The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (3 page)

For some time attention had been given to the condition of the route through the Balkans. The repair of bridges across the Maritza and the Morava was taken in hand. Unfortunately, exceptional rains increased abnormally the weight of water flowing off the Rhodope and Balkan mountains. The passage of the foremost troops inevitably churned up the road, to the disadvantage of men, carts, and beasts coming up behind them. On 30 March the vanguard of Janissaries set out, to be followed soon afterwards by the Sultan and his household with the main body of troops, the ambassadors of Austria and Poland, and all the rag-tag and bobtail that accompanied a court or an army on the move at this period. Perhaps 100,000 persons were trekking forward.

Caprara’s secretary has left an account of what took place on the road to Belgrade in April, 1683.
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Some parts of the army marched or rode by day, but when the secretary tried to sleep at night he woke to hear other troops, advancing through the darkness by the flare of countless torches. Carts and wagons of every description went along with, or followed, the different detachments; often they got lost, or lagged behind. Great flocks of sheep and herds of cattle formed the basis of the victualling system, and Caprara guessed that 32,000 lbs. of meat and 60,000 loaves were consumed daily.
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Prices fluctuated as rival commissariats bid against one another to supply their men. Privileged persons went by coach, and coaches stuck in the mud. The rains were shocking. If most men slept in tents, the more exalted (among whom the Austrian diplomats were still lucky to count themselves) sometimes found accommodation in the hospices which generations of wealthy and pious Moslems had built at intervals along the road. Sometimes there were halts of a day, or two days, when cities like Philippopolis and Sofia were reached; the army camped outside, and only civilians and grandees were allowed to pass the walls. Otherwise, there was nothing to be done except to go patiently forward after the vanguard—the indispensable vanguard of Janissaries which led the way, marked out the distances, and prepared the ovens every evening for those
who followed them. Behind the Balkan troops, the men of Anatolia and Asia were now coming up. At Niš the other great route was joined, from Salonika, down which were moving the men from the Aegean and the men of Africa. The main body finally reached the outskirts of Belgrade on 3 May. A little earlier, officers had been sent ahead to close all the wineshops. A little later, the Sultan’s entry into the city was of great ceremonial magnificence. The season of war and serious business approached with the spring, though spring itself, and the indispensable growth of fresh pasture for the innumerable livestock of this army, came late.

At Belgrade the Danube meets one of its largest right-bank tributaries, the Sava. Across the Sava stands Zemun, where the enormous camp was set on 4 May. More troops came in daily from different directions. The artillery was reviewed, though a Turkish account suggests that it did not include more than sixty guns and mortars. Munitions and provisions were loaded on 150 ships, for dispatch up the Danube. Every day the Sultan rode out from Belgrade on tours of inspection, and on 13 May he solemnly entrusted the sacred standard of Islam, ‘the Flag of the Prophet’, to the Grand Vezir, appointing him generalissimo for the campaign. Between 18 and 20 May the governor of Mesopotamia arrived with his men. The Janissaries marched out of camp, and a few days later the Grand Vezir followed with most of the remaining troops. The Sultan and his court stayed on at Belgrade with a small but adequate guard.

The pace of the Turks’ advance was still slow, and they did not reach Osijek until 2 June. Two things held them back, rain, and the knowledge that their great bridge over the River Drava, another major tributary of the Danube, was not yet in a proper state of repair. For at Osijek, the route into Hungary crossed the Drava by a long pontoon bridge and then, a little way upstream, another bridge—constructed of massive timbers, with spectacular wooden towers placed at short interval—traversed the marshes for a distance usually estimated at five miles or 6,000 paces. Throughout a chequered history of decay and renovation since Suleiman the Lawgiver’s reign, this formidable engineering work was the main gateway into Hungary from the south. Croats and Magyars had tried more than once to destroy it, and Caprara’s secretary in 1683 noticed the scars surviving from a brave effort to burn down the bridge in 1664.
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According to their own accounts, the Turks had been engaged on repairs during the previous six months; even so, they were too slow not to delay Kara Mustafa’s army. While the work was hurriedly completed, Osijek itself hummed with business. Troops arrived from Albania, Epirus, Thessaly and even Egypt. The pasha of Veszprém had come southwards and reported for duty with his men. Above all Thököly himself appeared, to be greeted royally.

On 14 June the army began to leave Osijek. Most of the European, Asiatic and African contingents had now arrived, and once past the bridge a stricter order of march was enforced. The vanguard, led by Kara Mehmed
of Diyarbakir, with 3,000 Janissaries, 500 Cebecis (also footsoldiers) and the cavalry of Diyarbakir, Aleppo, Sivas and Egypt, was 20,000 strong, and subsequently increased by some 8,000 Tartars who were then riding across Hungary to the Danube. Next came the main body of troops, followed by a powerful rearguard; but for neither of these are firm figures available. On they tramped, or rode. Instead of the rains, they complained of lack of water, and retailed the usual story that enemy agents were poisoning the wells. Prince Serban Cantacuzene, the tributary ruler of Wallachia, now appeared with his due contingent of men and wagons, to be employed by the Turks to strengthen their inadequate commissariat. Ten days later, Székesfehérvár was reached. A final decision on the future line of march had to be taken at this point, where the itineraries diverged towards alternative objectives on the long frontier between the Christian and the Moslem worlds.

On Saturday 26 June the Grand Vezir held a council.
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Its discussions have been unreliably reported but there is no doubt about the immediate result. On 29 June the Turks entered enemy territory to the north-west, and moved towards the Habsburg citadel of Györ. Prisoners disclosed the concentration of strong hostile forces, and once again the commanders checked the order of march. Tartars, and other irregulars, fanned out ahead. Then came the vanguard, then various troops normally stationed in Hungary. The main army itself was divided into three distinct columns: on the right the Anatolian cavalry, on the left the cavalry of Europe, with the mass of infantry and artillery in the centre. The baggage followed. The rearguard kept its distance well behind. On Thursday 1 July, the Turks reached the right bank of the River Raba, not far from the town and fortifications of Györ. Soon all Europe hummed with the news of their advance, and it was realised that the days of reckoning were at hand.

This short chronicle of events between August 1682 and July 1683 is based on good evidence. The history behind the chronicle at once appears much more obscure. It is one thing to describe the movement of these massive forces across the Balkan lands, quite another to show why they took this course, and at this date. Ottoman history in the seventeenth century, in spite of some heroic inquiries, has still to be written. There remains in Istanbul a forest of administrative records to be explored for this period, but in any case the Moslem cultural and political tradition never gave the Sultan’s greater office holders the impulse to compose state-papers and diplomatic instructions on the western model, or to write their memoirs in order to explain and justify their actions. Even Alexander Mavrocordato, the Greek dragoman who accompanied Kara Mustafa to the gates of Vienna, educated at Padua and a keen collector of western books, preferred to commit to paper only the most meagre account of what occurred in 1683.
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Yet no man was better placed to observe and to judge the secret course of Turkish politics at Istanbul, Adrianople, and in the gorgeous tents which were the headquarters of the Grand Vezir.

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Louis XIV here concluded separate treaties with his principal adversaries, the Dutch, the Emperor, and the King of Spain – who ruled over the Spanish Netherlands, Luxembourg, Franche Comté (which he lost by the terms of this agreement), Milan, Naples and Sicily.

II

One or two far-seeing Moslem writers of the seventeenth century contrasted unfavourably the working of contemporary Ottoman institutions with what they believed was the sounder practice of earlier periods. It is more important to take into account the conventional opinion of their day. For the plain man, accepting without debate the structure of human society as it existed, the frame of government provided by the great empire of the Ottoman Sultan seemed indestructibly part of the nature of things. Its splendour, and strength, far overshadowed the current tribulations of humanity within it. Anyone who cares to browse, for example, through the writings of the traveller Evliyá Chelibí,
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son of a prosperous Istanbul goldsmith who crossed and recrossed the Moslem world in a long sequence of journeys between 1640 and 1670, will be left with a vivid impression of his complete sense of confidence. No city, in Evliyá’s experience, could approach the magnificence of the Istanbul he so lovingly describes: its palaces and places of worship, its educational establishments and hospitals, its plethora of the guilds of skilled craftsmen. Nothing could detract from the glory of those marvellous conquests which the sultans of his own day, Murad IV and his two successors, had made in various parts of the world. They were worthy of Selim the Cruel and Suleiman the Lawgiver. Look up his account of the gun-foundry and its workmen in the capital, and of the
topjís,
or artillerymen: who could doubt that both were incomparable in their own line of business? Read his description of the siege by the Turks of Azov in 1640: the reader must believe that such a partnership of Moslem courage in battle with massive military organisation was, and would always be, superior to the efforts of any enemy. Besides, victories brought their due advantage to the brave adventurer. Evliyá tells of the booty distributed, of his own share of slaves and furs and other valuables; it was the traditional, practical motive for Ottoman militancy from the Sultan or Vezir down to the dingiest camp follower. In this valuable and conventionally-minded author there is not the slightest hint of a ‘failure of nerve’, no inkling of living mainly in the shadow of past Moslem achievements.

Against Evliyá it must be said that the armed forces, and the structure of government, were no longer based on the practice which made possible Ottoman expansion in earlier days. Apart from Murad IV, the sultans of the seventeenth century retreated to the hunting-lodge or the inner household of the palace. Their fear of rivals led them to refuse political and intellectual education, or any exercise of authority, or even personal freedom, to other members of their own family. This defect became the more glaring when a rule was established in 1617,
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in order to avoid the alternative dangers of a minority, that the vacant throne must always pass to the eldest surviving prince of the imperial house: a man, therefore, who had spent his earlier life ‘caged’ in the palace for the greater security of his predecessor. Power was still the Sultan’s, but responsibility increasingly rested with a sequence of Grand Vezirs whose
tenure of office depended on the Sultan’s good will, susceptible in turn to secret intrigue within the palace or hunting-lodge. The men who made the crucial political decisions were vulnerable in a way that Selim and Suleiman had never been in the previous century.

Nor was the standing army any longer so compact, highly trained, or dependent on the Sultan and independent of everybody else. The Janissaries, who were the infantry, and some of the
ojaks
or regiments of Spahis who were the household cavalry, had been normally recruited in the past from Christian populations in the Balkans; so also were the more talented men who became high officers of state. Educated as Moslems, drafted into the army or the administration, they were the well-paid servants who upheld the supreme power in its miraculous, isolated splendour. They were themselves cut off from the social order which they helped to control. Already in the sixteenth century, the Moslem populations began to react against this dominance, of a permanent military force and a brilliantly organised government, both manned by converted Christian ‘slaves’. Many of the leading statesmen and commanders had left behind them children who were Moslem-born, and who naturally reinforced the pressure in defence of their own obvious interest. The Janissaries were recruited increasingly from the sons of former Janissaries and from the Moslem population, particularly in Istanbul itself and other large cities like Cairo. They broke the old rules which forbade them to marry before retirement, or to trade; while married tradesmen, and others, purchased, the privileges of ‘veteran’ Janissaries. These tendencies were noted by foreign observers before the close of the sixteenth century. Then, gradually, the elite of the recruits which was educated in the schools of the Seraglio, was also taken from influential Moslem families.
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It amounted to a fundamental alteration in the personnel of the governing class, and of this the famous Köprülü dynasty of Vezirs forms a conspicuous example. The chances that Mehmed Köprülü’s sons and nephews would enjoy either affluence or influence were not much less than those of Le Tellier’s or Colbert’s family in France.

One result of this change was the greater sensitivity of the regime to the religious problems of the Moslem world. The inevitable tensions between the sects and orders of dervishes, and the representatives of orthodoxy, involved the army because the Janissaries were deeply influenced by the great sect of the Bektashi. The link between them received official sanction in 1594. Fifty years later the Mevlevi, another sect, certainly had influence in high places. The views of the Bektashi and the Mevlevi, on a wide range of subjects, from the veneration of saints to the drinking of wine, and their intermittent sympathy with Christian ideas, tended to meet with the strong disapproval of the orthodox. At the same time the Janissaries of the capital interfered increasingly in politics, partly in order to insist on the payment of full wages while the value of the currency steadily depreciated. Strife broke out between them and rival contingents in the standing army. They learnt to ally with opposite parties at court, and there were occasional periods of complete anarchy in the
headquarters of the empire. Then Mehmed Köprülü obtained full powers as the Grand Vezir in 1656. His rule could not restore the old structure of the state, but it did reinforce orthodoxy in religion. For the time being the more radical sectaries were suppressed, and the Janissaries and other paid troops were reduced to order. One of the most powerful allies of Fazil Ahmed, the second Köprülü, was Vani the stern preacher who denounced all dervishes and wine-drinkers.
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