In the broad landscapes outside the city there was warfare of a more savage, less organised kind but it is extraordinarily difficult to give an account of the movement of the Tartars, Magyars, and other irregular forces which accompanied the Ottoman army. Kara Mustafa had no control of them, and they appear to have advanced at their own pace, and in whatever direction seemed open to them. Their devastations were probably the greatest single handicap suffered by the Ottoman high command, once it had been decided to attempt the siege of Vienna; it became much harder to feed the standing troops outside the city walls. The most obscure period of all is the week before the siege began, partly because neither the Estates nor Leopold’s government had bothered to put into working order the ancient defence-system, which flashed warnings of an enemy attack from beacon to beacon across the hills. The beacons were not laid, so that no one knew and no one could record the routes followed by the Tartars. After 7 July the foremost raiders certainly pressed on unopposed over the Wiener Wald, almost keeping level with Leopold and his court on their journey up the Danube. When the main Ottoman army reached Vienna, on 14 July, a cluster of Tartar bands was near Melk fifty miles ahead, and during the next few days they moved still farther west until they came to the River Ybbs. They went upstream, and a few of them got across the river, but were at last roughly handled by the peasants and forced back. They proceeded to ravage the extensive lordship of the Auersperg family round Purgstall. If a later account can be trusted, they tried to advance from this area up a road which led through the hills to the industrial and mining district of Steyr, but were again stopped by peasants whom they had themselves pushed out of the villages on to higher ground.1 We cannot say when this section of the enemy finally withdrew eastwards again.
After 7 July, on the border of Hungary other Tartars and Turks turned south from the Leitha valley. Breitenbrunn by the Neusiedler See was burnt, and they continued on their way to the towns of Rust, Eisenstadt and Sopron. The citizens of Sopron, as their worthy chronicler Hans Tschány records, had been troubled by every kind of rumour for weeks past.2 From the beginning of the month their workers in the fields gave up reaping. Turks and Magyars were already across the Rába east of them when these new bands approached, and they felt compelled to seek a negotiation which would stave off the worst horrors of invasion. At this moment, Thököly was popular in Habsburg Hungary because he alone appeared able to act as a shield against the Moslems, while the Moslems used him to gain sufficient control of new territory as quickly as possible. The townsmen of Sopron soon admitted the ‘king’s’ commissioners. They took an oath of obedience on 16 July in return for an assurance of good treatment, and their neighbours in Eisenstadt and Rust followed suit. A Turkish commander quartered in the Esterházy palace which overlooks Eisenstadt. By then Paul Esterházy himself, who had earlier withdrawn from an untenable position on the frontier to the strongest of his private fortresses, was safely in Austria. But his men remained in Forchtenau.* Together with the Habsburg garrison at Wiener-Neustadt, and another handful of supporters in Eberfurth, they now confronted the Turks and Tartars camped along the shore of the Neusiedler See.3 The stage was set for a long series of bitter raids and counter-attacks, of burnings and sackings, in this otherwise smiling countryside.
Meanwhile the main Ottoman force was advancing on Vienna. On its way, some troops turned aside to storm and destroy Hainburg on the Danube (12 July). Bruck-on-the-Leitha had repulsed the Tartars five days earlier; the castle near-by, belonging to the Harrachs and garrisoned by Croats, also resisted them. But the Bruck townsmen could see little point in trying to defy a more formidable attack, and were soon aware that Eisenstadt and Sopron had come to terms. They decided to accept Turkish (not Thököly’s) jurisdiction,4 and gained a measure of security at the price of heavy requisitioning; by the time the negotiation was complete they were more or less quit of the menace of depredations by Turkish irregulars, who had moved farther forward. Apart from the marauders already across the Wiener Wald, there were now many others in the region immediately south of Vienna, where they seem to have killed more, captured more, and burnt more than anywhere else in Austria. Between 12 and 16 July they took Mödling, Baden and Perchtoldsdorf.5 If a majority of the inhabitants had fled, just in time, sufficient remained to be the victims of undoubted savagery. Almost more frightening were the endurance and persistence of the raiders, who pushed up into the hills unhesitatingly. On 13th and 14th places twenty miles west of Mödling had been stormed; Hainfeld, another fourteen miles farther, was destroyed on 18 July. The countryside seemed utterly defenceless for the moment. But beyond Hainfeld the monks of Lilienfeld were preparing successfully to meet enemy attacks, and a little later and somewhat farther north—along the direct road from Vienna to St Pölten—the Countess Pálffy held out in her castle. On the Sinzendorf estates not far away, while barns and cottages were destroyed and livestock disappeared, the manor-houses survived intact.6 Nonetheless, all contemporaries wrote and spoke in paralysed terms of a great tract of land rapidly filling up with hostile bands of Tartars and Magyars—who were more feared than any—while the immensely large Ottoman army battered away at Vienna. A relieving force, it seemed, faced the impossible task of first getting through an area ruined and dominated by the irregulars. Only a few cool-headed individuals realised that the success of the Tartars depended on the total lack of any system of defence organised to link the villages and valleys together, and that this had led to a panic which emptied the country of the more able-bodied, leaving it defenceless.7
* Forchtenau (Forchtenstein) is on high ground midway between Sopron and Wiener-Neustadt.
Multiple disasters had pushed the remnant of the Habsburg field-army to the other side of the Danube. Its hold on that part of the country was in consequence all the stronger. On 15 July most of Lorraine’s cavalry regiments withdrew from the islands which gave access to Vienna. On 16 July, after a sharp encounter with the Turks in front of the last of the bridges leading from one island to the next, his rearguard also retired to the north bank of the river. It was a major defeat, and resulted from a major miscalculation. Lorraine at first undoubtedly hoped to keep in touch with Starhemberg, holding a position from which he could threaten the besiegers. But Le Bègue (his secretary) is emphatic that lack of forage made it impossible to leave cavalry on the islands; and he says also that such a position could not be maintained without the help of infantry.8 Conceivably Lorraine gave up (as he had given up behind Györ) too easily, and certainly Herman of Baden thought so. But on this occasion he had at least avoided a division of his forces. His new camp at Jedlesee contained about 10,000 men, mostly cavalry, in the third week of July.*
For the next nine days he was stationary, almost powerless. His measures were modest but useful. He threw a few troops back across the Danube to stiffen the defences of Klosterneuburg, where fortunately the clergy and townsmen of this great monastic stronghold only six miles upstream from Vienna, and close to the high ground of the Wiener Wald, had in any case determined to resist the Turks. Colonel Dunewald and a majority of the dragoons were sent to Krems, another forty miles up the Danube; from here they too crossed to the south bank, and checked further raiding by enemy irregulars in the wide plain which stretched away eastwards towards Tulln—about half-way between Krems and Klosterneuburg. Dunewald soon reported a successful encounter, and the repulse of perhaps 800 Tartars.9 Moreover Lorraine was still in touch with the garrisons at Györ and Komárom, and ventured to bring back from Györ two more infantry regiments, those of Baden and Grana; they arrived safely at the camp on 24 July. Prince Lubomirski had by then reached Olomouc with six companies of Polish horse. Lorraine summoned them at once, apparently intending to send their commander on an urgent mission to Sobieski, in order to beg the King to march south at top speed. Lubomirski duly came—but despatched a deputy to Sobieski. He himself wished to stay in the theatre of active warfare.10
Lorraine also sent off Taafe, followed by other officers, to Passau; and the Duke of Sachsen-Lauenburg to the Saxon court at Dresden. All were to plead for the instant departure of more troops, so that the relief of Vienna could be attempted with the least possible delay.11 In particular, the messengers to Passau were instructed to raise the fundamental strategic problem of the day by firmly stating Lorraine’s opinion that a relieving army could only approach the city by a route through the Wiener Wald. Members of his staff also considered that it might be necessary to build a fortified camp somewhere in that steep and wooded country, from which to try to strike at the Turks.
At this point news arrived from Hungary. On 11 July, Thököly had broken up his quarters near Miskolcz, about 200 miles from Vienna, and begun to ride with his followers through the Slovakian hills.12 Ahead of them, his agents summoned the larger towns to promise obedience to the new Magyar ‘king’. The citizens of Trnava took an oath of loyalty on 19 July and Géczy, the most active of these envoys, negotiated with the burgomaster of Pressburg. The Habsburg garrison in the citadel there was completely isolated by then; and the townsmen had to reckon not merely with the menaces and blandishments of Thököly who appeared on the scene in person on the 27th, but with the Turks. While the main body of the Ottoman army advanced on Vienna, and other troops blockaded Györ, a third force of possibly 7,000 men under Abaza Kör Hussein—the ‘One-eyed’—wheeled from Györ to Esztergom and crossed the Danube.13 The Turkish commander and Thököly soon quarrelled, but jointly they threatened Pressburg. There were signs that the Turks intended to build a pontoon bridge from a point opposite the town in order to get additional troops over the Danube, and by this means give further assistance to Thököly in driving forward right up to Lorraine’s encampment opposite Vienna. Their adversary would then be compelled to withdraw once again to the west. It would become exceedingly difficult for the Poles to enter Austria by the direct route through Moravia. The area from which the Habsburg army continued to gather food and taxes would be diminished, and the garrisons at Györ and Komárom totally cut off from their comrades. But at the end of July Lorraine reacted violently to the danger, and won his first positive victory since the beginning of the campaign.14
A small force, under Major Ogilvie of the Baden regiment, went ahead to try to stiffen the Pressburg garrison. It was unfortunately cut to pieces by Thököly’s men and Ogilvie had to return. So Lorraine, leaving only a few companies of dragoons behind him, moved east to Marchegg on the Morava, ten miles from the point where this river meets the Danube and twenty miles from Pressburg. There he learnt that the burghers had allowed a small troop of Thököly’s supporters to enter the town, that Thököly himself was now coming up fast with very large numbers—possibly 25,000 Magyars and Turks. The enemy had begun to build his bridge. In spite of the appalling consequences of a defeat at this stage, Lorraine forded the Morava in the late afternoon of 28 July. His forces, first his dragoons, then the Poles, and finally the main body of cavalry, rode through the night up the narrow valley leading to the crest—and to the vineyards—which overlook the citadel and city of Pressburg. Almost at the beginning of this march his van frightened off a few enemy outriders; and Lorraine could not know that these gave the alarm to Thököly who determined to withdraw at once, with many of his followers. Thököly, like Lorraine, greatly over-estimated the size of the force opposed to him.
In the last hours of darkness, the dragoons under Lewis of Baden were posted in the vineyards close to one of the suburbs and the citadel. Lorraine himself came forward to inspect, and saw below him the town, and beyond it two of the enemy’s principal camps, apparently some miles apart. Then, easily, Ogilvie and 200 foot got inside the walls of the castle and strengthened the garrison. At dawn Baden occupied a part of the suburb and summoned the town to surrender. The townsmen speedily gave way to him; but first giving 300 of Thököly’s soldiers sufficient time to escape.
The accounts of the battle which followed are very confusing.15 It seems probable that Lorraine doubted whether he was strong enough to attack the main body of Magyars and Turks outside the town. Luckily Baden and other officers argued boldly for an assault, and he finally agreed. The dragoons were spread out on a broad front between the hill-slopes and the Danube, while the heavier cavalry was being ranged into battle-order; then the dragoons were concentrated on the wings. The Poles under Lubomirski’s command were nearest the river. Other Poles under Tetwin, with the Veterani and Pálffy regiments, stood on the far left. The attack commenced and it soon became clear that most of the Magyars present felt unable to resist. The Turkish units alone were not strong enough to do so, and the reason for this weakness was almost certainly that Thököly and many other Magyars had already withdawn. The Habsburg victory of 30 July was a chase rather than a battle. Even Lorraine lost control of the situation for several hours whilst Lubomirski and Tetwin, their men and those of the Veterani and Pálffy regiments drove across the plain and then slowly returned, loaded with spoil of various kinds, tents, baggage, horses and cattle. They were all—or nearly all—back by dusk; and in the camp that night there was drinking and congratulation, spiced with the envy of those troops who had gained less or too little in the way of plunder. But the Habsburg commanders had not wasted time: the materials for building a bridge over the Danube were either removed or destroyed; supplies were taken into the castle; and the municipality of Pressburg was roughly admonished for truckling to the rebels. It once again promised loyalty to Leopold.
The threat from Thököly had been promptly and successfully met. It was high time to hurry back to the scene of the siege which agonisingly continued its course. On 31 July Lorraine and his men were once more in Marchegg, across the Morava. He himself believed that it was essential to lighten the weight of Turkish pressure on Vienna at once. Conceivably he could have crossed the Danube at Pressburg and threatened Kara Mustafa from the east. The testimony of various prisoners in his hands suggested that the tension between Magyars and Turks had risen high. Messages from Györ and Komárom spoke of extremely effective raids made by Habsburg skirmishers in that area. Intercepted correspondence between the besiegers at Vienna and the authorities at Buda disclosed the tightness of supply in Kara Mustafa’s army and grumbling in its ranks. But Lorraine had a diminutive force by comparison with his enemy’s, whose cavalry enjoyed every chance of emphasising its superiority in the gentle plainland on that side of Vienna. A bridgehead so far to the east was both remote and vulnerable. Indeed the arguments in favour of a speedy crossing at Krems or Tulln, and the construction of a fortified camp in the Wiener Wald from which to try and regain contact with the beleaguered garrison, still sounded convincing to the members of Lorraine’s staff. They were shocked when Taafe reached Marchegg with the gloomiest account of the mood of ministers in Passau. Leopold’s government appeared to view the situation calmly, almost passively, and to insist that any move on Vienna depended on the prior arrival of reinforcements from Germany and Poland; while clearly such reinforcements were coming up at a slow pace. Lorraine was not prepared to accept this programme without protest.16 He passionately wanted to anticipate what he considered the obvious perils of the immediate future. Pálffy was sent off to Passau to press his case once again.17 Other messengers set out on longer journeys, to the King of Poland and the Elector of Saxony.
Fresh intelligence soon showed that the Habsburg cavalry still had work to do on the eastern front; the regiments could not yet be taken back to the Vienna bridgehead. Thököly’s supporters, it seemed, were about to break across the Morava into Moravia, possibly into Silesia. Lorraine was on the point of moving up the river towards them, when he also learnt that the Turks had got over from the south bank of the Danube on to the islands opposite Gross Enzersdorf some miles below Vienna, a village where Habsburg magazines were stored. At the same time, they were adding to their strength on the islands which faced Lorraine’s original encampment opposite the city. So he turned about, spent the night of 3 August at Enzersdorf, and pushed forward to the bridgehead.18 The Turks were successfully dislodged from the islands lower down the river, and their chance of crossing the Danube was cut to a minimum. The troops then turned up the Morava to deal with the Magyar raiders.
The condition of the whole area round Pressburg had become anarchic; typically, on 8 August, an accidental but devastating fire reduced to ashes most of the town of Trnava. While Thököly himself kept close to the shelter of the Little Carpathians, and resided mainly in the castles of Czeklesz (about ten miles east of Pressburg) and of Vereskö farther north, some of his men moved forward again.19 To oppose them the Habsburg headquarters were set at Angern from 6 to 20 August, from which troops would go at intervals to winkle out or mow down those wild incendiaries who were burning the villages of that unpretentious countryside. It was a merciless, sporadic form of warfare in which civilian losses of life and property were extremely high. The Poles once again, mobile and relentless, distinguished themselves; and Lorraine took care to inform Sobieski, while pleading in a sequence of dispatches for the King’s speedy arrival, of the prowess of his countrymen. Privately he would have preferred the inhabitants to withdraw completely with their goods and livestock, rather than that he should be burdened with the impossible task of protecting them. This, in fact, he was not able to do; but he did manage to stop Thököly entering Moravia with a compact force which could threaten the main routes from Poland to Austria.
Meanwhile, his attempts to gather reliable information about the state of Vienna after four weeks of siege always continued. Le Bègue laments on 2 August: ‘However hard we try to get news from Vienna and the Grand Vezir’s camp, we can learn nothing at all.’20 Peasants who had worked for the Turks were questioned, as well as a captured Turkish Aga, a burgher from Bruck-on-the-Leitha, a so-called ‘Catholic Cossack’, and a man who described himself as a German deserter from the Ottoman army and turned out to be an Italian Jew. Their testimonies were weighed, and the balance of probabilities estimated. They had to be compared with reports coming in from the commander at the bridgehead, Magny. How much could be inferred from the noise of successive bombardments and explosions? Or from the intermittent silences which followed them? The arguments, now becoming familiar to us, went round and round in a confusing circle. Kara Mustafa was well and truly pinned down, and undoubtedly expending his resources on the grandest scale. His convoys bringing up supplies from Buda were liable to attacks by the undefeated forces at Györ and Komárom; while farther south Wiener-Neustadt still held out. The enemy was apparently not strong enough to take Klosterneuburg, or to raid farther west than Tulln (after the first fortnight of the siege), or to get over the Danube at any point west of the Morava provided that Thököly could be prevented from helping him. Nor were there any reports that he had fortified his camps round Vienna or placed a guard on the heights of the Wiener Wald. Unfortunately, any optimism based on these facts was tempered by consideration of the one premise of supreme importance: they all depended on the continued resistance of Vienna. The Turks understandably bent all their efforts to this end, the capture of the city. If they succeeded, they could then strike at lesser objectives with every hope of victory in each case. So Lorraine and his staff were back again at the starting-point of their inquiry, their ignorance about the progress of the siege. After a fortnight at Marchegg and Angern they could still only conclude that the siege was making progress, but slowly. After listening to Taafe, and studying the dispatches which followed Taafe from Passau, they decided that powerful reinforcements were indeed coming up, but very slowly indeed. Nine thousand Bavarians and 8,000 Franconians would be within striking distance of Vienna by mid-August. A Saxon army of 10,000 was unlikely to approach before the end of the month, or a Polish army of perhaps 20,000 before the beginning of September; possibly the Polish vanguard under Sienawski would reach Austria earlier than the main body under Sobieski himself. The dilemma was obvious, but insoluble: the longer Lorraine waited, the larger and stronger the relieving force would grow, but the more likely a successful Turkish assault on Vienna. The maximum period of weeks or days was needed to give the Christian armament a chance of confronting the Turks on almost equal terms. To exceed that maximum by an hour was to invite a crushing disaster.
On 2 August he had sent Pálffy to Passau. The days passed, he received no reply, and was compelled to go on waiting at Angern anxious and frustrated.
* For Jedlesse and other points north of the Danube, see the maps (pp. xiv–xvii).
Just then, the city re-established contact with the outside world;21 for it is one of the more puzzling features of the siege that no arrangements were made, before Lorraine drew back from Leopoldstadt and the islands, for signalling of even a rudimentary kind across the river by the use of rockets. The soldiers camped at Jedlesee simply attempted to guess at the course of events from what they could see and hear of the rival artilleries. With the help of Prince Serban Cantacuzene of Wallachia and his Christian subjects, who always served the Turks half-heartedly, Kuniz from the besiegers’ camp was able to send messages into Vienna during the first week of the siege—but this did not help the Habsburg commander on the other side of the river.
On the night of 21 July a bold cavalryman swam across the Danube from near Enzersdorf, bearing a letter from Lorraine which promised the speedy relief of the city. He (or possibly some other volunteer) left Vienna the same day, and the Turks caught him, but luckily they could make nothing of his dispatch which was in cipher. Brought before the Grand Vezir, he said that the losses of the garrison had already been so great that the city was likely to surrender in the very near future. Also on that day, the 22nd, Kuniz managed to get a warning through that the enemy had cut a large amount of timber from the woods round Schönbrunn, in preparation for the advance of their trenches and galleries—for which it was needed—as far as the counterscarp; from here they intended to mine a way through the remaining defences. Starhemberg replied at once, promising to resist to the utmost, and this messenger got safely back to Kuniz. Simultaneously another crossed the Danube to Lorraine, who had heard nothing from the city for eight days. He learnt that the Turks were approaching the counterscarp fast, and that it looked as if they next wanted to extend their trenches laterally from a point facing the Burg-ravelin in order to bring them opposite the Burg and Löbel bastions. Starhemberg repeated that he was determined to hold on.22
Kuniz again sent a servant, a man named Heider, to give warning of mines likely to explode (so he thought) close to the Schotten-gate. Heider entered the city safely, and began the return journey almost immediately, carrying a dispatch for Lorraine which the garrison hoped that Kuniz would be able to forward. No doubt Heider had described the envoy’s contacts with the Prince of Wallachia, the Turks’ unreliable ally; these could surely be used to transmit information through the Ottoman camp, from the city to the Christian world beyond the Wiener Wald or the Danube. But Heider was caught by the Turks. He loudly protested that his only business in Rossau—where he was taken—had been to look for supplies of wine for his employer, but it needed a handsome bribe from one of Kuniz’s interpreters to save his life. On 26 July the Turks shot an arrow into the Burg-ravelin, having attached to it the intercepted letter in cipher of the 21st. They added a superscription, saying that the plight of the city was perfectly well-known to the Grand Vezir who once more promised mercy to the citizens if they surrendered immediately, or death and total destruction if they hesitated an instant. There was no reply, Starhemberg held firm, but for the next week Vienna was cut off from Kuniz, Lorraine and the government at Passau.
Lorraine soon had to concentrate on the threat from Thököly, while Kuniz was obviously vulnerable to Turkish reprisals after the arrest of his servant. The authorities in Vienna failed to find any more volunteers for an enterprise so manifestly dangerous as this journey in disguise through the dense numbers of the enemy. At last, on the night of 4 August a cavalryman who knew Turkish and was dressed in Turkish clothes got into Vienna, bringing with him letters from Passau.23 Details were given in these about the size of the forces which it was hoped to assemble for the army of relief, although the government referred only vaguely to the timing of future operations. Caplirs and his colleagues drafted an answer, advising that they could not reckon to hold on much longer to the strip of counterscarp in front of the threatened bastions; but nobody was willing to take the message out of the city. Caplirs and Starhemberg wrote again on 8 August to say that the enemy was now in the counterscarp, and this time they found a volunteer, one Lieutenant Gregorovitz, to whom a company was promised if he succeeded in his mission and returned to Vienna. Recently a prisoner of the Turks, who had escaped, he claimed to know enough of the language to risk the journey. It was agreed that he should signal his arrival in friendly country from the beacon on the Bisamberg, the height nearest Vienna across the Danube, and easily visible from the city.
He set out, and there was great disappointment within the walls as one night passed and then another, and still the watchers in the tower of St Stephen’s saw no beacon-light on the Bisamberg. In fact Gregorovitz was deviously doing his best, but took a long time to get over the Wiener Wald as far as Herzogenburg,* and from there to Mautern and Krems. Starhemberg (or Caplirs) had already decided to try again; and on this occasion a man of Armenian extraction, once an interpreter in Istanbul and Buda, and now a member of Frank’s volunteer company of civilians, was brought to the notice of the burgomaster and sent by him to Caplirs. This person, named Koltschitzki, either had a flare for publicity or had fame thrust upon him by the pamphleteers of the period. By the end of the year he became easily the most famous of the messengers in the story of the siege, which makes it very difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction in the accounts given of his adventures between 13 and 17 August 1683. He and his servant named Seradly dressed up as Turks, and went over the counterscarp on the Rossau side of the city. They passed without incident through the Turkish guards and encampments, a little farther on climbed round the slopes of the hills which descend sharply to the Danube, and then themselves came down to the water’s edge. Attracting the attention of peasants and boatmen who had taken refuge on an island in the stream, both were ferried safely to the north bank, and soon came up with Colonel Heisler and some of his dragoons. They hurriedly rode across the plain to Lorraine’s quarters on the Morava, and reached him a few hours after the arrival of the dispatches brought out of Vienna by Gregorovitz.
At last the commander in the field had authentic information, even if a little out of date, about the condition of Vienna’s defence and the progress of the Turks.25 The text of one of Caplirs’ letters survives, addressed to Leopold.26 It states that the Turks had begun to mine and undermine the Burg-ravelin, that the defenders’ supply of grenades was nearly exhausted, and that they were severely handicapped by the lack of trained miners. The numbers killed in the recent fighting were high. Disease took toll of many others. Starhemberg himself was ill. The immediate future was grim indeed, and particularly because the design of the Burg-bastion27 made it peculiarly vulnerable to mines.
Almost at once Koltschitzki and Seradly started back. They followed much the same route, according to their own story coming very much nearer to arrest by the Turks in the no-man’s-land outside the city, and by 17 August were safely inside the walls. Smoke was used to signal their arrival to the army in the field and, when night fell, rockets were sent up. The two men had earned the 200 ducats promised them; next day, they were paid. The actual content of the letters which they carried amounted, and could amount, to no more than a general promise from Lorraine to come to the relief of the city as soon as possible. Starhemberg replied in relatively confident terms,28 because the Turks made slow progress from the counterscarp into the moat, and they were still a long way from capturing the ravelin. All their advances towards the two bastions had been repulsed, and their losses—to judge from the confession of prisoners—were very high, while they were running short of essential supplies. On the following day, 19 August, he added a postscript which stated that one more assault had been beaten back. The authorities meanwhile improved on their offer to any man who volunteered to carry the next dispatch. Koltschitzki and Seradly had been given 200 ducats when they returned to the city. Now 100 ducats were offered before the volunteer set out, with a promise of another 100 if and when he came back; and Seradly accepted the bargain—unlike the canny Koltschitzki, his master. He left on the 19th, a signal went up from the Bisamberg on the 20th, and he returned by the 23rd with the usual promise of a speedy relief, now planned to commence at the end of the month or at least early in September.
For the moment, there was little more that Starhemberg could say or do except continue his grim defence of the bastions, then coming sharply under attack. But he must have guessed that his dispatches played a useful part in building up the diplomatic pressure on Leopold’s allies to hasten their advance to Austria, just as the messages from Lorraine helped to assure soldiers and civilians in the city that a powerful relieving army really was on its way to draw off the enemy from the siege. So he wrote again on 27 August, and Caplirs also.29 A man named Michaelovitz took the letters and the ducats, and completed the double journey successfully. The two commanders pressed their case in much more urgent language than in earlier messages, referring to the sad loss of manpower from casualties and disease, together with the running-down of the stock of grenades; many, said Caplirs, who began the siege as corporals were now lieutenants. Their seniors had been killed in action. They would not be able to hold on to the ravelin for more than one or two days longer, and the Turks were beginning to mine the Burg-bastion. These ominous facts were promptly relayed by Lorraine to Sobieski, who appeared to the Austrian commander so agonisingly slow in his advance through Poland.
Starhemberg and Caplirs wrote once again on 1 September. They re-emphasised the fact, no doubt familiar to all military men who had visited Vienna, that the faulty design of the bastions under attack made it very difficult to defend them for any length of time, so that only an immediate attempt at relief could save the city. They lamented, as before, the shortage of skilled miners in the garrison, so that opposition to the Turkish workers underground was ineffective. At the very moment of writing, they stated, the enemy was under the Burg-bastion! They pleaded that they did not say these things for lack of courage, and would fight to the bitter end. Even so, they concluded, defeat was possible and the city might fall.
Michaelovitz was willing to transmit this solemn warning but raised his price, insisting this time on the immediate payment of 200 ducats. He left on 2 September and by the evening of the same day reached Lorraine’s new camp at Korneuburg. Wisely, perhaps, he did not return to Vienna; he already had his money and preferred to save his skin. He set out on the journey home, but then vanished. Perhaps the risks were greater than ever before. Indeed, many contemporaries believed that the Turks captured and killed him, and few of them knew that he survived until 1699.30
Lorraine himself had by now marched westwards with his troops from the Morava, in order to be within reach of the Danube bridges upstream—the old bridge at Stein near Krems, and a new bridge rapidly being constructed from a point opposite Tulln, twenty miles from Vienna.
* Here, dressed in Turkish clothes and talking the oddest German, he had great difficulty in convincing people that he was not an enemy agent.24 The Bisamberg appears in illustration xi.
At Passau, where the Inn flows magnificently from the south and the little River Ilz comes down from the Bohemian hills and both join the Danube, Leopold’s court was in residence from 17 July to 25 August. Quarters were difficult to find, and the Italian diplomats Pucci and Buonvisi preferred to live in the smaller towns nearby, Schärding and Braunau. Buonvisi hoped that from Braunau it would be easier to retreat farther into the mountains, if another emergency threatened and the Turks pressed forward to Linz or even to Passau.31 Meanwhile the Hesse-Darmstadt envoy was unfeignedly thankful to continue his journey up the Danube to Regensburg and so home; unfortunately for us, he passes out of this history. But the court remained uneasily anchored at Passau. The officials tried hard to observe their normal calendar, to celebrate the birthdays and name days of princes and the festivals of the Church, lamenting that they had not with them the proper clothes.32 They accompanied Leopold when he attended services in St Paul’s and in the Cathedral—in which at least one of their number admired the new Baroque decoration just then clothing the medieval shell of the building—or crossed the Inn and climbed up to the pilgrimage church of Mariahilf. The wheels of government also began to revolve again. The Treasury, War Council, and Chanceries were soon hard at work.33
Their first obvious preoccupation was the question of reinforcements. They turned confidently to the Elector of Bavaria.
Max Emmanuel, travelling slowly homeward through Bohemia after his visit to Vienna and Kittsee in the spring, did not reach Munich before the beginning of June. Here he was careful to remain on friendly terms with Louis XIV, but the terms of his treaty with Leopold speedily committed him to send troops to the eastern theatre of war. The Turks advanced, and he readily accepted this obligation.34 By the time the Habsburg court reached Passau the two governments had only to work out the details of an agreement, on such matters as the pay and supply of Bavarian regiments after their entry into Austrian territory; and a final treaty was signed on 6 August providing for the dispatch of 8,200 at once. Ten days earlier, the Bavarian foot regiments had already assembled at Straubing on the Danube. On the last day of July they, and also the Elector’s horse, were reviewed by Leopold at Passau. Max Emmanuel himself arrived. Contingents from the Bavarian Circle of states came on a little later. The foot went down the river, the horse travelled overland. The total reinforcement of 11,300 men was quartered in the area south of Krems by the middle of August, under the command of General Degenfeld. It was the first undoubted and substantial contribution of Habsburg diplomacy and administration to the relief of Vienna.
Leopold’s ministers were no less successful in Franconia and Thuringia. Their appeal for the instant dispatch of troops was discussed by the Franconian and Upper Rhine Circles during the second half of July at meetings in Kassel, Darmstadt, Schmalkalden, and Hassfurt-on-the-Main. Count Waldeck himself came from Holland and inspired the final decision. Soon 6,500 infantry and 1,500 horse made ready to go down the Danube from Regensburg to Krems.35 It was a powerful reinforcement, swift and apparently generous. The sentiments of loyalty to the Emperor and fear of the Turk were no doubt effective strings for the Habsburg ministers to pluck, and they made good use of them during the crisis of the siege. The central German states had also another argument to consider. If both Leopold and Max Emmanuel were fully engaged in Austria, and if in consequence Louis XIV took the opportunity to invade the Rhineland, they themselves could not hope to resist Louis unaided. But their troops had already been raised for the defence of the Empire. Unemployed, they were expensive. It was therefore expedient to lend them to the Emperor, and to quarter them in Austria. Motives were as usual mixed, but the action of the Franconian princes was pure gain for the hard-pressed administration at Passau.
The summons of Leopold’s own soldiers from the Empire was also a relatively simple decision to take. Although the government’s bias had earlier been to insist on the priority which their commitments in the west, and resistance to the claims of Louis XIV in Germany, should take over their commitments in the east and resistance to the Sultan in Hungary, the present crisis forced it to give way and to take risks. In consequence, although the diplomats were still instructed not to give way to French demands, the military administration quietly and steadily made arrangements to transfer regiments from west to east. On 1 August 1,000 men of the Lorraine regiment appeared at Passau, on the 5th Leslie’s regiment, on the 12th the Neuburgers, all bound for Lower Austria. It looked to Pucci as if only the ‘Jung-Starhemberg’ would be left to hold Philippsburg on the Rhine, assisted by troops raised by the Circles in Germany.36 The transfer, which of course involved a major administrative effort in the hereditary lands, as well as a real weakening of the military front against Louis XIV, was another solid addition to the army of relief on which the immediate future of the Habsburg dominion depended.
The government’s relations with its commander-in-chief were much more complicated. From the middle of July until the middle of August neither party had any authentic information about conditions inside Vienna. Lorraine argued that Starhemberg could not hope to hold out for long, given the scale of the Turkish assault, and the limited amount of munitions and food known to be in the city when communications with it were cut off. Passau retorted that enough munitions and food were known to be at Starhemberg’s disposal, that the garrison and the defenceworks were strong, while it would be madness to try and relieve the city without first assembling the maximum number of troops, drawn from all possible sources of manpower in Austria, Germany and Poland. This debate in fact continued week after week, carried on in a long sequence of reports, dispatches and instructions, which were taken to and fro between Lorraine’s headquarters and the court at Passau.37 Lorraine sent off five important and well-informed officers—Taafe, Welspurg, Rostinger, Pálffy and Auersperg—to Passau, and they reached Leopold on 20, 21, 26 July, 7 and 17 August. His written instructions to the second, third and fourth of these have been found, and we have Leopold’s written response to the first and the third. References to other letters and reports also survive, so that it is still possible to follow the controversy, which was intensified by the perennial discord between Lorraine and Herman of Baden.
Taafe left the camp opposite Vienna on 16 July immediately after the Turks had cut the communications between Lorraine and Starhemberg. Lorraine, as we have seen, urged the maximum concentration offerees for the rescue of the city as quickly as possible, and also held that the relieving army would have to choose a route across the Wiener Wald. He quoted a letter from Caplirs, written a little earlier, which estimated the size of the garrison in Vienna at only 8,700 men (or even less)38 and spoke gloomily of the shortness of all essential supplies in the city. There was a certain dishonesty about this, because Lorraine’s staff knew well enough that there were over 10,000 men in the garrison; but it was ordinary good sense to favour the shortest possible route if the case for speed was proved. The government in Passau thought otherwise. It questioned the reliability of Caplirs and insisted on the Vienna garrison’s will and ability to keep out the Turks. It felt that there were two important objectives, to raise the siege and to protect the hereditary lands from any further devastation by Turks and Tartars; it wanted to carry out the rescue operation in such a manner that the provinces surrounding Vienna were also saved from the Turk. Leopold therefore deprecated—he had already done so in a previous dispatch from Linz—the retreat of Schultz and his forces from the line of the Váh. He asked for a firm defence of the whole area north of the Danube from Pressburg to Krems, and insisted on the need to hold the bridge at Stein because ‘the main army will probably have to pass over it to the south bank of the river’. But the question of the route to be followed by any relieving army was left over for more detailed discussion at a later date. The reply to Lorraine hints that it might be advisable to circle round farther to the south in order to give assistance to the Inner Austrian lands, and draw additional troops from that area. In any case the councillors at Passau believed that the suggestion, presumably also Lorraine’s, that an attempt might be made to raise the siege as soon as the Bavarian regiments had reached Austria was impracticable and dangerous, and they would have none of it. Instead they wished to use any additional troops, first of all, to give greater security to the countryside both north and south of the Danube.
Taafe’s mission, and the arguments urged by Lorraine and by the administration in Passau, anticipated the whole course of the debate during the next four weeks. Lorraine was certainly too nervous, but his fears may have spurred on the government sufficiently to bring together the force which saved Vienna just before it was too late.
Rostinger soon arrived at Passau with further memoranda. Lorraine once more assumed that the only possible route to Vienna lay across the Wiener Wald, but this time he said that the enterprise should be attempted as soon as an army of 50,000 German soldiers could be got together.39 This implied that there was no time to wait for the arrival of John Sobieski and his Poles. It was also necessary to provide efficiently for the relieving army, guaranteeing the supply of forage and food, in order to cut down the time needed to move from Krems to Vienna; and both Lorraine and the officer in charge of his commissariat begged for more money in order to pay the troops. Their Polish auxiliaries were already two months in arrears, and grumbling in a way that threatened trouble. Leopold’s reply simply avoided the principal point of the argument. It did not state clearly that a force of 50,000 was too small for an attack on the Turkish army, but informed Lorraine that the negotiations with other courts were designed to bring into Austria a very much larger force, that steps had been and would be taken to find sufficient supplies when they were needed.
Lorraine was not satisfied. After his victory over Thököly at Pressburg he sent Pálffy to Passau to press the view that, if Vienna appeared in obvious danger of falling to Kara Mustafa, an army of 25,000 infantry supported by cavalry should try to relieve the city.40 A route over the Wiener Wald, ‘or a little above it to the right’, was again suggested; and the alternative of crossing the Danube at Pressburg and marching on Vienna from the east, which had been discussed after the recent victory in this area, was firmly rejected. Passau preferred to oppose Lorraine on this occasion by saying nothing at all; or rather, as Le Bègue sardonically noted, ‘after 22 days’ delay’41 Pálffy returned to the camp with a message forbidding any attempt to take decisive action, before the German and Polish troops now on their way across Europe had joined the Habsburg force. Indeed, Vienna still held out. When the letters from Starhemberg and Caplirs were finally brought to Lorraine on 15 August and were then sent on to Passau, readers could interpret them as they wished: the position in Vienna was serious but not desperate, or it was desperately serious. Lorraine sent Auersperg—that incessant bearer of letters to and fro—to press the second view. The ministers in Passau took the first;42 and for the next three weeks their veto forced the Habsburg commander to continue his many preparations for feeding, moving and guiding a confederate army, but not to anticipate the actions of such an army by acting independently.
The days of Wallenstein and Condé were over, fortunately for Leopold and Louis XIV Lorraine, and after him Eugene of Savoy, loyally recognised the authority of the Habsburg ruler. In 1683 that loyalty helped to maintain a government otherwise discredited by an overwhelming temporary setback.
Meanwhile Passau had also to keep the civilian administration of the provinces going, more often by exhortation than command. Leopold, for example, wrote elaborately to the Estates of Croatia on 26 July thanking them for their services, informing them of the troops promised by the German princes, and stating that a substantial armament was being built up in Styria to protect the Inner Austrian duchies, and to collaborate in the rescue of Vienna itself. The Croatians were asked to give all the support they could, keeping closely in touch with the administration at Graz and with Lorraine.43
Much more important, at this time, was the correspondence with the Lower Austrian Estates and government at Krems, so much closer to the principal theatre of war.44 The chief official here was Count Traun, assisted by the Abbot of Göttweig and others. One of Traun’s first duties had been to try to enforce Leopold’s order dated 13 July, that all shipping on the Danube in Lower Austria must be moved over to the left bank of the river. Not everyone obeyed, and certainly not the Abbot of Melk, who was determined to defend himself against Turk or Tartar and at the same time wished to keep open his line of retreat across the Danube. The Abbot of Aggsbach was also a recalcitrant. Traun, authorised by the administration at Passau to use force, ultimately succeeded in getting his way; although the activity of the dragoons under Dunewald, who held the area south of the Krems bridge, no doubt did most to stop the enemy from raiding across the river. The security of the lands north of the Danube deeply concerned Traun, because devastation in that quarter would destroy the stocks of hay and corn needed to support the troops. Imports on the largest possible scale were needed, but the local supply was the obvious nucleus for Lorraine’s commissariat, and a contractor named Kriechbaum signed an agreement with the Lower Austrian administration on 29 July to provide it with these commodities. For Traun, another worry was the attitude of the peasants. There were all the signs of total indiscipline in many lordships; rebellious groups of peasants refused to work, and resisted requisitioning. It looks as if a conscription order published at Krems on 28 July was an attempt to enroll a local police force, in order to restrain the subject populations; but Traun also asked Passau for a regiment of troops to assist this improvised militia.
In the middle of August he himself went up the river to Passau to discuss a different matter, of greater and growing importance: the building of a bridge across the Danube at Tulln for the use of Lorraine’s regiments, and of the Polish troops when they arrived. Up to that time officials had been far more concerned about the existing bridge, connecting Stein (a mile away from Krems) and Mautern. When Leopold fled from Vienna, they at first wanted to build proper military works on the south bank, in order to protect it. But because the inhabitants of the little town of Mautern had almost all disappeared, while the Tartars’ approach was strongly rumoured, they then decided to break the bridge down. Fortunately Lorraine’s dragoons appeared in the nick of time, and Dunewald pushed the Tartars back. The bridge was saved. Then more troops, under Leslie, also reached Krems and from 9 August discussions were going on here about its repair and strengthening, and about the construction of a new bridge at Tulln, 25 miles down stream. The relief of Vienna, however slow the government’s diplomacy and cumbrous its organisation of supplies in the Austrian provinces, had drawn a stage nearer. The great practical necessity of the immediate future was to provide for the safe and speedy crossing of the Danube.
Meanwhile certain stout-hearted individuals, neither helped nor hindered by politicians in Passau or Krems, began to take more positive action against the raiders along the south bank of the river. The Abbot of Melk, on 17 July, informed the Estates of Upper Austria that the devastation caused by the Tartars (and by Magyars) was above all due to a lamentable unwillingness to attack them. One of his officials, writing to a brother at Linz, adds that the enemy bands did not number more than fifteen men apiece. Sometimes only two or three horsemen swept up suddenly to set fire to barns and houses. They disappeared at once, if anyone dared to resist. It was, he said, as if the resident population were temporarily ‘bewitched’; more probably they were just not at home, and like the government had fled in panic. The Abbot was made of sterner stuff, and enjoyed the great advantage of stone walls surrounding a stronghold. Equally, the authorities at the Herzogenburg monastery east of Melk did their best. With the help of fifty musketeers and a sergeant sent by Leslie, they kept the raiders out of most of their property. In fact, little damage was reported in this quarter of the plain.
An Austrian detachment continued to hold on at Tulln, although in the neighbourhood were not only Tartars and Magyars but Turks ‘from Asia’—which we know, because during the second week of August a curious incident occurred.
Albert Caprara, dismissed by Kara Mustafa at Osijek, had been sent to Buda.45 The Turkish assault on Vienna prospered, and the Grand Vezir could see no further advantage in detaining an ambassador extraordinary to whom he felt obliged to accord some of the privileges of his status. So Caprara was brought from Buda to the encampment outside the besieged city, where he conferred with Kuniz and saw for himself the desolation of once prosperous palaces and suburbs. He was next taken over the Wiener Wald. He records a dignified and philosophic conversation over coffee, with the Turkish officer in charge of an outpost near Tulln. They lamented together the illiberality of war in so noble a landscape. Then—we are not told precisely how this was managed—Caprara got over to the other side of the Danube, and went to report at Passau.46 His journey, when it was first sanctioned by the Grand Vezir, must be understood as a sign of the Turks’ confidence; by the time Caprara reached Tulln, Leopold’s increasing armament had begun to tilt the balance of forces in central Europe to their disadvantage.