinthia and Carniola later came to the rescue and occupied it. Just as a thin screen of troops under Lorraine’s command was to protect Moravia, north of the Danube; so here in the south Wiener-Neustadt held out, and beyond Wiener-Neustadt a few companies and squadrons covered the approaches to Styria. The dragoon regiments of Metternich, Aspremont and Saurau were there. Further support was looked for from Nicholas Erdödi, the Ban of Croatia. All the same, throughout a vast area south of the Danube government had collapsed in mid-July, and the populations were helplessly on the move.

*
This was the first bridge over the Danube, upstream from Vienna.

5

The Siege

I

On the day the choirmaster first came to St Pölten, 100 miles distant to the east Kara Mustafa was in Ungarisch-Altenburg; and his Master of Ceremonies speaks of the dust rising thickly as the troops marched, so that one man could not recognise another.
¹

Three days later the Grand Vezir reconnoitred the ground between Schwechat and Vienna. He made his way first to the Neugebäude, a palace built by the Habsburg emperors on the spot where Sultan Suleiman the Lawgiver was believed to have camped during the siege of 1529. For this reason, and because it faintly imitated the Turkish style of architecture, and overlooked superb gardens with clipped alleys, with aviaries orchards and a menagerie, Turkish travellers in the past had greatly admired the palace.
²
Kara Mustafa may have wished to show his respect for that mighty predecessor whose venture against Vienna he hoped to surpass, but he also quite certainly regarded the building as a prize worth protection. There could be no question of sacking or despoiling it; and a strong guard was put there. He enjoyed his siesta, he rode forward to look at the city ahead, and then returned to Schwechat. But he was not a wise commander and it was already clear that he was unable to control his forces. The same day, and only a few miles off to the right, Fischamend on the shore of the Danube was raided and, according to the Master of Ceremonies, large stocks of timber were utterly destroyed: but a siege of the kind which Kara Mustafa had in mind required timber for the galleries and trenches of the miners.

On the next day, Wednesday 14 July, he moved forward to the slopes which look down towards the city from the south; the valley of the Wien was immediately in front and farther back were all the other features of military significance—the Canal, the Danube, the hills of the Wiener Wald behind the city, and the contours around the suburbs.
*
Here he called his council. Obviously, his lieutenants and engineers had been making their plans, and the
time had come to settle finally and formally the dispositions for an assault on Vienna. They were based on a conviction (which appeared to justify the whole general strategy of an attack), that the fortifications could be breached in the sector adjoining Leopold’s palace, the Hofburg.
³
Here the Wien curved away from the walls. From the higher ground on its left bank there was a fairly gentle gradient down to the glacis and counterscarp; the drainage appeared good; and from this point the approaches could conveniently be dug. Kara Mustafa had been told all this before. Now he was able to see for himself the force of the proposal. Even while he stood viewing the scene, the enemy tried frantically to destroy the buildings and garden-walls of the suburb, where they came closest to the bastions opposite the Hofburg; but the chances of exploiting so favourable a site remained very high. Moreover, the arguments against any other course of action were strong. If he made his approaches opposite the eastern wall of Vienna, they would have to begin close to the waters of the Wien, which would be likely to seep into them; if it rained hard, mining in this area would prove impossible. Farther round, the terrain favoured diggers and miners, and the rising ground at the back provided a good site for artillery. Engineers and gunners here had a chance of combining and concentrating their power to the best advantage.

Without hesitation the Grand Vezir instructed the main force of his army to camp on the other side of the Wien, between the villages of Gumpendorf and Hernals. Many detachments were sent further, to settle along a broad band of ground (as far as the village of Döbling), in this way circling round the city west and north. Other troops would be stationed in the suburb of Rossau,
⁴
adjoining the canal and relatively close to the city defences.
*
The pasha of Timisoara commanded his contingents here, together with Janissaries, with units from Anatolia and a whole miscellany of remote Ottoman provinces.
⁵
A smaller if still formidable, division stayed on the right wing, east and south-east of Vienna, at St Marx and elsewhere.
†
The Viennese observed with dreadful anxiety their opponents’ swarm of tents, now being placed in a grand if irregular crescent which gave an appalling, exaggerated idea of the total force of effective fighting men encamped around them.
⁶

Kara Mustafa sent in a summons to surrender, framed in accordance with the customary Ottoman demand on such an occasion.
⁷
A Turkish officer rode up to the counterscarp with a document, handed it to a Croat soldier and awaited a reply. ‘Accept Islam, and live in peace under the Sultan! Or deliver up the fortress, and live in peace under the Sultan as Christians; and if any man prefer, let him depart peaceably, taking his goods with him! But if you
resist, then death or spoliation or slavery shall be the fate of you all!’ Such, embroidered in rhetorical language, was the message. But Starhemberg curtly dismissed the messenger and continued to wall up the gates. Kara Mustafa, says the Master of Ceremonies, bade the guns speak.

The defenders were now compelled to reckon with a whole set of possibilities: an immediate general attack, feint assaults at certain points combined with real attacks on others; or a gradual and systematic destruction of the defence-works. But the enemy’s preparations soon gave away clues which became progressively easier to interpret.

On that first day the Turkish command, bringing up quantities of men and a tremendous train of baggage, horses, camels, guns and equipment of every kind, seemed occupied in building a new city of their own. Only a few roving detachments ventured close to old Vienna, to be smartly repulsed. The focus of Turkish activity lay south of the Burg. Well to the rear, the Grand Vezir’s tents were placed, and accommodation was prepared for treasury, chancery and offices of justice. The stores accumulated. Large forces were close at hand, and grouped into three divisions; to each was assigned a frontage for their approach to the city, in an area which lay on both sides of the road leading from the village of St Ulrich to the Burg-gate. This road sloped gently down, and then crossed the glacis to the counterscarp. At intervals there were walls and buildings still standing, also walled pleasure-gardens, and among them a building named the Rotenhof next a garden which belonged to Count Trautson. Here Kara Mustafa put his own forward base, within gunshot—about 450 paces—of the walls of the city. The Turks were delighted by the shelter to be found in so advanced a position. One of them believed that there was no precedent, in the long and glorious history of the Ottoman empire, for a siege in which the soldiers of Allah could actually ride under cover in this way as far as the points of entry into the trenches.
⁸

In this advanced position, Kara Mustafa naturally assigned himself the place of honour in the centre; he was to be assisted by the Aga and Prefect of the Janissaries with the troops under their command, and by the
beylerbeyi
of Rumelia with his. On the right he put the pashas of Diyarbakir and Anatolia with Asiatic contingents, and some more Janissaries. He gave the command of the left to the pashas of Jenö and Sivas, led by the Vezir Ahmed. On the same day, Wednesday the 14th, he himself crossed over the Wien to his ceremonial tent in the main camp; and during the night the troops of the centre, right and left, began digging their approaches towards the fortifications of the city. The centre faced the projecting angle of the counterscarp opposite the Burg-ravelin; the right wing of the Turkish position around St Ulrich faced the Burg-bastion; their left faced the Löbel-bastion. Early next morning batteries started firing from the height immediately behind them.

Leopold’s envoy Kuniz and his band of interpreters, after their long journey from Istanbul, found themselves assigned a pitch only a few hundred yards from St Ulrich. They would soon be scheming to get into touch with the
garrison, not much farther off. Serban Cantacuzene, Prince of Wallachia, took up his quarters in the neighbourhood of Schönbrunn. Our poor friend Marsigli, who had been captured by Tartars and sold by them to Vezir Ahmed, was now a cook-boy and drudge at Hernals.

The defenders continued to palisade the counterscarp. Now that Starhemberg understood the enemy’s tactic he had his own artillery moved into position, with the strongest concentration of pieces near the Hofburg. Other matters absorbed the councillors assembled in the town hall. The number of strangers in the city still frightened them, the scare of the Schotten fire suggested that traitors were at large: they wanted a complete census of the population household by household. The storage of the ammunition had not yet been settled. Next, they tried to decide how to use their manpower, and allocated 800 men to the burgher companies under arms, 120 to the watch, 180 to duties on the Dominican-bastion,
⁹
and another 180 to assist their Junior Treasurer George Altschaffer in his multifarious duties. His office was indeed the chief executive agent of the city councillors. As the siege continued, both they and Starhemberg used it unsparingly for a miscellany of civilian and semi-military chores.
¹⁰