It was 1618 and the on-again, off-again Christian civil war exploded again for one grand finale. The Ottoman Empire smelled opportunity in the Thirty Years War although its policy alternated between caution and belligerence. As its Transylvanian vassal Gábor Bethlen proclaimed himself king of Hungary on 25. August 1620, an Ottoman ambassador ominously read a letter to the assembled Diet in Besztercebánya swearing the Porte would protect Hungarian independence referring to all the Hungarian lands, including the ones the Habsburgs currently ruled. Bethlen did manage to ensnare the Porte in a war with Catholic Poland-Lithuania to keep that country from aiding the emperor, Ferdinand. The result was the Polish-Turkish War of 1620-21, in which the first year saw the Ottoman annihilation of a Polish army at Cecora on the Pruth River (modern Romania) in 1620, but the next year found Sultan Osman II himself leading the Ottoman army that was defeated by the Poles at Chocim. With this last act the Ottomans signed a peace with the Poles and stayed out of the rest of the Thirty Years War, though they kept ample forces in Ottoman Hungary to deter any Habsburg adventures there. In the 1650s and 60s after the Thirty Years War the Porte became embroiled in the Polish eastern rebellion wars, which resulted in a war with Russia that served as an ominous precursor for the next stage of Ottoman history.
In 1682 the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV had a decision to make. His realm was extensive and still powerful, but decreasingly so when compared to the rising states of Europe and they were treating the Porte with less respect than they had Mehmeds predecessors. The Porte had fought a brief and inconclusive border war with the Habsburgs in 1663-1665 and had ended it by signing a truce that was going to come due in 1684. The Sultans Grand Vezir, Kara Mustafa, was urging the Sultan to break the truce and attack the Habsburgs in 1683. The empire was beginning to creak, its Balkan Christian population was showing signs of rebellion against the increasingly despotic and repressive local Ottoman authorities, and the lack of adequate respect shown the Porte by the Europeans was needling the Sultan. After a short deliberation, Mehmed IV ordered his Grand Vezir to begin moving the Ottoman armies northward, through Belgrade and Buda and on to Györ, from where they would commence an attack on the Habsburg lands that would remind the infidels of the Ottoman Empires power and bring Central Europe into the Moslem orbit.
By the winter of 1682-83, it was apparent to everyone in the Ottoman Empire and Europe that the Porte was moving towards war. The Habsburgs, doubly nervous because of Louis XIVs designs on the Rheinland, began fishing for allies against the Ottomans. One of their most obvious choices was Poland, a fellow Catholic state that shared a frontier with the Ottoman Empire. Negotiations began in early March and dragged on, but rumblings from Constantinople frightened the Poles into concluding the treaty with Vienna by 31. March. In any event the Poles had their own beef with the Sultan and his meddling in the 1648-1667 wars in Poland, with the Porte seizing a key eastern fortress.
The Ottoman Turks began to collect troops from all over their empire Anatolia, Albania, Greece, Persia, Egypt, Wallachia - and they began a northward march in May 1683, led by the Grand Vezir himself, Kara Mustafa. Their destination was not yet clear, and the Poles called off a proposed attack on Kamieniec Podolski (in modern Ukraine), the eastern fortress they desired returned. By the end of May the Turks were in Belgrade (where Sultan Mehmed IV waited out the coming battle), and from there they moved on to Buda Castle, and finally by 29. June to the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier fortress at Györ in Ottoman-occupied Hungary. Ottoman and Habsburg forces, both aided by irregulars, skirmished throughout northern Habsburg Hungary over the next week but the Ottoman forces still managed to cross the Rába River (modern western Hungary near Austria) and headed westward. Their objective became crystal clear now: Vienna. On 7. July the Habsburg emperor Leopold fled Vienna along with his government to Passau, and Habsburg envoys began showing up in all the capitals of Europe imploring their princes to send troops. On 15. July one such envoy arrived in Warsaw begging the Polish king Jan (John) III Sobieski to hurry. The day before on 14. July the first Turkish forces had reached the walls of Vienna. Within days they surrounded the city, and the siege began.
Viennas relief was the responsibility of Charles V of Lorraine. The Habsburg commander in the city, Ernest Rüdiger Starhemberg, had some 11,000 usable soldiers. The Turks surrounded the city with about 28,500 troops. The last few weeks of July and the entire month of August were desperate times for the defenders of Vienna as the Habsburgs allies marshaled their forces and marched to lift the siege. In early August the Ottomans showed themselves so sure of victory that they broke their own tradition of holding the enemys ambassador to the Porte hostage, and let the Habsburg envoy Caprara go free, and he eventually provided valuable intelligence to the Christian camp. By 31. August the Habsburgs allies began to finally filter into their camp at Tulln, west of Vienna. In total it is estimated the allies mustered some 100,000+ troops from Austria, Poland, Franconia, Brandenburg, Bavaria, Saxony and Brunswick.
Realizing a relief force was crystallizing nearby, the Turks aggressively began to mine and blast at the citys walls by 4. September, blowing huge holes that required immediate attention from the defenders resulting in hundreds of casualties on both sides. Older and infirm people were beginning to die of starvation in the city, and Starhemberg had only about 4000 capable defenders left within city walls. The Allied commanders understood the situation was desperate and planned for immediate action. King Sobieski is known to have observed at this point that Kara Mustafa was a poor military commander because he had left several important routes through the nearby Wienerwald (woods) unguarded and the Ottoman camp itself was not fortified. On 12. September the Allies, composed of 80,000 infantry and 40,000 cavalry, advanced to relieve the besieged city.
Lorraine and Sobieski led a two-pronged attack that morning, Lorraine the left and Sobieski the right wing. Fierce fighting filled the morning, especially on the Habsburgs side and the Poles, who had to move through the Wienerwald, were held up but by 1.00 p.m. Sobieski and the allied right wing emerged visibly from the forest to the shouts and cheers of their German allies on the left. The Turks realized the Allies now controlled the heights around the city. At this point the Allies were only about 3 km (2 miles) from the city walls. After a brief respite (on a blistering hot day) the Allies resumed their attack at 3.20 p.m., with the fiercest fighting ensuing around the Saxon and Bavarian infantry in the center. Franconian infantry in the north also made their impact felt and when this was all followed up by a thundering Polish cavalry charge southwards through the center the Turkish lines collapsed. Kara Mustafa and his army fled the field eastwards, leaving behind his personal tents, the Ottoman standards, and much wealth. It was 5.30 p.m., and Vienna had been saved. On 13. September, King Sobieski wrote his wife in Kraków from the Grand Vezirs tent. (In fact, Kara Mustafas tents and a huge collection of items captured by the Poles in the Turkish camp can still be seen today at the royal castle museum in Wawel Castle, in Kraków.)
In an interesting but unsubstantiated side story, it has been claimed that the Christian forces who surged into the Turkish camp discovered large bags of dark beans, and small cups of hot brown liquid the Turks had abandoned with haste in their rout; the claim is that this is how Europeans first came into contact with coffee. Coffee houses did indeed spring up in Vienna shortly after the siege, but there were many routes through which Europeans could have encountered coffee
The Turks fell back to Györ in disorganized fashion, and immediately Kara Mustafa began to execute his commanders for their failures, real or imagined. He had reason to fear for his own life because failure was not an acceptable option for a Grand Vezir, but of course there was still the chance of re-grouping and re-launching another attack on Vienna. This was however not to be; by early October the Allies had advanced on Komárom (modern Komarno, Slovakia) on the opposite side of the Danube River not far from the old Hungarian ecclesiastical center Esztergom in Ottoman-occupied Hungary. It was not long before the allies crossed the river and Esztergom itself soon fell. Over the winter in typical medieval fashion the Ottoman army began to disband as the auxiliary units left for home. Ominously, some of them the Transylvanians and the Wallachians began secret contacts with the Christian forces and fighting broke out in Ottoman Moldavia, although the Poles were unable to capitalize on this. On 25. December, Christmas Day, messengers from the Sultan caught up with Kara Mustafa in Belgrade, and after demanding he turn in his royal seals of office they showed him the Sultans green cord; this was the Sultans pronouncement of a death sentence, and Kara Mustafa submitted quietly to his own strangulation.
Events now moved quickly. At Linz in March 1684, the Habsburgs and Poles were joined by the Venetians in the Holy League to drive the Moslems out of Europe. The Allies even tried to bring France, Russia and Persia into the alliance, though these states abstained. (Louis XIV took the opportunity of the Habsburgs distraction in June 1684 to finally seize Luxembourg, bringing Strasbourg and Freiburg into the French orbit.) The Holy League advanced, Buda Castle fell in 1686 and Belgrade fell to the Christians in 1688 (although within two years the Ottomans would recover Belgrade). The old Hungarian borders were clear of Ottoman troops by 1690, including its medieval possessions in Croatia, the Banat and Transylvania. The Ottoman Empire and the Holy League signed the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, recognizing the Christians territorial gains.
The failed siege of Vienna and the subsequent War of the Holy League that resulted in the Ottoman Empire losing Hungary had far more far-reaching consequences than the mere loss of territory. It was a profound shock for the Moslem world, which, having come to see the Turkish Ottoman Empire as a replacement for the older Arab Islamic empire of c. 650-1200, could not believe Moslem troops had been defeated so soundly by the "Franks" (Europeans). The Treaty of Karlowitz is a watershed in Ottoman history as the end of Ottoman conquests and the beginning of a long, painful period when Sultans would spend their efforts defending the empire, with increasing desperation but just as increasing lack of success. This treaty marks the beginning of the West's (and Russia's) conquest of the Moslem lands. The Ottoman Empire's military in 1450 stood as the premier military force of Europe but in 1683 it faced very different European foes while its own military had only marginally adapted to modern warfare. Though the empire would limp on for another two centuries, by 1912 even the puny armies of its former Christian Balkan subjects would be able to push the Sultan's troops nearly off the Continent.
In this lies the kernal of what the Ottomans and the Islamic world at large had missed, that Europe had undergone a dramatic series of changes in the period between the early days of the Battle of Tours and the siege of Vienna. It is a distinction few in the Moslem world still today are making or understanding; that the Crusaders who charged into the Levante in 1095 were very different political animals than, say, the French troops who seized Egypt in 1798. A funny thing happened shortly after the Treaty of Karlowitz was signed; in 1713 several European states signed the Treaty of Utrecht as they wound down a series of French military adventures. This treaty called Europeans something funny that had never happened in an official document before: it called them Europeans. Until now Europe had called itself throughout its long medieval and Renaissance history Christendom, but the social, philosophical and political upheaval lit by the Renaissance, coupled with the 16th and 17th century religious wars, had transformed how Europe saw itself, and it indeed became "Europe". The Moslem world's inability to appreciate the full implications of this change is still a major roadblock in Western-Middle Eastern relations today, and will plague us for some time to come...
It should also be mentioned that another consequence of this war came out in the 1990s. In 1688 the allies managed to overrun most of Serbia but within two years the Turks recaptured much below the Drava River, causing a massive flow of Serbian refugees fleeing northward to the Habsburg lands. These Serbs were allowed to settle in the borderlands (deep within Croatia) by the Habsburg authorities in exchange for providing border defense. Vienna referred to this Serbian enclave as the Militärische Grenze (Military Border) and the Serbs called it simply "the region" (Krajina). Krajina became a major focal point in the Yugoslav implosion wars of the early 1990s, but Milosevic apparently sold the Krajina Serbs out because Belgrade did not lift a finger to help them when in 1994 a Croat army overran the region, ironically sending its Serbian population scurrying for cover again after 300 years.
It also occurred to me this morning that another consequence of this war was the near-destruction of the Parthenon. In 1684 the Venetians were besieging the Turkish garrison in Athens when an errant cannonball struck the Acropolis - which unfortunately the Turks were using to store powder and ammunition. The resulting explosion devastated the ruins.
In 1682 the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV had a decision to make. His realm was extensive and still powerful, but decreasingly so when compared to the rising states of Europe and they were treating the Porte with less respect than they had Mehmeds predecessors. The Porte had fought a brief and inconclusive border war with the Habsburgs in 1663-1665 and had ended it by signing a truce that was going to come due in 1684. The Sultans Grand Vezir, Kara Mustafa, was urging the Sultan to break the truce and attack the Habsburgs in 1683. The empire was beginning to creak, its Balkan Christian population was showing signs of rebellion against the increasingly despotic and repressive local Ottoman authorities, and the lack of adequate respect shown the Porte by the Europeans was needling the Sultan. After a short deliberation, Mehmed IV ordered his Grand Vezir to begin moving the Ottoman armies northward, through Belgrade and Buda and on to Györ, from where they would commence an attack on the Habsburg lands that would remind the infidels of the Ottoman Empires power and bring Central Europe into the Moslem orbit.
By the winter of 1682-83, it was apparent to everyone in the Ottoman Empire and Europe that the Porte was moving towards war. The Habsburgs, doubly nervous because of Louis XIVs designs on the Rheinland, began fishing for allies against the Ottomans. One of their most obvious choices was Poland, a fellow Catholic state that shared a frontier with the Ottoman Empire. Negotiations began in early March and dragged on, but rumblings from Constantinople frightened the Poles into concluding the treaty with Vienna by 31. March. In any event the Poles had their own beef with the Sultan and his meddling in the 1648-1667 wars in Poland, with the Porte seizing a key eastern fortress.
The Ottoman Turks began to collect troops from all over their empire Anatolia, Albania, Greece, Persia, Egypt, Wallachia - and they began a northward march in May 1683, led by the Grand Vezir himself, Kara Mustafa. Their destination was not yet clear, and the Poles called off a proposed attack on Kamieniec Podolski (in modern Ukraine), the eastern fortress they desired returned. By the end of May the Turks were in Belgrade (where Sultan Mehmed IV waited out the coming battle), and from there they moved on to Buda Castle, and finally by 29. June to the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier fortress at Györ in Ottoman-occupied Hungary. Ottoman and Habsburg forces, both aided by irregulars, skirmished throughout northern Habsburg Hungary over the next week but the Ottoman forces still managed to cross the Rába River (modern western Hungary near Austria) and headed westward. Their objective became crystal clear now: Vienna. On 7. July the Habsburg emperor Leopold fled Vienna along with his government to Passau, and Habsburg envoys began showing up in all the capitals of Europe imploring their princes to send troops. On 15. July one such envoy arrived in Warsaw begging the Polish king Jan (John) III Sobieski to hurry. The day before on 14. July the first Turkish forces had reached the walls of Vienna. Within days they surrounded the city, and the siege began.
Viennas relief was the responsibility of Charles V of Lorraine. The Habsburg commander in the city, Ernest Rüdiger Starhemberg, had some 11,000 usable soldiers. The Turks surrounded the city with about 28,500 troops. The last few weeks of July and the entire month of August were desperate times for the defenders of Vienna as the Habsburgs allies marshaled their forces and marched to lift the siege. In early August the Ottomans showed themselves so sure of victory that they broke their own tradition of holding the enemys ambassador to the Porte hostage, and let the Habsburg envoy Caprara go free, and he eventually provided valuable intelligence to the Christian camp. By 31. August the Habsburgs allies began to finally filter into their camp at Tulln, west of Vienna. In total it is estimated the allies mustered some 100,000+ troops from Austria, Poland, Franconia, Brandenburg, Bavaria, Saxony and Brunswick.
Realizing a relief force was crystallizing nearby, the Turks aggressively began to mine and blast at the citys walls by 4. September, blowing huge holes that required immediate attention from the defenders resulting in hundreds of casualties on both sides. Older and infirm people were beginning to die of starvation in the city, and Starhemberg had only about 4000 capable defenders left within city walls. The Allied commanders understood the situation was desperate and planned for immediate action. King Sobieski is known to have observed at this point that Kara Mustafa was a poor military commander because he had left several important routes through the nearby Wienerwald (woods) unguarded and the Ottoman camp itself was not fortified. On 12. September the Allies, composed of 80,000 infantry and 40,000 cavalry, advanced to relieve the besieged city.
Lorraine and Sobieski led a two-pronged attack that morning, Lorraine the left and Sobieski the right wing. Fierce fighting filled the morning, especially on the Habsburgs side and the Poles, who had to move through the Wienerwald, were held up but by 1.00 p.m. Sobieski and the allied right wing emerged visibly from the forest to the shouts and cheers of their German allies on the left. The Turks realized the Allies now controlled the heights around the city. At this point the Allies were only about 3 km (2 miles) from the city walls. After a brief respite (on a blistering hot day) the Allies resumed their attack at 3.20 p.m., with the fiercest fighting ensuing around the Saxon and Bavarian infantry in the center. Franconian infantry in the north also made their impact felt and when this was all followed up by a thundering Polish cavalry charge southwards through the center the Turkish lines collapsed. Kara Mustafa and his army fled the field eastwards, leaving behind his personal tents, the Ottoman standards, and much wealth. It was 5.30 p.m., and Vienna had been saved. On 13. September, King Sobieski wrote his wife in Kraków from the Grand Vezirs tent. (In fact, Kara Mustafas tents and a huge collection of items captured by the Poles in the Turkish camp can still be seen today at the royal castle museum in Wawel Castle, in Kraków.)
In an interesting but unsubstantiated side story, it has been claimed that the Christian forces who surged into the Turkish camp discovered large bags of dark beans, and small cups of hot brown liquid the Turks had abandoned with haste in their rout; the claim is that this is how Europeans first came into contact with coffee. Coffee houses did indeed spring up in Vienna shortly after the siege, but there were many routes through which Europeans could have encountered coffee
The Turks fell back to Györ in disorganized fashion, and immediately Kara Mustafa began to execute his commanders for their failures, real or imagined. He had reason to fear for his own life because failure was not an acceptable option for a Grand Vezir, but of course there was still the chance of re-grouping and re-launching another attack on Vienna. This was however not to be; by early October the Allies had advanced on Komárom (modern Komarno, Slovakia) on the opposite side of the Danube River not far from the old Hungarian ecclesiastical center Esztergom in Ottoman-occupied Hungary. It was not long before the allies crossed the river and Esztergom itself soon fell. Over the winter in typical medieval fashion the Ottoman army began to disband as the auxiliary units left for home. Ominously, some of them the Transylvanians and the Wallachians began secret contacts with the Christian forces and fighting broke out in Ottoman Moldavia, although the Poles were unable to capitalize on this. On 25. December, Christmas Day, messengers from the Sultan caught up with Kara Mustafa in Belgrade, and after demanding he turn in his royal seals of office they showed him the Sultans green cord; this was the Sultans pronouncement of a death sentence, and Kara Mustafa submitted quietly to his own strangulation.
Events now moved quickly. At Linz in March 1684, the Habsburgs and Poles were joined by the Venetians in the Holy League to drive the Moslems out of Europe. The Allies even tried to bring France, Russia and Persia into the alliance, though these states abstained. (Louis XIV took the opportunity of the Habsburgs distraction in June 1684 to finally seize Luxembourg, bringing Strasbourg and Freiburg into the French orbit.) The Holy League advanced, Buda Castle fell in 1686 and Belgrade fell to the Christians in 1688 (although within two years the Ottomans would recover Belgrade). The old Hungarian borders were clear of Ottoman troops by 1690, including its medieval possessions in Croatia, the Banat and Transylvania. The Ottoman Empire and the Holy League signed the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, recognizing the Christians territorial gains.
The failed siege of Vienna and the subsequent War of the Holy League that resulted in the Ottoman Empire losing Hungary had far more far-reaching consequences than the mere loss of territory. It was a profound shock for the Moslem world, which, having come to see the Turkish Ottoman Empire as a replacement for the older Arab Islamic empire of c. 650-1200, could not believe Moslem troops had been defeated so soundly by the "Franks" (Europeans). The Treaty of Karlowitz is a watershed in Ottoman history as the end of Ottoman conquests and the beginning of a long, painful period when Sultans would spend their efforts defending the empire, with increasing desperation but just as increasing lack of success. This treaty marks the beginning of the West's (and Russia's) conquest of the Moslem lands. The Ottoman Empire's military in 1450 stood as the premier military force of Europe but in 1683 it faced very different European foes while its own military had only marginally adapted to modern warfare. Though the empire would limp on for another two centuries, by 1912 even the puny armies of its former Christian Balkan subjects would be able to push the Sultan's troops nearly off the Continent.
In this lies the kernal of what the Ottomans and the Islamic world at large had missed, that Europe had undergone a dramatic series of changes in the period between the early days of the Battle of Tours and the siege of Vienna. It is a distinction few in the Moslem world still today are making or understanding; that the Crusaders who charged into the Levante in 1095 were very different political animals than, say, the French troops who seized Egypt in 1798. A funny thing happened shortly after the Treaty of Karlowitz was signed; in 1713 several European states signed the Treaty of Utrecht as they wound down a series of French military adventures. This treaty called Europeans something funny that had never happened in an official document before: it called them Europeans. Until now Europe had called itself throughout its long medieval and Renaissance history Christendom, but the social, philosophical and political upheaval lit by the Renaissance, coupled with the 16th and 17th century religious wars, had transformed how Europe saw itself, and it indeed became "Europe". The Moslem world's inability to appreciate the full implications of this change is still a major roadblock in Western-Middle Eastern relations today, and will plague us for some time to come...
It should also be mentioned that another consequence of this war came out in the 1990s. In 1688 the allies managed to overrun most of Serbia but within two years the Turks recaptured much below the Drava River, causing a massive flow of Serbian refugees fleeing northward to the Habsburg lands. These Serbs were allowed to settle in the borderlands (deep within Croatia) by the Habsburg authorities in exchange for providing border defense. Vienna referred to this Serbian enclave as the Militärische Grenze (Military Border) and the Serbs called it simply "the region" (Krajina). Krajina became a major focal point in the Yugoslav implosion wars of the early 1990s, but Milosevic apparently sold the Krajina Serbs out because Belgrade did not lift a finger to help them when in 1994 a Croat army overran the region, ironically sending its Serbian population scurrying for cover again after 300 years.
It also occurred to me this morning that another consequence of this war was the near-destruction of the Parthenon. In 1684 the Venetians were besieging the Turkish garrison in Athens when an errant cannonball struck the Acropolis - which unfortunately the Turks were using to store powder and ammunition. The resulting explosion devastated the ruins.
