The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (32 page)

The King took an affectionate farewell of the Queen. She returned to Cracow to preside over the government of Poland, and this separation gave the King greater freedom of movement. It gave her that amazing series of letters, passionate and rhetorical, which he wrote in the course of his journey into Austria and Hungary.

The next few days were strenuous enough for the moving forces of men, and the districts through which they passed. The King spent the nights of the 22nd and 23rd in monastic houses. Crossing the Oder at Ratibor he was well entertained there by the Obersdorf family at the Emperor’s expense.
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His reception in Silesia satisfied the King, and provisioning for his army seems to have been adequate. The Habsburg administration gave the lightweight Polish coinage a limited legal currency, but naturally made every effort to keep the troops outside the towns; the quartermasters and commissaries were continually busy.
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The Estates of nobility paid deferential attention to the King and the Polish grandees. At the same time the wheels of diplomacy went on turning. The King wrote to the Queen on the 23rd and 25th, to the Pope on the 23rd, to Lorraine on the 24th. News came in from Danzig, Paris, Lorraine’s camp, and Cracow. With some 3,000 men the King definitely went ahead of the main army after the 24th, and on the next day hurried through Opava
without loss of time. He went up into the hills along a steep and stony road. On the evening of the 25th, he was handed official messages of welcome from Leopold and his court. But King John describes these as ‘impertinent’ to his Marysienka; while at Olomouc the next night he was displeased equally by his lodgings and the character of the citizens. He slept under canvas for the first time on the 27th, and by the next evening reached a small town not far from Brno.

The news coming in from the south was bad. Lorraine was getting desperate about the situation in Vienna; correspondence with the garrison increased his fears. On the 21st he forwarded Starhemberg’s letter of the 19th to the King and—the direct evidence has been lost—he must once again have appealed to Sienawski, who had advanced through Silesia and Moravia on Sobieski’s left. There is no sure proof of the date when the King first read Starhemberg’s letter but on the 25th he was highly alarmed by what he had learnt of Lorraine’s new request to Sienawski, a request backed by Lubomirski. He did not want Lorraine to try to relieve the city before he arrived, nor did he want Lubomirski or his Field Hetman Sienawski to risk the terrible penalties of defeat by employing too small a force of men. Above all he did not want his personal prestige compromised. As he said: ‘Precipitate action might cause disaster (which God forfend), or give to others the glory of forcing the enemy to retreat before I arrive, and therefore I am hurrying forward, having strictly commanded the Hetman to wait for me.
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With this crucial problem on his mind, it is hardly surprising that the ceremonial harangues and the salvoes of municipal artillery at Olomouc did not appeal to him.

On the 27th he received a letter written by Lorraine two days earlier. Addressed to Sienawski, it contained a positive proposal for a meeting between the Austrian commander and the Hetman at Wolkersdorf (a long way down towards the Danube) on that very day, the 27th. In accordance with the King’s previous instructions, this meeting could not and did not take place. Lorraine drew back to Korneuburg where there was enough to preoccupy him: guarding the area from which Thököly’s men and the Turks had recently been driven, destroying the Vienna bridges which the Turks were trying to mend, and finishing the new bridge at Tulln.
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The King moved on, hurrying but not to be hustled. He informed Lorraine on the 28th that he must wait for the troops behind him, while ordering Jablonowski to bring forward his cavalry and leave the infantry to follow. He received in audience one of the Liechtenstein family, proprietor of much of the neighbouring land. At Brno he dined with old Kolowrat, Lieutenant of Moravia. He admired the city, the citadel of the Spielberg above it, and the country-side round about which looked rich with the harvest—‘better land than the Ukraine’, he wrote. He camped late that evening, signing his letters long after dusk. There was much to occupy his thoughts. A copy of Starhemberg’s most recent appeal had arrived. So had Lubomirski in person, to give him first-hand impressions of the scene of war, and of the Habsburg leaders. But there was nothing from Poland. Had the
Queen reached Cracow? Where were those Cossacks and Lithuanians, after all the money spent on them? Or, looking south once more, why was the bridge at Tulln not ready yet? Should he lead his troops to Tulln, or Krems, or elsewhere? He now (on the 29th) asked for a conference with Lorraine as soon as possible.
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Next day his troops began to cross the River Thaya, the Austrian frontier. Hilly country lay to the left where his men were trying to establish contact with Sienawski’s detachments. Next day again they started at dawn, in clear cloudless weather, following a route south and westwards. Soon after noon Sienawski appeared on the road, and Lorraine shortly afterwards. The Duke, once a candidate for the Polish throne, and the King of Poland had met at last. They rode on to Ober-Hollabrun together where they found Waldeck, commander of the Franconian troops already camped on the other bank of the Danube, and various high-ranking officers. There were introductions, inspections, toasts and preliminary consultations. All the witnesses differ as to the details; all were aware that this was a significant occasion, and not only in the history of an Austrian village.

In 1683, so far, most men had discussed the great crisis of the day from a distance. Vienna was remote, beleaguered, and they pondered its probable fate in courts and townships between Madrid and Podolia. They continued to do so, but the meeting at Hollabrun signified that the Habsburg government was at length fusing together widely dispersed forces into a combined armament capable of relieving the city. When Sobieski and Lorraine and Waldeck met, it was as if the curtains had been pulled back, though only by an inch or two and for a moment, to disclose the possibility of an astonishing and decisive feat of arms. The Danube, the hills of the Wiener Wald, and the numbers of the enemy, had always appeared formidable obstacles to success. On closer inspection they still looked formidable, and yet it seemed possible to overcome and even to profit from them.

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The Elector’s obligation to send help to Poland was a relic, confirmed by treaty, of the old feudal dependency of East Prussia on the Kingdom of Poland which ended in 1657.

II

One other powerful force, from Saxony, had also been brought into the arena by this date.

Leopold’s ministers, when the Sultan’s army entered Hungary, sent Lamberg once more to John George in Dresden and to Frederick William in Berlin. They continued to think in terms of the defence of the Empire, but hoped that a satisfactory agreement with the greater German princes would free more Habsburg troops to deal with the Ottoman advance. A fresh negotiation began in Dresden, but was soon overshadowed by the Elector’s dispute with his Estates. They refused to pay for his increasingly numerous standing army, while he insisted on larger grants of supply. Then the dreadful news from Vienna reached them, to be followed hot-foot by Lorraine’s special envoy the Duke of Sachsen-Lauenburg, appealing for immediate aid.
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John George’s military ardour was at once fired by the prospect of a catastrophe which his initiative might help to avert. He had in any case to face the threatening implications of a permanent Ottoman encampment within striking distance of the routes northwards from Moravia and Austria. But he also argued like his neighbours in Franconia:
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it happened that at the moment he was maintaining numerous troops ready for action; that his own subjects objected strongly to the cost; and that the Turkish assault on Austria made their employment in the Empire unlikely because the Empire would have to acquiesce in a peace dictated by France. If, and the if was important, the Habsburg lands paid the costs, an expedition to Vienna looked like the reasonable temporary solution of a serious problem.
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The crisis of 1683 in fact forced the Dresden government to use a tactic which was popular enough in the early history of German standing armies. In the next few years Saxon and Brandenburg and Hanoverian regiments, dispensable at home, would be hired out to fight for the Habsburgs in Hungary or for Venice in the Morea. These arrangements were often the result of the most exact and bitter bargaining; but John George proved on this occasion a somewhat careless politician.

He had taken his decision by 22 July without insisting on precise agreements about supply, or the command of his forces in the field. Sachsen-Lauenburg assured him that the Habsburg government was certain to satisfy him on the first point; the Elector vaguely felt that the second could cause little trouble because he himself was setting out at the head of his army. Lamberg wrote from Berlin to lay that he intended to come back immediately to Dresden, in order to complete detailed arrangements for the line of march through Bohemia, and the provisioning of the Saxon regiments. The Elector still had qualms that Frederick William of Brandenburg would secure more favourable terms from Leopold, and he therefore instructed his envoy Schutt to negotiate with the Habsburg statesmen at Passau. Schutt was to ask for the army’s pay and supply on the march and during the campaign, for winter quarters, and also for a solution of current frontier disputes affecting forestlands claimed by both Bohemia and Saxon mining enterprises; if possible, Saxony wanted territorial concessions. It sounded grasping enough, but all these requests were robbed of their menace by John George’s prior decision to go to Vienna.

This was the position on the last day of July, and the Elector left Dresden on 11th August.
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The bustle in and about the city was tremendous. On 4th, 5th and 6th, some 7,000 infantry and 3,250 horse and dragoons were mustered on a great meadow by the banks of the Elbe, to be ceremonially reviewed by John George on 7 August. A first-class artillery officer and expert on fortifications, Caspar Klengel, selected artillery from the Dresden arsenal: 16 guns, 2 petards, 87 carts, 351 horses and 187 men were inspected on the 10th. The Elector’s own household and staff, when the expedition set out, amounted to 344 persons. Meanwhile members of the Saxon Diet produced a final catalogue of their doubts, debts, and grievances, in a not so humble petition. Commissaries of the Saxon and Bohemian governments met in conference, they settled
how fast the army should march and how often it should rest. The Saxons undertook to cross the Bohemian frontier on 13 August and the Austrians agreed in rather airy and imprecise terms to find the supplies which would be required in Bohemia.

The Saxon soldiers now began to move southwards. It was at once apparent that communications and commissariat were entirely inadequate in their own country. They must have put to one another the question, were conditions likely to improve across the border in Bohemia?

A bare recital of dates in the month of August, and of places passed, seems to record the steady progress of the expeditionary force.
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It went over the heights to Teplice, and reached Lovosice by 16 August. Here it divided into two main bodies. Most of the cavalry moved up the Elbe valley, crossed to the right bank of the tributary Ultava (the Moldau) and then rode over the plains east of Prague, arriving in the uplands of southern Bohemia by the last day of the month. Meanwhile, the infantry and the Elector himself reached Prague on the 20th, followed the obvious southerly route to Tabor, turned south-east, and joined the cavalry in the neighbourhood of Nová Bystrice. They were now half-way between Prague and Vienna.

This record is deceptive. Only feverish negotiation, and hard riding by the negotiators, kept the army moving forward. On the day John George entered Bohemia, and on the next day when he rode to Teplice, a whole sequence of envoys reached his headquarters: the tireless Lamberg still shuttling between Brandenburg, Saxony and Passau; the Bohemian commissioners, who now announced that they were not empowered to provide supplies
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to the Saxon troops; and a messenger from Schutt, to state that his discussions at Passau had not led to an agreement. Indeed the Habsburg ministers turned down every one of John George’s demands: for winter quarters, supplies, the supreme command in the field, and territorial concessions of any kind. They simply continued to ask blandly for his help and of course, from their standpoint, they correctly assumed that the Elector would find it difficult to draw back. The Saxon counsellors conferred angrily at Teplice. The diary of one of the most influential, Bose, says that the case was argued for an immediate return to Dresden.
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Lamberg intervened, pleaded, and finally secured a fresh statement of Saxon grievances with which he hurried off to Passau. The Elector said that he was determined not to advance beyond Prague until he received a satisfactory answer. The paper in Lamberg’s hand repeated his original demands, but the envoy himself now saw that only one point was crucial: if the Habsburg ministers wanted the Saxon army, they must at least co-operate in finding the necessary food and forage; nor could the Saxons be expected to pay for these. The other demands could be evaded, as before, by sensible diplomatic inaction. The army moved on. The Elector delayed a few hours longer to enjoy the hunting and to admire the scenery.

What happened in Teplice happened in Prague. Schutt’s message had been followed at a slower pace by a polite letter from Leopold, echoing the negative
response of his councillors. The reply to the Saxon ultimatum carried by Lamberg had not yet come in. Once again the Elector sent off a messenger, Friessen, who was to state that the Elector proposed to advance no farther than two days’ march beyond Prague unless he got a satisfactory answer. Prague, so the diarists report, was an enjoyable city, the entertainment given in the Duke of Sachsen-Lauenburg’s palace was excellent; the Elector went sightseeing but, once again, he finally moved forward on 22 August without waiting for Leopold’s reply.