The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (29 page)

The summons of Leopold’s own soldiers from the Empire was also a relatively simple decision to take. Although the government’s bias had earlier been to insist on the priority which their commitments in the west, and resistance to the claims of Louis XIV in Germany, should take over their commitments in the east and resistance to the Sultan in Hungary, the present crisis forced it to give way and to take risks. In consequence, although the diplomats were still instructed not to give way to French demands, the military administration quietly and steadily made arrangements to transfer regiments from west to east. On 1 August 1,000 men of the Lorraine regiment appeared at Passau, on the 5th Leslie’s regiment, on the 12th the Neuburgers, all bound for Lower Austria. It looked to Pucci as if only the ‘Jung-Starhemberg’ would be left to hold Philippsburg on the Rhine, assisted by troops raised by the Circles in Germany.
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The transfer, which of course involved a major administrative effort in the hereditary lands, as well as a real weakening of the military front against Louis XIV, was another solid addition to the army of relief on which the immediate future of the Habsburg dominion depended.

The government’s relations with its commander-in-chief were much more complicated. From the middle of July until the middle of August neither party had any authentic information about conditions inside Vienna. Lorraine argued that Starhemberg could not hope to hold out for long, given the scale of the Turkish assault, and the limited amount of munitions and food known to be in the city when communications with it were cut off. Passau retorted that enough munitions and food were known to be at Starhemberg’s disposal, that the garrison and the defenceworks were strong, while it would be madness to try and relieve the city without first assembling the maximum number of troops, drawn from all possible sources of manpower in Austria, Germany and Poland. This debate in fact continued week after week, carried on in a long sequence of reports, dispatches and instructions, which were taken to and fro between Lorraine’s headquarters and the court at Passau.
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Lorraine sent off five important and well-informed officers—Taafe, Welspurg, Rostinger, Pálffy and Auersperg—to Passau, and they reached Leopold on 20, 21, 26 July, 7 and 17 August. His written instructions to the second, third and fourth of these have been found, and we have Leopold’s written response to the first and the third. References to other letters and reports also survive, so that it is still possible to follow the controversy, which was intensified by the perennial discord between Lorraine and Herman of Baden.

Taafe left the camp opposite Vienna on 16 July immediately after the Turks
had cut the communications between Lorraine and Starhemberg. Lorraine, as we have seen, urged the maximum concentration offerees for the rescue of the city as quickly as possible, and also held that the relieving army would have to choose a route across the Wiener Wald. He quoted a letter from Caplirs, written a little earlier, which estimated the size of the garrison in Vienna at only 8,700 men (or even less)
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and spoke gloomily of the shortness of all essential supplies in the city. There was a certain dishonesty about this, because Lorraine’s staff knew well enough that there were over 10,000 men in the garrison; but it was ordinary good sense to favour the shortest possible route if the case for speed was proved. The government in Passau thought otherwise. It questioned the reliability of Caplirs and insisted on the Vienna garrison’s will and ability to keep out the Turks. It felt that there were two important objectives, to raise the siege and to protect the hereditary lands from any further devastation by Turks and Tartars; it wanted to carry out the rescue operation in such a manner that the provinces surrounding Vienna were also saved from the Turk. Leopold therefore deprecated—he had already done so in a previous dispatch from Linz—the retreat of Schultz and his forces from the line of the Váh. He asked for a firm defence of the whole area north of the Danube from Pressburg to Krems, and insisted on the need to hold the bridge at Stein because ‘the main army will probably have to pass over it to the south bank of the river’. But the question of the route to be followed by any relieving army was left over for more detailed discussion at a later date. The reply to Lorraine hints that it might be advisable to circle round farther to the south in order to give assistance to the Inner Austrian lands, and draw additional troops from that area. In any case the councillors at Passau believed that the suggestion, presumably also Lorraine’s, that an attempt might be made to raise the siege as soon as the Bavarian regiments had reached Austria was impracticable and dangerous, and they would have none of it. Instead they wished to use any additional troops, first of all, to give greater security to the countryside both north and south of the Danube.

Taafe’s mission, and the arguments urged by Lorraine and by the administration in Passau, anticipated the whole course of the debate during the next four weeks. Lorraine was certainly too nervous, but his fears may have spurred on the government sufficiently to bring together the force which saved Vienna just before it was too late.

Rostinger soon arrived at Passau with further memoranda. Lorraine once more assumed that the only possible route to Vienna lay across the Wiener Wald, but this time he said that the enterprise should be attempted as soon as an army of 50,000 German soldiers could be got together.
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This implied that there was no time to wait for the arrival of John Sobieski and his Poles. It was also necessary to provide efficiently for the relieving army, guaranteeing the supply of forage and food, in order to cut down the time needed to move from Krems to Vienna; and both Lorraine and the officer in charge of his commissariat begged for more money in order to pay the troops. Their Polish
auxiliaries were already two months in arrears, and grumbling in a way that threatened trouble. Leopold’s reply simply avoided the principal point of the argument. It did not state clearly that a force of 50,000 was too small for an attack on the Turkish army, but informed Lorraine that the negotiations with other courts were designed to bring into Austria a very much larger force, that steps had been and would be taken to find sufficient supplies when they were needed.

Lorraine was not satisfied. After his victory over Thököly at Pressburg he sent Pálffy to Passau to press the view that, if Vienna appeared in obvious danger of falling to Kara Mustafa, an army of 25,000 infantry supported by cavalry should try to relieve the city.
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A route over the Wiener Wald, ‘or a little above it to the right’, was again suggested; and the alternative of crossing the Danube at Pressburg and marching on Vienna from the east, which had been discussed after the recent victory in this area, was firmly rejected. Passau preferred to oppose Lorraine on this occasion by saying nothing at all; or rather, as Le Bègue sardonically noted, ‘after 22 days’ delay’
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Pálffy returned to the camp with a message forbidding any attempt to take decisive action, before the German and Polish troops now on their way across Europe had joined the Habsburg force. Indeed, Vienna still held out. When the letters from Starhemberg and Caplirs were finally brought to Lorraine on 15 August and were then sent on to Passau, readers could interpret them as they wished: the position in Vienna was serious but not desperate, or it was desperately serious. Lorraine sent Auersperg—that incessant bearer of letters to and fro—to press the second view. The ministers in Passau took the first;
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and for the next three weeks their veto forced the Habsburg commander to continue his many preparations for feeding, moving and guiding a confederate army, but not to anticipate the actions of such an army by acting independently.

The days of Wallenstein and Condé were over, fortunately for Leopold and Louis XIV Lorraine, and after him Eugene of Savoy, loyally recognised the authority of the Habsburg ruler. In 1683 that loyalty helped to maintain a government otherwise discredited by an overwhelming temporary setback.

Meanwhile Passau had also to keep the civilian administration of the provinces going, more often by exhortation than command. Leopold, for example, wrote elaborately to the Estates of Croatia on 26 July thanking them for their services, informing them of the troops promised by the German princes, and stating that a substantial armament was being built up in Styria to protect the Inner Austrian duchies, and to collaborate in the rescue of Vienna itself. The Croatians were asked to give all the support they could, keeping closely in touch with the administration at Graz and with Lorraine.
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Much more important, at this time, was the correspondence with the Lower Austrian Estates and government at Krems, so much closer to the principal theatre of war.
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The chief official here was Count Traun, assisted by the Abbot of Göttweig and others. One of Traun’s first duties had been to try to enforce Leopold’s order dated 13 July, that all shipping on the Danube in
Lower Austria must be moved over to the left bank of the river. Not everyone obeyed, and certainly not the Abbot of Melk, who was determined to defend himself against Turk or Tartar and at the same time wished to keep open his line of retreat across the Danube. The Abbot of Aggsbach was also a recalcitrant. Traun, authorised by the administration at Passau to use force, ultimately succeeded in getting his way; although the activity of the dragoons under Dunewald, who held the area south of the Krems bridge, no doubt did most to stop the enemy from raiding across the river. The security of the lands north of the Danube deeply concerned Traun, because devastation in that quarter would destroy the stocks of hay and corn needed to support the troops. Imports on the largest possible scale were needed, but the local supply was the obvious nucleus for Lorraine’s commissariat, and a contractor named Kriechbaum signed an agreement with the Lower Austrian administration on 29 July to provide it with these commodities. For Traun, another worry was the attitude of the peasants. There were all the signs of total indiscipline in many lordships; rebellious groups of peasants refused to work, and resisted requisitioning. It looks as if a conscription order published at Krems on 28 July was an attempt to enroll a local police force, in order to restrain the subject populations; but Traun also asked Passau for a regiment of troops to assist this improvised militia.

In the middle of August he himself went up the river to Passau to discuss a different matter, of greater and growing importance: the building of a bridge across the Danube at Tulln for the use of Lorraine’s regiments, and of the Polish troops when they arrived. Up to that time officials had been far more concerned about the existing bridge, connecting Stein (a mile away from Krems) and Mautern. When Leopold fled from Vienna, they at first wanted to build proper military works on the south bank, in order to protect it. But because the inhabitants of the little town of Mautern had almost all disappeared, while the Tartars’ approach was strongly rumoured, they then decided to break the bridge down. Fortunately Lorraine’s dragoons appeared in the nick of time, and Dunewald pushed the Tartars back. The bridge was saved. Then more troops, under Leslie, also reached Krems and from 9 August discussions were going on here about its repair and strengthening, and about the construction of a new bridge at Tulln, 25 miles down stream. The relief of Vienna, however slow the government’s diplomacy and cumbrous its organisation of supplies in the Austrian provinces, had drawn a stage nearer. The great practical necessity of the immediate future was to provide for the safe and speedy crossing of the Danube.

Meanwhile certain stout-hearted individuals, neither helped nor hindered by politicians in Passau or Krems, began to take more positive action against the raiders along the south bank of the river. The Abbot of Melk, on 17 July, informed the Estates of Upper Austria that the devastation caused by the Tartars (and by Magyars) was above all due to a lamentable unwillingness to attack them. One of his officials, writing to a brother at Linz, adds that the
enemy bands did not number more than fifteen men apiece. Sometimes only two or three horsemen swept up suddenly to set fire to barns and houses. They disappeared at once, if anyone dared to resist. It was, he said, as if the resident population were temporarily ‘bewitched’; more probably they were just not at home, and like the government had fled in panic. The Abbot was made of sterner stuff, and enjoyed the great advantage of stone walls surrounding a stronghold. Equally, the authorities at the Herzogenburg monastery east of Melk did their best. With the help of fifty musketeers and a sergeant sent by Leslie, they kept the raiders out of most of their property. In fact, little damage was reported in this quarter of the plain.

An Austrian detachment continued to hold on at Tulln, although in the neighbourhood were not only Tartars and Magyars but Turks ‘from Asia’—which we know, because during the second week of August a curious incident occurred.

Albert Caprara, dismissed by Kara Mustafa at Osijek, had been sent to Buda.
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The Turkish assault on Vienna prospered, and the Grand Vezir could see no further advantage in detaining an ambassador extraordinary to whom he felt obliged to accord some of the privileges of his status. So Caprara was brought from Buda to the encampment outside the besieged city, where he conferred with Kuniz and saw for himself the desolation of once prosperous palaces and suburbs. He was next taken over the Wiener Wald. He records a dignified and philosophic conversation over coffee, with the Turkish officer in charge of an outpost near Tulln. They lamented together the illiberality of war in so noble a landscape. Then—we are not told precisely how this was managed—Caprara got over to the other side of the Danube, and went to report at Passau.
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His journey, when it was first sanctioned by the Grand Vezir, must be understood as a sign of the Turks’ confidence; by the time Caprara reached Tulln, Leopold’s increasing armament had begun to tilt the balance of forces in central Europe to their disadvantage.