The badger would like to say thank you for preventing him from having to doublepost.
Rex tremendae majestatis.
“Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”
-Bertolt Brecht
For most of Europe’s states, the peace treaties of 1678 and 1679 were not merely truces, but meant to last. England, Sweden, Brandenburg-Poland-Lithuania, the Habsburgs of both east and west, and the United Provinces recognized that further fighting would be primarily detrimental, and that their efforts as states could best be focused elsewhere, whether inward or out to entirely new arenas. Naturally, their aims were not shared by others.
King Louis XIV was probably the single most powerful man in Europe in 1679, and his victory in the last war had secured him a peace treaty that he had been able to practically dictate to his opponents. France had secured massive gains in north and east that had eluded her for centuries and which brought her strength to even greater heights. Yet even Louis was unsatisfied with the new peace, for several reasons. Perhaps chief among these was his paranoia over his new possessions’ security. Alsace, the Franche-Comté, the Flemish fortresses – these symbolized his
gloire, and without them he was nothing. And the Allies had demonstrated their ability to invade them during the war. The terrifying specter of Allied attack into Alsace, raised again and again over the course of war, ate at the King. His northern border, too, was all too susceptible to attack. Perhaps it was unconscious, but already he and his top advisors, de Louvois and de Colbert, were rationalizing further expansion in order to protect the gains already won. The perils of this policy, in leading to never-ending war and theoretically sustained by never-ending victory, did not occur to the French ministers. Perhaps they did, but were dismissed.
Negotiations with Spanish boundary commissions to finalize the details of the border line from the Nijmegen treaties dragged on throughout 1679, and the French commissioners were making the usual pushes for their side – claims that a certain farm fell under one jurisdiction, that this town had always been subject to the dukes of this other jurisdiction, and so forth. But Louis had already ordered the organization of parallel unilateral French committees for the same purpose. Set up in Metz, Besançon, and Breisach, these courts of ‘reunion’ began work immediately, quickly turning up evidence that allowed French borders to extend further and further. By the end of 1680 they had secured the total annexation of all of the Alsatian towns, which pledged allegiance to Louis without reference to the Kaiser. The county of Montbéliard, between the Franche-Comté and Alsace, was also incorporated.
These moves clearly did not go unnoticed. While somewhat moribund, the Holy Roman Empire still retained a shred of a constitution and its institutions. One of these, the system of
Reichskreise, or Imperial Circles, had been organized as an intermediate regional assembly of Imperial states. The two
Reichskreise directly affected by the Louisian
reunions, those of Burgundy and the Upper Rhine, were already raising the issue at the Regensburg
Reichstag in 1680, demanding imperial action. Yet the Kaiser limited his complaints to a perfunctory grumble and a cease-and-desist order.
The primary reason for this, of course, was his attention elsewhere. In Hungary, the situation was growing delicate. After the 1664 Treaty of Vasvár with the Ottomans, the Habsburgs had secured a respite, which they attempted to use to bring the Counter-Reformation to Hungary. This took the form of a two-pronged offensive: the one, milder, angle of attack lay with the construction of church schools and Catholic universities. The other took the form of anti-Protestant raids and deportations. To prevent a response, the Hungarian constitution was suspended in 1673; by 1678 the Magyar Protestants had had enough. One Imre Thököly, a Calvinist, was elected their leader, and he soon began attacking Habsburg churchmen, bureaucrats, and troop detachments.
The conclusion of the western war in that year would have seemed like the perfect opportunity to destroy the insurrection, but Kaiser Leopold had to balance much more than that. France was not his only enemy; the Ottoman Empire lay menacingly on the other side of Fortress Komorn, and the Treaty of Vasvár had almost expired. Leopold had to tread cautiously, lest he create a fifth column for the Ottoman Turks and help them to renew their war. So in 1679, he attempted conciliation, backed up by force, by proposing a truce to Thököly’s rebels, to allow a fresh diet to convene. The rebels warily accepted and attended the reassembled diet in 1680, but Thököly himself refused to come, lending the proceedings an air of uselessness. The rebel leader was already negotiating behind his back with the Ottomans, attempting to secure open support for a renewed rebellion.
For the aging Fazıl Ahmed Paşa, such support was dangerous. Chastened by his defeat decades before at Szentgotthárd, and again by the repulse in the Ukraine, the grand vezir was growing increasingly withdrawn, foregoing even his usual drinking binges as he turned back towards the puritanical Kadızadeli inclinations of his youth. He appeared much older than his forty-five years would have suggested. He was loathe to embark on another risky war, but even so the advantages of Thököly’s support were obvious. It took months before he arrived at a final decision, but in the end the vezir decided against Thököly. Yet the rebel refused to accept the decisions of the diet in early 1681: that Royal Hungary would recover a measure of autonomy in both political and religious matters, and the Counter-Reformation would by and large be halted, though existing Catholic institutions would remain in their place. So instead he continued his revolt, but the concessions and the amnesty had destroyed much of his support, and late in the year he was finally cornered and executed, along with a small band of diehards. Having secured his eastern flank, more or less, the Kaiser quickly switched his attention back to the west, where the French
reunions were reaching a new height.
In 1681, the court at Metz had found that part of the Spanish duchy of Luxemburg had once belonged to a part of the Metz bishopric, so off it went to France. But the new French acquisitions had intimate ties with the rest of the duchy, too. One by one, they fell into French hands as the Metz chamber issued decree after decree. By mid-year, the only part of the duchy that remained in Spanish hands was the fortress itself. Louis, slowly escalating the situation to bring more pressure to bear on the weak Spanish monarchy, ordered the Luxemburg citadel to be blockaded by French troops, to force its garrison to yield. And in September, the French secured the critical bridgehead over the Rhine into Alsace at Strassburg and its sister-city on the other bank, Kehl. Overwhelming force was brought to bear, so the city fathers surrendered without a shot fired. The place that, according to the French fortifications wizard de Vauban, was ‘of the greatest consequence’ to French security was now under Louis’ control. The very same day, French forces occupied the critical fortress of Casale, on the Italian side of the Alps, not far from Turin, having paid off its owner, the duca de Mantova. The seizures of Strassburg, Casale, and Luxemburg in such rapid succession shocked Europe, but even now Leopold was not quite ready for war, though his injunctions assumed a new, more menacing quality; the French king, however, did not particularly care. Seemingly oblivious to his rapidly blackening public image, he ordered the Lutheran city cathedral in Strassburg reconverted into a Catholic one. He attended mass there in October to the cheers of his new subjects, accompanied by a small army that could not have failed to raise fresh fears among France’s cross-Rhine neighbors.
What sparked the renewal of conflict, though, were his actions back in Luxemburg. Over the winter of 1681-2 the Spanish garrison commander in the Luxemburg citadel, with his troops on the verge of starvation, ordered a sortie for food, running up against the French blockade and starting a minor skirmish. The Spanish got their food and made it back to the fortress, but Louis considered it to be sufficient provocation for even greater measures. Unprepared Spanish troops in Flanders were forced to scatter as large French armies, already mobilized for this very purpose, swept into Courtrai – where the Franco-Spanish boundary commission was still meeting, its resolutions ignored. The blockading troops at Luxemburg were ordered to commence a mortar bombardment of the fortress, to speed up the garrison’s surrender.
Leopold and the Spanish grasped for allies, but their usual Dutch friends were less than willing to fight – Willem van Oranje was preoccupied with the political battles over the English succession being fought out across the Channel, and was only prepared to commit a token force to shore up the Spanish army. The English were if anything more immobilized, and the Savoyards – who were directly threatened by the Casale occupation – were trying their best to reach a diplomatic solution to the crisis. Denmark-Norway was suspiciously quiet, and Sweden was embroiled in its own domestic problems, as were the Brandenburgers. A ragtag coalition was finally cobbled together, featuring the Kaiser, Genoa, Spain, a few Dutch troops, and the duke of Württemberg. Yet no war was declared. The coalition was committed to attempting to force the French to back down by armed suasion, but fighting was to be avoided if possible.
The young margrave of Baden-Baden, Ludwig Wilhelm, commanded the Imperial army that swept down on Luxemburg and unexpectedly induced the outnumbered French to withdraw. But elsewhere, French troops scored successes. The Spanish governor of the Netherlands, the marqués de Grana, had attempted to retaliate over the winter by raiding villages in the newly-conquered northern French territories. Enraged, Louis ordered Marshal de Humières to ‘burn fifty villages for every one that is destroyed on my lands’, a task de Humières took to with vigor, smashing the few troops de Grana could muster against him. Louis’ ally, the Elector Palatine Karl Ludwig, did his best to disrupt Imperial supply lines and generally confuse things. The situation in the west was becoming more, not less muddled, and if anyone was profiting from the situation it was Louis.
Well, not just Louis. Fazıl Ahmed Paşa had finally croaked in 1683, and his place at the grand vezirate was taken by his longtime ally and second vezir, Musahib Mustafa Paşa. Musahib – “companion” – had little of the pacifism of his mentor, and was determined to take the helm of the Ottoman Empire back on a course that would put it back on its ancient and irresistible march towards glory. To this end, he spent much of 1683 preparing for a major military campaign. But where would its goal lie – north in the Polish Ukraine, or northwest against the Habsburgs? Both of those enemies were suffering from major internal problems, and appeared ripe targets. Having no desire to engage in the steppe warfare he considered fruitless, Musahib set his sights on Habsburg Hungary. Thököly’s followers had not been entirely exterminated, and some were already disillusioned with the Habsburg-imposed peace; Ottoman agents set to work on laying the groundwork for a renewed revolt there. Logistical preparations were well underway by the time the fifth vezir tore up the Treaty of Vasvár in front of a Habsburg envoy. As of December 1683, war had been renewed in Hungary.
Once again, Leopold was forced to try to extricate himself from a dangerous situation on his other frontiers and scrabble about for allies. The French would have to be left to their
reunions; Spain and the Dutch would simply have to deal with them as best they could alone. No final decision was made – instead, Leopold fully intended to return and deal with France later, assuming there was a later. As for allies, the Kaiser could count on the support of a mess of minor German states, but nobody save for the revanchist Venetians would come down on his side out of the major powers. Efforts to entice the Brandenburg-Polish Elector-King into fighting along the Habsburgs’ side went unanswered – Friedrich Wilhelm, even if he had not had his own problems, was hardly inclined to aid one of his enemies.
Musahib Mustafa Paşa, unlike Fazıl Ahmed Paşa, was able to get the imperial Ottoman army off to an early start, leaving Edirne on the twentieth of March, 1684. By the last day of April the army was in Belgrade, despite some problems – as usual – transporting the carriages and accountrements of Rabia Gülnüş Emetullah and eighty
harem ladies over some of the rougher terrain. By June the army was nearing the frontier. It would not move unopposed. The Habsburgs unfortunately had an army already mobilized, namely Ludwig von Baden-Baden’s, and it had easily managed to cross southern Germany to draw itself up in front of Vienna by the time the Ottoman army was within striking distance. This only reinforced Musahib Mustafa’s decision not to attack Vienna but instead to clear the way towards the city by capturing the critical fortress of Győr. Held briefly during the Long War in the 1590s, Győr – the German
Raab – blocked the Ottomans’ path along the south bank of the Danube. Its possession would make a siege of Vienna infinitely easier.
However, before Győr could be attacked, the Ottomans needed to reduce another Habsburg fort, Komorn, which stood closer to the frontier. The time needed to capture Komorn, which switched sides fairly frequently in any given Ottoman-Habsburg war, gave Ludwig von Baden-Baden the chance to move his army up to cover Győr. Despite a valiant stand by the defenders, Komorn fell on the seventh of August. Not much time remained in the campaigning season to take Győr.
The Ottoman army had but ten miles to go between Komorn and Győr, but the main routes between the two were insufficient to move the nearly 120,000 troops Musahib Mustafa Paşa commanded. Electing to split his forces to make logistics easier, the grand vezir took the army’s irregulars along the northern route, keeping close to the Danube. The commander in chief of the
yeniçeri troops, Tekirdağli Bekri Mustafa Paşa, took his 45,000 men along the southern road. Had Musahib Mustafa Paşa known of the Imperial army drawn up near him, he would have been more leery of dividing his forces. But Ludwig von Baden-Baden had done much to conceal his 40,000-strong force. When Tekirdağli Bekri Mustafa Paşa stumbled into these head-on at the village of Bábolna on the afternoon of August 10, he was taken completely by surprise.
Ludwig von Baden-Baden waited for the Ottoman troops to enter the deserted village itself before opening up with his artillery, positioned to the southwest and concealed in some woods. Confusion and panic immediately overtook the
yeniçeris as the village caught fire and concealed Imperial detachments opened up; at first, it looked to be a rerun of Szentgotthárd. But Tekirdağli Bekri Mustafa rallied his men and they escaped Bábolna, forming up in a rough line of battle west of the town to engage the Habsburgs. Though much of the surrounding area was covered in fields, the route to the Habsburg front was broken by a small pond, which canalized the Ottoman attackers into deep formations. They were mowed down by Habsburg artillery, but most of the army was able to reach firearm range and began a real engagement. Even now, they outnumbered the Habsburgs, and soon some of their own advantages began to tell, like their “organ-gun” multiple-barreled artillery pieces that sprayed round shot towards the Habsburg positions. German gunnery superiority and their linear firing tactics took their toll on the Turks, but so too did Turkish preponderance at melee fighting and their still-unparalleled cavalry batter the Habsburg forces. Late in the afternoon, the historian-soldier Silahdar Fındıklılı Mehmed Agha led a major attack on the Habsburg guns, which had been exposed in the fight; a regiment commanded by the young prince François-Eugène of Savoy-Carignan headed his troops off and saved the artillery. A final Ottoman rally in late evening, led by the disgraced Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa, drove the Habsburgs out of the village of Csemerház on their right flank, and with nightfall Ludwig von Baden-Baden pulled his troops back, allowing the Ottomans to claim the field.
Both armies had been badly battered. Of 45,000
yeniçeri, Tekirdağli Bekri Mustafa’s army had lost 8,000 dead – including the commander himself – with perhaps another 10,000 wounded. The corps had been practically gutted, with waves of troops cut down by artillery fire. By the time Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa led the tattered remnant back to the grand vezir’s army three days later at Szölöhegy, another 4,000 had deserted. Still, Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa’s successful performance had allowed him to rehabilitate his reputation somewhat, and he was given a subordinate command for the siege of Győr. As for the Imperials, from the army of 40,000 some 5,000 had been killed, and another 7,000 wounded – the army had been mauled, enough to make it suicidal to try to stand up against the reunified Ottoman army. Ludwig von Baden-Baden was forced to confine his activities to raiding and disrupting Turkish preparations as the siege began on the 15th of August. But the Turkish siege was conducted with an unusual amount of haste. At the price of even more casualties – these mostly among the militia – the Ottomans stormed Győr on the 9th of September, with Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa in the lead. They left a strong garrison there as the rest of the army pulled back to prepare for the next year’s campaign.
Once again, the Kaiser sent out the call for aid; once again, there was barely any reply from his fellow rulers. Pope Innocent XI finally did form a Holy League with the Kaiser and several German states, including Bavaria and Württemberg; spurred by papal endorsement of what was increasingly proclaimed to be a crusade, soldiers from all over Christian Europe flooded towards Vienna as well, swelling the ranks of the Imperial armies. (The Pope’s cash also helped immeasurably.) Despite Louis XIV’s attempts to keep men from flooding eastward and aiding his enemies, French nobility came to Vienna as well. Eventually even the King of France figured that he, the Most Christian King, could hardly be seen to be aiding the heathen Turk, and suspended military operations in Flanders and the Ardennes for 1685 – releasing even more Germans to go to Austria, among them the staunchly anti-French duke of Lorraine, Karl V. Even though the hands of the rulers of Europe were busy, all their eyes were on the Danube.
But what were they busy
doing? What troubles could the Elector-King have that would trump the guardianship of Europe from the heathens? Well, for starters, there was the minor matter of a civil war. Even as his reputation in Brandenburg and Prussia plummeted for his papism, he lost ground in Poland-Lithuania because he was a dirty lying tyrannical German. Sobieski increasingly refused to even speak to the King, while Sapieha more or less openly organized a
konfederacja and dared Friedrich Wilhelm to do something about it. Matters were racing towards a head over the Elector-King’s constant efforts to increase Poland-Lithuania’s military contributions and force the
Sejm to grant him wider powers to levy the
łanowa. But an unrelated debate had precipitated the final break – that over the Peace of Andrusovo with the Muscovites. As per its terms, further staged land transfers were to begin shortly across the Dnepr, with Muscovy receiving its due portion of the Ukraine. The Elector-King had thought that a relatively simple thing like ratifying peace terms already ratified once before would not precipitate argument, but in the heated debate that followed, two-thirds of the
Sejm walked out.
Most of those members went to join Sapieha and Sobieski at Słuck, where in June 1682 a
konfederacja was formed with the express aim of removing the Elector-King from power to precipitate a new free election. Its other articles included demands for Ducal Prussia to be transferred once again to Polish-Lithuanian sovereignty, for a reaffirmation of the
Sejm’s prerogative in allowing a levy, and for the Andrusovo peace with Muscovy to be repudiated. Sobieski, named marshal of the
konfederacja, could boast an army of 50,000 men. He moved purposefully against positions in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which capitulated fairly quickly, and seized much of the eastern Ukraine.
But as yet he did not march on Warsaw, Lublin, or Kraków, which formed a strong triangle around which support for the Elector-King coalesced. Sobieski reasoned that he could not storm any fortifications held by the formidable Brandenburger infantry, especially since he massed few infantry of his own. Therein lay a key problem with the confederal army: founded as it was on resisting an expansion of the Polish army’s infantry, it could not rely on infantry of its own. So Friedrich Wilhelm was able to ride out the initial surge of support for the Słuck confederals, and organize resistance in Poland proper. Meanwhile, confederal proclamations had had a helpful effect in Prussia: the demands for Polish sovereignty pleased mostly the city council of Königsberg, which had frequently used the Polish King as an ally in its struggles against the Electors of Brandenburg. But it was not at all welcome to most of the
Junkers outside of Königsberg, who quickly rallied to the Elector’s side. While the council members busied themselves with releasing former council members from prison, like the dynamic (but elderly) Hieronymus Roth, the local nobility aided a small detachment sent by the Elector, storming the city and reestablishing royal control.
Even though the Warsaw-Lublin-Kraków triangle remained unbroken into 1683, the confederal troops were already swarming west along the northern bank of the Vistula. Płock and Toruń fell into the hands of Sobieski’s chief subordinate, Hieronim Lubomirski, in the spring, which virtually cut off the “iron triangle” from the rest of the territory loyal to the Elector-King, including his German possessions. A small army under Friedrich Wilhelm’s personal control was mauled by Sobieski near Sandomierz in the summer, and a second Brandenburger defeat at Chełmno a few months later prompted more defections in the Ukraine and Galicia. Only in 1684 did the royal cause make some ground back, when Georg von Derfflinger with 27,000 men surprised Lubomirski with 34,000 at Pułtusk. Yet Sobieski continued to win tactical victories over any loyalist generals sent to fight him (though von Derfflinger hadn’t had the chance yet) as he continued to consolidate confederal control of Galicia. Things still looked quite dim for the royalist cause, as the balance of numbers was not improving and more and more territory continued to fall into Sobieski’s hands.
As for Sweden, it wasn’t exactly having political trouble, but its army was in no condition to go crusading, much less for the papists. The Swedes had clearly taken more than they could easily hold in Norway, and the army was absorbed with holding down the Trondheimers and preventing open revolt. Further, Sweden’s fiscal situation had if anything deteriorated during the war, as only a part of the French subsidies had actually gotten through. The Swedish budget was covered in red, a situation only exacerbated by the occupation of northern Norway. These expenses and military problems had to be eliminated somehow, and Karl XI, finally in the driving seat with the end of the de la Gardie regency, was intent on resolving them. Already before 1680 talk of a royal
reduktion had been going around, a reversion of noble land to royal control. But even the monarch who had conquered Trondheim and who had defeated Danish forces so dramatically at Kungälv could not get the
Riksdag to agree to his policies on a whim. Backdoor politicking was required, which Simon Helmfelt ably conducted.
By 1682 all was ready, and when Karl asked the
Riksdag’s four estates directly about increasing royal power, the representatives responded unanimously that the King was no longer bound by the same Forms of Government that had hobbled every Swedish king since Gustav Adolf. He was answerable not to any Council, but to God alone, and to underline his new power they authorized a
reduktion to encompass three-quarters of all alienated farms. This was not merely driven by Helmfelt’s political deals, however, or even mostly; even the monarch was surprised at the response he got. But the Council that had existed for sixty years no longer represented the aristocracy as a whole. New nobility had been created since then, and most of them were state servitors instead of landowners; in short, men who lost nothing by a
reduktion. These men, headed by Johan Gyllenstierna (who
was a landowner, but one critical of the de la Gardie era patronage), had formed the core of the King’s support in the
Riksdag for years, and now in 1682 they came to the forefront.
The 1682
reduktion, combined with a second wave in 1684 that encompassed many previously exempt farms and forced a further ‘contribution’ from the nobility, revolutionized Swedish finances. The fifty million riksdaler national debt was already shrinking tremendously within two years, and there was plenty of money left to spare even with debt payments. This money was used for the beginnings of a reform program to rationalize Sweden’s army program. The old system of more or less arbitrary conscription,
utskrivning, had shown its deficit in the wars of the last forty years, when Swedish regiments performed well at the start of a war but rapidly decreased in manpower as it went on. Karl wanted to keep those ranks filled with a steady stream of recruits from the homeland, and so organized a territorially-based regimental system, whereby each province was contracted to raise a regiment
and keep it at its proper strength in both war and peace. This
indelningsverk spread the burden of conscription more evenly across Swedish society and regularized loss replacement. It still had a long way to go before it would be completely finished, but already the results were promising. Yet its creation meant that Sweden was effectively immobilized, its army in no condition for operations.
So grimly, with little help from any quarter, the Kaiser and his few allies soldiered on, preparing for the inevitable hammerblow at Vienna. And in Constantinople, the grand vezir marshaled what resources he had for his own dice-roll at eternal glory. Despite some distractions elsewhere, all eyes were on Central Europe in 1685 as the long Ottoman-Habsburg struggle reached its most decisive stage.
Yes. That was captured relatively quickly, as per OTL, and since I generally didn't spend much time on the Dutch War as it was I elected not to cover that particular element of the fighting.
