The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (35 page)

Between 9 and 19 August 12,000 florins were paid out for work and materials needed on the fortifications, on the 13th nearly 1,000 florins were paid to the artillerymen, and on the 19th the troops got their fortnightly allotment of some 32,000 florins.
⁷
The first of these figures is exceptionally high, and is a fair indication of what was going on in the moat and on the bastions. On the 19th, as well, a small raiding party went out by the Carinthian-gate and was lucky enough to return with thirty-two oxen. The garrison also recovered that part of the ravelin which had been lost the day before.
⁸

Indeed the administration in the city ticked on. The bitter and inch by inch struggle for ravelin and moat continued. The fears or hopes that something of a more spectacular kind would decide the issue were daily fed on not very substantial rumours and reports—like the rumour that the Turks were digging a tunnel right under the main wall into Leopold’s wine-cellars, or the report that Turkish cavalry were overrunning all the countryside north of the Danube after Lorraine’s regiments had marched away to the west.

On 25 August Starhemberg held an important conference with all his principal officers on the Löbel-bastion; immediately opposite the enemy had
been steadily making further progress in the last few days and was coming, as far as he could judge, dangerously close. A major sortie was decided,

and accordingly about four in the Afternoon Captain
Travers,
and Captain
Heneman
of the Regiment of
Souches
and Lieutenant
Simon
of the Regiment of
Beck,
were commanded out upon this Service; who passing through the Sallyports, were followed thither by Count
Sereni
and the Prince of
Wirtenberg . . .
And Count
Souches
having at the same time undertaken another Sally, not far from the same place, the Enemy was forced to give ground; and the Prince of
Wirtenberg
pursuing closely into their Trenches without the Counterscarp as far as one of their Batteries, upon which were planted three Pieces of Ordinance, it would have been very easie to have nailed up their Guns, if our men had been provided with Nails, but the Turks beginning to rally and to increase in number, they thought fit to retire into the Ditch, still firing upon the Enemy that followed them. In this Action were lost about two hundred Common Souldiers on our side.
*

With that account may be compared the corresponding entry in a Turkish version of the day’s fighting:

Before noon the Grand Vezir entered the trenches, and summoned to his headquarters Hussein pasha, Bekir pasha, the Aga of the Janissaries from Rodosto and the
kethuda beyi
Yusuf, as well as other commanders. He gave solemn warnings to them all, and ordered each one of them to do his utmost to bring the enterprise to a successful conclusion, expending life and property for the true faith. Then he returned to his own base outside the works. He granted the province of Eger to
kethuda
Ahmed pasha and the province of Maras to Omer pasha; he awarded them both insignia of the noblest rank. In the afternoon a mine was exploded in Ahmed pasha’s sector on the left (that is, opposite the Löbel), and the flame of battle flickered for over half an hour. It seemed as if the struggle would never end, and the fighting continued with incredible bitterness. The commander of the volunteers was given insignia appropriate to his rank.
⁹

Noticeably, the Turkish writer has played down this affair, but on those occasions when the garrison had decidedly the worst of the encounter the Austrian diarists have far less to say about it.

Two days later Starhemberg tried to repeat this tactic, and formidable assault parties were thrown against the Turks in the moat, particularly in front of the Burg-bastion. But although his men did a good deal of damage the Turks were undeniably moving forward towards the main bastions at this stage, and gradually more and more of the ravelin fell into their hands; the latter was by now little more than a ruin, with heroic groups of Christian soldiers taking turns to defend it as long as they could also hold the entrenchment which gave access to it. That day and the next, a quantity of rockets were fired off from the tower of St Stephen’s at nightfall, in an attempt to warn Lorraine of the growing urgency of the crisis at hand. The volunteer Michaelovitz prepared to set out with one more dispatch to the world outside the city. The Turks
welcomed those rockets as a sign of the garrison’s distress. ‘May the almighty Lord of Heaven obliterate the infidels utterly from the face of the earth.’
¹¹

At last the Turks closed in on the ravelin and, as they did so, began to concentrate their attack on the two bastions. On 2 September after slight rainfall, one powerful mine brought down a part of the wall of the Burg-bastion, and during the same night the post of fifty men under Captain Heisterman (of Starhemberg’s regiment) on the ravelin suffered terrible losses when the enemy set fire to the timbers around them. But although Heisterman had orders to retire if it proved necessary, he held on until he was relieved at two o’clock on the next day. Then, and then only, Starhemberg finally gave up the ravelin. For both sides it was the beginning of the end, and they knew it.

The defence, underestimating considerably the Turkish working-parties in the moat, was surprised by the suddenness of the next major attack. At two o’clock in the afternoon of the 4th, after a showery morning of relative calm, the great blow fell.
¹²
Colonel Hoffman relates that a violent explosion shook the house in which he was just then resting. Like everyone else he rushed towards the Burg-bastion where Souches, taking his turn to command the post, had placed his men on guard behind the foremost works. The mine had torn a large hole in the wall to the left of the tip of the bastion—Starhemberg’s precautions having apparently forced the Turks to place their powder at some distance from the most vulnerable point of all—and Hoffman now saw the tops of the Turkish flags and standards coming into view through the breach as the troops climbed up to the assault. Thirty feet of the defences were down, cries of ‘Allah! Allah! Allah!’ mingled with the fire from batteries on the counterscarp directed at the wall and bastions immediately opposite them; and for the defence this was a moment of anguish and desperation. But it soon rallied. Some units concentrated on the steady employment of their muskets, others heroically managed to stop the gap with planks and sacks. They wheeled forward the ready-made ‘chevaux de frise’, made of these materials; they were reinforced by troops who were in any case preparing to relieve the guard at that time. They were not dismayed by the continual storm of bombs, stones, arrows, which continued to come at them from the counterscarp, nor by the very great number of the attackers who put to good use the multitude of tunnels and passages in the Turkish works to get from the approaches and down into the moat at alarming speed. The onslaught lasted two hours, Starhemberg lost 200 men, the enemy many more. Kara Mustafa had failed, when the day ended, to make good a footing on the bastion; but his opponents, rightly, were never more alarmed for the safety of the city. They could no longer hope to hold out indefinitely by their own efforts. This had been argued before. It was now incontrovertible, even by the boldest.

At one o’clock in the morning of 6 September, Kuniz in great agitation hurried off a letter to his government. He wrote that the Turks now believed on the testimony of ‘the servant of an Armenian doctor’—whom they had captured—that Starhemberg’s position was desperate. The garrison contained
no more than 5,000 effective fighting men, they were told. The citizens and the military command were quarrelling. If the assault of the 4th had been pressed a little further and a little longer, the municipality would have offered to surrender.
¹³
This news vastly encouraged the Grand Vezir, who determined to continue mining and cannonading with all his strength. Kuniz, in the Ottoman camp, was correspondingly depressed.

The Turks then turned to the Löbel.
*
Certainly, Souches had here taken immense pains to prepare for an attack. Forewarned by events on the Burg-bastion barricades were set up at all points, and careful arrangements made to avoid confusion; the duties of each of the guards were laid down in detail. But exactly at noon on the 8th two mines went off; the tip of the bastion and a part of the left-hand wall crumbled at once, leaving only a small portion of the masonry intact. (It was not large enough to give shelter to the defenders.) Up came the Turks, while different parties of the garrison fired at close range from the barricades on top of the bastion, as well as from the positions which they still held in the moat. The assault lasted a full hour, but possibly the extreme heat of the day helped to blunt its fierceness. In the end, the Turks retreated. The Habsburg officers took in hand a partial repair of the gaps in the wall; where these improvisations were weakest, fires were lit and kept burning to ward off the next onrush, and to impede the miners. As it was, the motive behind the tactics of Kara Mustafa and his advisers gradually became clearer. They had substantially weakened the Burg-bastion, then weakened the Löbel; they next began to advance their works across the moat on both sides of the ruined ravelin to the curtain-wall between the bastions, in order to mine it. The defenders had now to reckon that five mines were being attached to this section of their own works, while there were evident preparations to weaken the bastions still further. The stage was to be set for a general storm of the city on a grand and irresistible scale.

Moreover the garrison was tiring. Hoffman calculated that Starhemberg had only 4,000 fit men at his disposal by now.
¹⁴
The commander dared not accept the suggestion that the casemates of the Löbel should be opened, so that a sortie could be made against the Turkish workmen only thirty or forty paces distant, as they prepared the charges at the base of the curtain-wall. Instead, during the next few days he redoubled the defences at the higher level, and even fortified the houses behind them. It was here that the troops were quartered in order to be ready for immediate action in every emergency, although they were tired and desperate men by now, complaining bitterly. Starhemberg did his best to avoid trouble at this crucial moment by a general re-allocation of commands and duties. But much more depended on the ability of the besiegers to keep up their pressure, and to make it overwhelming. Fortunately for those exhausted men in the houses behind the Löbel and in the Burg, they could not do so.

No less harassed were the civilians.
¹⁵
The death-rate due to dysentery and other fevers crept up steadily during August, partly because food cost more and was harder to find; the official pegging of prices was increasingly disregarded. The municipality issued scores of instructions and orders, especially to the bakers, and tried to arrange for the fair distribution of bread which in any case became less and less edible, but found itself hampered by insistent requisitioning for the soldiers of the garrison. Donkey and cat meat took the place of veal. Yet one finds few notices of outright shortage. Instead there was great suffering just short of starvation, so that mostly older men and women died off. The overall sense of strain tightened sharply when September began, and Starhemberg’s grip on the civil population grew harsher as his position grew weaker.

Between 30 August and 4 September a fresh sequence of edicts attempted to mobilise more people for guard and labour duties. It was officially stated that such persons might be required to replace soldiers, when the soldiers were too tired or too few. Between 7 and 10 September Lieutenant-Colonel Balfour carried out a house-to-house inspection in order to muster further manpower: shirkers, and householders who concealed them, were alike threatened with the death penalty. Three more companies of unwilling conscripts were at length assembled on the Burgplatz, and immediately sent to work on the defences. Starhemberg also complained to the city council about burgher officers who failed to appear for duty on the watches to which they and their men had been assigned. Then on the 9th, burgomaster Liebenberg, ill and useless for many weeks past, finally died. On the very next day his incompetent nominee, who had been titular commander of all the civilian companies, was dismissed and replaced by a professional officer. He, a Major Rosstaucher, at once set about drawing up new and stringent regulations to enforce better discipline.

All this while, from the top of St Stephen’s tower the landscape around Vienna was under eager observation. Lorraine’s cavalry had reappeared opposite the city, fought an engagement with both Turks and Magyars, and then vanished again to the west. The Turks were also sending out large foraging parties which in due course came back. And they seemed to be redistributing their forces. Some moved in from the countryside to the suburb of St Marx, while others crossed over the Canal from Leopoldstadt and camped much closer to the Grand Vezir’s headquarters. From the tower, too, the garrison sent up its rockets at night to signal the safe arrival of Seradly or Michaelovitz. Away across the river the Bisamberg responded, while in the darkness between 7 and 8 September other rockets were seen rising from the direction of the Kahlenberg,
¹⁶
on the Vienna side of the Danube—a first, breathtaking sign that an army of liberation had approached the heights of the Wiener Wald.

*
From the English version ‘printed for William Nott in the Pall Mall, and George Wells Bookseller in St Paul’s Church-yard, 1684’.
¹⁰

*
On the left-hand side of
illustration VI
. The Burg-bastion is on the right.