The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (10 page)

In spite of such improvements, it is not easy to say when the defences were at their best. Progress in one area was often counter-balanced by dilapidation elsewhere. An expert’s memorandum, together with other testimony, painted a gloomy picture in 1674.
²⁰
The masonry generally was then in a bad state of repair. Access from the walls and bastions to the moat was in most cases
faulty, from a military point of view. The water-level in the Canal was far too low, with a number of unfortunate consequences. The Canal itself no longer provided a real defence, because it could be forded too easily. Not enough water flowed into the moat, except for a short distance at each end; but on the other hand it had seeped into many of the fortifications, and weakened them. The lack of any proper works on the north bank of the Danube, to protect the bridgehead, was also judged very serious; a powerful bastion was needed there, partly because the northern defences along the shallow Canal seemed so inadequate. The counterscarp everywhere was in a ruinous condition, and the timber supports of the covered way had rotted. The glacis was no longer open ground because too many buildings had been put up there. The existence of suburbs beyond the glacis, and straggling into it, constituted a final deviation from the strict rules of a scientific military defence.

The critics were right. Clamped within the walls but expanding in numbers, the citizens of Vienna had tried to build upwards. They added an extra storey to some 400 out of 1,100 houses in little more than a century. But inevitably the suburbs also grew, spreading out into the countryside—and in towards the city. By 1680 there were large settlements in Leopoldstadt on the Prater island, by the right bank of the Wien on the east, round the hamlets of Wieden and St Ulrich south and south-west, and on the western side.
*
Particularly here the new building approached very close to the fortifications. The government had over and over again ordered the demolition of dwellings within a given distance of the walls, but to little effect. If a maximum estimate of Vienna’s total population brings it to nearly 100,000 people, a sizeable proportion must have lived in these suburbs, which would in due course give accommodation and protection to a besieging army.

There was also no real garrison. The City Guard,
²¹
a regiment paid by the Emperor, had been decimated by the plague in 1679. They were ill-trained, and ill-housed in cramped quarters inside or on top of the walls and bastions. Most of them scraped an existence by following a variety of civilian trades, to the annoyance of the civilians with whom they competed. There were in addition eight burgher companies, recruited from the eight wards of the city. They made a brave show on ceremonial occasions, and could act as a police in emergencies, but did not regard themselves as soldiers. If the well-stocked municipal armoury supplied them with weapons, their military exercises were leisured enough to suit even those elderly burghers who were the senior officers.

The report of 1674 was once believed to give a fair account of the condition of defences when Kara Mustafa arrived in 1683; it made his final defeat sound all the more striking. In fact we know that there were considerable improvements from 1680 onwards.
²²
Extra money was allocated to the repair of the walls, bastions and ravelins in that year, and in 1681. Even so, no radical reconstruction took place; and in 1683 old and somewhat inadequate fortifacations still visibly enclosed the city in which the burghers and other
inhabitants had to go about their daily business.

*
This was the term commonly used in the seventeenth century, but here it should not be taken to imply that there was a slope up towards the counterscarp outside the walls of Vienna. For the military architecture of the city, see also the drawings on
p. 101
below, and
illustration VII
.

†
This crossing of the canal (‘Danubius Fluvius’) is shown in the 1649 drawing of
illustration VII
.

*
Viz. the road south-west to Carinthia (Kärnten) and Italy, via the Semmering pass, left Vienna by this gate.

†
The road to Hungary, the Landstrasse, crossed the Wien shortly after leaving the city by the Stuben-gate, adjoining the Dominican Bastion (
illustration VII
).

*
For a panorama of the suburbs of Vienna, see
illustration IX
.

IV

The municipal privileges of Vienna were based on charters granted by the Babenberg and Habsburg dukes of Austria. These built up the complicated edifice of the ‘Wiener Stadtrecht’ in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The duke gave certain privileges to the citizens, but from time to time claimed to decide who should be admitted as burghers. He accepted the institution of a municipal council, presided over by an elected burgomaster, but not before he had also created the office of recorder, or
Stadtrichter,
whom he always appointed. He granted the right to hold markets and fairs, and the various rights bound up with a medieval ‘staple’; but he did not lose the power of exempting special groups or individuals—his own coiners or the Flemish traders, for example—from the control of the very institutions which he had allowed to develop. On the other hand, the Vienna burghers then chose their councillors and burgomaster, exercised their own jurisdiction in the city and its immediate neighbourhood, and could discriminate lawfully against merchant-strangers and interlopers. Perennial and sometimes fierce disputes with the ruler always continued; but to a much greater extent than in the days of Leopold I the townsmen were independent. They built their most splendid monument, the Cathedral of St Stephen, in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries while they enjoyed this relative freedom.

Favourable economic conditions explain the growth, wealth and vigour of the city.
²³
Central Europe wanted the precious metals (and, a little earlier, the salt) mined in Hungary; and the Magyars, with their metal, could pay for the products of the west. The Venetians, if they wished to tap the market of Bohemia and Poland, had to take the obvious route over the Semmering pass and across the Danube into Moravia. Trade came to the cross-roads of Vienna and the burghers, brandishing their privileges of pre-emption, became the universal middlemen. Their own exports increased, especially of wine from their vineyards, but were of slender importance by comparison with the easy profits of the staple. This halcyon period ended in the fifteenth century. Everything then turned against Viennese business activity. The development of mines in the Tirol and Bohemia broke the near-monopoly of Hungary as a source of supply. A staple at Passau blocked the staple at Vienna. The Austrian currency collapsed, trade found new routes from Venice and Germany into eastern Europe, and for some years the King of Hungary occupied Vienna. All this meant that the capitalists of Ulm, Nuremberg, Regensburg and even of Passau easily outstripped the Viennese. Habsburg rulers came to depend on German loans for the financing of their government. They made slight use of Vienna, either as a source of revenue and credit or as an administrative centre. They were irritated by democratic elements in the town, which were often
dominant in a period of economic instability and weakness. This party came into prominence for the last time immediately after the Emperor Maximilian I’s death in 1519; Ferdinand I brusquely restored order, revised the framework of municipal government in Austria,
²⁴
and put an end to the radical tradition in Viennese municipal politics until the nineteenth century.

In Leopold’s reign, then, the city was administered by 100 burghers, divided into an Outer or common council of seventy-six, an Inner council of twelve, and a Tribunal of twelve for legal business.
²⁵
The seventy-six elected the twenty-four senior councillors, but the twenty-four elected the seventy-six. Only propertied burghers who were not mere tradesmen could sit on the two smaller bodies, and the latter naturally took care to choose for the common council substantial men like themselves, or the ‘better’ masters from the trades. Elections were for life; and all vacancies were filled up at an annual ceremony on 21 December, St Thomas’s Day, when the 100 councillors assembled to vote under the watchful eye of a Habsburg commissioner. His approval was required before any election could be ratified. They also chose their new burgomaster if the office was vacant; and a good glass of wine completed the transaction of business. The burgomaster normally presided over both the Inner and Outer councils and kept the keys of the eight city gates, but by this period he had become as thoroughly submissive to the ruler as the recorder, who presided in the Tribunal. Other important functionaries were the registrar (or Syndic)—much the most highly paid—the senior and junior treasurers and the Master of the City Hospital. A personnel of inspectors, clerks and tax-collectors assisted them. Rates, control of the markets, weights and measures, public health, the relationship of the guilds with one another and with the councils, and all the miscellaneous problems of local government in a heavily populated area, gave them plenty to do.

A tiny group monopolised high office and we can watch its members, turn and turn about; we shall meet them again. Between 1678 and 1683 John Liebenberg was first the recorder, then burgomaster. Between 1680 and 1684 Simon Schuster was successively treasurer, recorder, burgomaster. Daniel Fotky was treasurer, then burgomaster. From 1691 until 1707 two other worthies alternated as burgomaster and recorder, administering each office for two separate terms of years. They no doubt formed a clique within a somewhat larger circle of solid but less active councillors. But even these men must never be confused with the families which merely kept their place on the Outer council; nor the latter with the poorer sort of master craftsmen in the guilds; nor the masters with the artisans and labourers. For the city had its own steeply graded hierarchy, whose upper levels were in turn completely overshadowed by the grander hierarchy of the Estates and the Hofburg.

V

At this single point on the map of Europe, therefore, in the decades before 1683, a municipality and a court and a government were locked together within the city walls. A poor carter would come down the high road from Bohemia,
*
pass the Danube, pay the dues on his goods at the Rotenturm-gate, and enter the town. Ahead of him was the street which led to the Cathedral. If he followed it, at some distance on his left stood the University, controlled by its Jesuit rectors. Farther ahead, towards the Kärntner-gate, was the great City Hospital, maintained by endowments and various municipal taxes raised for its benefit; close to this appeared the Augustinian church and then the Hofburg. Away to the right were a number of market-places, particularly the Hoher Markt, where many of the guilds had their headquarters; and behind this was the town hall. The carter was a humble man. Above him ranked all the higher orders, with their place in society and their standard of living carefully (but ineffectively) regulated by the latest sumptuary ordinance of 1671:
²⁶
at the bottom, artisans and school-teachers; then masters in the crafts, and liveried servants; then lawyers, auditors, other professional men and some musicians; then the burgomaster, doctors of medicine and law, and the Master of the Court Chapel; and above all these the noblemen.

Laws of singular complexity divided noble families by rank. Those of ancient lineage, with titles and properties enrolled for generations in the registers of the Austrian or Bohemian Estates, were often reluctant to accord full recognition to others only recently ennobled (or promoted to a higher rank) by the ruler’s patent. But if the question of precedence deeply concerned individuals, the spectacular trait of this period was the sheer number of the privileged orders who pressed towards the centre of government at Vienna. As the preacher Abraham a Sancta Clara remarked of the year 1679, just before the dreadful months of plague began: ‘the
NOBILITY,
in crowds which I could not count, and extravagant to a degree, dutifully attended the court.’
²⁷
These noblemen gradually bought up large amounts of house-property, so that the burghers’ share of real estate within the walls declined, and the richest began to build for themselves in the outskirts of the city. What they built did not as yet compare in stateliness with the churches and convents inside and outside the walls, which had been put up in the course of the great Catholic offensive since 1600 by the Capuchins, Franciscans, Jesuits, Calced and Discalced Carmelites, Barnabites, Servites, Ursulines and others. In conjunction, however, church and nobility—with their servants, their expenditure, their privileges—seemed to share in the Hofburg’s dominance of Vienna. Whereas the municipal pretensions, and prestige, of the medieval city had been thoroughly trimmed by the late seventeenth century.

The townsmen knew their place. Only the absolute compulsion of the siege would force them momentarily to the forefront of world affairs. This crisis was imposed on them by the miscalculations of grandees in the palace.

*
The ‘Taborstrasse’ in Leopoldstadt gets its name from Tabor, 100 miles NW of Vienna, on the road to Prague.

3

The Defence of Habsburg

Interests in Europe

I

The Empire, Burgundy, France, Italy and Spain had been the dominant concerns of the Austrian Habsburgs of many generations, who all turned intermittently and unwillingly to deal with Danubian or Balkan problems. Accordingly, at this date the menace of Kara Mustafa’s ambitions was underestimated; but later, with Vienna actually besieged, the Habsburg politicians were right in thinking that the repulse of the Ottoman army depended on the alignment of forces in western Europe (and in Poland) and on their diplomacy at these Christian courts.