On 6 August 1682, an important meeting took place in Sultan Mehmed IV’s great palace in Istanbul. The highest officers of his government were present, and those among them who opposed the Grand Vezir Kara Mustafa for personal reasons, or deplored his aggressive statesmanship, had been silenced. They now agreed to disregard the existing treaty of peace with the Emperor Leopold I, which was not due to expire until 1684, and they recommended a military campaign for the year 1683, to be mounted in Hungary with the maximum armament of the Sultan’s empire.
In fact, these dignitaries were formally accepting the Grand Vezir’s decision to intensify a policy already in operation; but they could hardly fail to realise how much depended on the bigger scale, and therefore on the scope, of his new proposal. In 1681, a number of the Sultan’s troops stationed north of the Danube had been sent to help Imre Thököly, the Magyar leader in rebellion against Habsburg authority in Christian Hungary, that part of the country which the Turks themselves did not occupy. Early in 1682, more troops were drawn from an even wider area, including Bosnia and Serbia, for the same purpose. Their commander, old Ibrahim, the governor of Buda, gave Thököly powerful assistance and some useful Habsburg strongholds in Slovakia were captured. Up to, but not beyond this point, the policy was flexible. It could be modified or even reversed. But now the Sultan, inspired by the Grand Vezir, went decidedly further. He recognised Thököly as ‘King’ of Hungary under Ottoman protection. He instructed his own court, and in addition the full complement of his household troops, to winter in Adrianople. He began to summon other contingents from his more distant provinces. It was soon understood that they were all to move northwards during the early months of the following year to Belgrade, the general rendezvous for an immense concentration of forces.
Five days later, on 11th August 1682, at Laxenburg near Vienna, Leopold I received the opinion of his counsellors on the question of peace or war with the Turks.1 They unanimously advised him to try to renew his treaty of peace. These statesmen paid far too little attention to the gloomy dispatches from the Habsburg envoys in Istanbul, George Kuniz and Albert Caprara, or to the threatening situation in Hungary. They were almost all preoccupied by the recent aggressions of Louis XIV in Flanders and Germany and Italy, and by Leopold’s and Louis’ rival claims to succeed Carlos II of Spain if he died childless. They considered that the ambitious foreign policy of the French court had gained rather than lost momentum since the treaties signed at Nymegen* in Holland, in 1678 and 1679, put an end to seven years of public warfare in western Europe. They believed that Louis XIV was more to be feared than Mehmed IV. They argued that further concessions to France would prove fatal to Habsburg power and reputation, while possible concessions to the Sultan might be retrieved in due course. They appeared to have in mind, not an immediate order to Caprara to make a positive offer to the Turks (this they had always refused to contemplate), but a further dragging out of discussion between their envoys and the Grand Vezir; if necessary, somewhat later, they would consider the surrender of a few fortified points in the area between Habsburg Pressburg and Turkish Buda. The Sultan, after all, had not stirred in the critical 1670s when Christian Hungary was in a state of mutiny against Leopold. They tried hard to convince themselves that he would not stir far in the 1680s.
The Austrian counsellors were mistaken, but the westward orientation of Viennese policy was an obstinate tradition of long standing. The dominant idea, at least since the early part of the century when the Ottoman power was relatively quiescent, had been to deal gently with the Moslems in order to spare the maximum force required to oppose Christian enemies in western Europe. This was the tactic in 1664, after the great victory of St Gotthard on the banks of the River Rába, when the Habsburgs made concessions (unnecessarily, it seemed to some critics) in order to secure the twenty years’ truce due to expire in 1684. ‘The Crescent Moon (of Islam) climbs up the night sky and the Gallic cock sleeps not!’ was a popular German saying of the time. Leopold I in the Hofburg heard clearly the crowing of the French court and, with the majority of his statesmen, disliked Louis XIV intensely; but for him, the moon rose in comparative silence and the Sultan represented the principle of evil in a somewhat remote sphere, at least in the years before 1682 and 1683. A strong clerical interest at his court, which argued the merits of defending or expanding Christendom, battled in vain against the traditional emphasis in the complex system of Viennese diplomacy.
In August 1682, therefore, the Turks decided on an ambitious military attack against the Habsburg at an early date; and the Habsburg decided to try to avoid war. It is a coincidence which helps to explain why twelve months later the armies of the Sultan were camped round the walls of Vienna itself. In fact, the Habsburg government was not caught completely off its guard, as other evidence will show. But a fundamental underestimate of Turkish striking power continued to bedevil its general policy.
An official ceremony in Istanbul, the mounting of the Sultan’s insignia—the Tugh, or horsetails—outside the Grand Seraglio, publicly proclaimed his intention of leaving the city in the near future. As so often in past years, no doubt, it seemed that he would hunt during the autumn and then go on to Adrianople. Indeed, he left on 8 October,2 after the fast of Ramadan and the feast of Bairam were over, hunted at leisure through various tracts of countryside, and reached Adrianople early in December. His harem and household followed him. But observant men were on the watch for a great deal besides the usual paraphernalia of a despot’s private pleasures. They saw the different sections of the Sultan’s permanent army, usually stationed in and near Istanbul, now assembling outside the walls of the city around his gorgeous ceremonial tent, the movable headquarters and symbol of his government: the Janissaries and auxiliary infantry units, the Spahis and other household cavalry, and a host of technicians and tradesmen required for the service of the troops. Although a marvellous cavalcade had ushered the Sultan out of the city with traditional Moslem emphasis on the importance of such an occasion, the majority of the soldiers left a week later, moved forward without stopping long anywhere, and reached Adrianople before him. Here they remained for four months, the core of an army which expanded rapidly as additional detachments kept coming in; for messengers had gone out to the farthest edges of the empire in Asia and Europe, and also to Egypt. The beylerbeyis, or governors-in-chief, were instructed to bring with them the contingents for which their revenues made them liable, and to see that the lesser provincial officials, the sandjakbeyis, and the landowners large and small, who held land on military tenures, did likewise. Gradually, these forces began to make their way to Adrianople, Belgrade or to points on the road between them.
Meanwhile Kuniz and Caprara had both been brought from Istanbul, and the representatives of other rulers arrived at the temporary centre of government where the Sultan and Grand Vezir resided. One came from Moscow, and the treaty made in 1681 with the Czar of Muscovy was ratified, which ensured peace in a vast area north of the Black Sea. The envoys of the Prince of Transylvania were for once well and lavishly entertained: the Ottoman government hoped to make certain that Prince Michael Apafi sent his forces to join the army, and paid his tribute punctually in the coming year, at the same time acting as a counterweight to Thököly, the new ‘King’ in Hungary. A conference with Caprara took place, in which arguments aired at earlier meetings between the Austrian and the Turkish statesmen were repeated. It was a farcical occasion, because Leopold had made no fresh offers, and because Kara Mustafa was determined not to commit himself until the weight of the army to be assembled in Hungary had given him an overpowering advantage. Caprara learnt now that the price of peace was the surrender of Györ, a fortress of the greatest importance to the Habsburg defences, situated on the Danube, fifty miles south-east of Pressburg. The Turks realised that he had no authority to agree to this; he was already that familiar phenomenon in the history of Ottoman relations with the Christian states, a captive diplomat, detained for possible use by the Turks at their discretion. As a matter of much greater immediate importance, at Adrianople the Sultan willingly agreed with his counsellors that he should lead the army to Belgrade, while thereafter the Grand Vezir exercised supreme military command as his deputy.
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, 1683.3 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.4 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 1664.5 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.6 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 1683.7 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.
* 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.
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,8 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 1617,9 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.10 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.11
A further consequence of this reviving orthodoxy may well have been increased hostility to the Christian churches. While the Orthodox Christian clergy tended to look to the Ottoman government for protection against the encroachments of Roman Catholic missions, and were much alarmed by the multiplication of Uniate churches in communion with Rome, some of them had responded to this Catholic threat by a vigorous movement of reform under Patriarch Cyril Lukaris (executed in 1638). They also began to look with growing attention and sympathy towards the Orthodox Czar and Church of Muscovy, then coming more closely into line with Greek religious practice thanks to Nikon, Patriarch of Moscow (until 1657) and other reformers. The Orthodox rulers of the Romanian principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia, over which the Sultan claimed sovereignty, also occasionally looked to Muscovy (and to Catholic Poland) for support. But these developments simply strengthened the Istanbul government’s determination to control its Orthodox subjects with the utmost rigour. Meanwhile, economic pressure by the Christian states of western Europe increased in the Ottoman lands. If an old tactic of the Turkish rulers consisted in playing off the envoys from Protestant Holland and England against the ambassador of Catholic France, and it was often profitable, there could be no doubt that the ‘capitulations’ of these countries with the Sultan formed the basis of their growing commercial supremacy in the Levant. Moslems rightly mistrusted wealthy alien merchants who imported debased currency, manufactured in the west for use in the Turkish dominions.12 Foreign Christians tended to do business, first of all, with the native Christians, and this was a further cause of offence.13 Dislike and alarm were naturally to reach new heights when the French admiral Du Quesne and his ships burst into the Aegean on the prowl after pirates in June 1681, and remained in those waters for nine months. ‘The Gran Visir thunders amongst us,’ the merchants from the west complained, but he had good reasons for doing so.
The state was becoming more obstinately Moslem in personnel and outlook. This is one comment that may be made on old Evliyá’s view of the Ottoman empire’s continuing glory. Other fundamental changes, which he could hardly be expected to grasp, were also taking place.
When the masterful Murad IV died in 1640, a strongly entrenched party of courtiers in the palace soon realised that warfare was the simplest means of keeping the standing troops otherwise quartered in or around Istanbul at arm’s length. This helps to account for the prolongation of the desultory war against Venice, begun in 1645 for the conquest of Crete. But rivalries at court then tended to make each faction exploit the sympathy of rival contingents in the standing army. It was found that a naval war against Venice involved the defence of the Dardanelles, and of Istanbul itself, so that large numbers of soldiers had to be kept close to the vital centre of government. They were still on the spot to be used by, or to use, the factions. The Grand Vezirs, who often had a clear notion of their imperial responsibilities, sometimes tried to employ the troops against the court, and sometimes regarded military disorders as the primary evil to be stamped out first. Alternatively, without troops they could not hope to repress the mounting tumult in parts of Asia Minor. A final and most important element in an anarchic situation was the temperament of the Sultan: ‘mad’ Ibrahim (1640–7) made courtiers and politicians fearful for their personal safety, and was therefore responsible for kaleidoscopic changes of front, and reversals of alliance by all the interests involved. The minority of Mehmed IV (born in 1640) had very much the same effect on the situation. During this period two main parties, patronised by the mother of Ibrahim and the mother of Mehmed respectively, fought one another to a standstill—the older lady was slaughtered in 1651—but the boy Sultan was so much under the influence of his immediate entourage that the foothold of successive Vezirs was correspondingly weak. Sivash, in office in 1651, and Ipsir, who was Mehmed Köprülü’s patron, were without doubt men of ability.14 Later on the Sultan had grown older and surer of himself, and his determination to maintain the Köprülüs in office as the responsible Grand Vezirs did more than anything else to restore stability while this stability made it easier to increase the revenue of the state and to pay the troops, whose discipline improved accordingly.
The first Köprülü ferociously repressed most of the elements of disorder: the influence of household politicians in court and harem, the perpetual rumbling of stipendiary troops in the larger cities, and the incendiarism of dervishes. His success vindicated Evliyá’s faith in the structure of Ottoman dominion, even if that structure was insensibly changing.
When Mehmed Köprülü died in office in 1661 his son Fazil Ahmed succeeded him unopposed, and ruled fifteen years. He too died in office and Kara Mustafa, a son-in-law, took his place in 1676. This long span of time, hardly interrupted by such easy transfers of power, gave a continuity and firmness to the central authority which made it more formidable than at any period earlier in the century. Much depended on the Sultan’s willingness to tolerate Vezirs who acquired greater effective power the longer they remained in office. But Mehmed IV, like his exact contemporary Louis XIV, had endured years of misery during his minority, and unlike Louis he never dreamt of being his own first minister. The development of court protocol, with its deliberate denial of an education in politics to members of the ruling house, made this improbable in any case. Only someone of exceptional quality could break down such a barrier, and Mehmed’s virtues as a prince were the simple ones: to survive his minority, to prefer hunting to politics, and not to die for many years. His vices were said to be avarice, and occasional fits of acute jealousy.
The Köprülüs, father and son, were not the men to elaborate a system. They felt their way, a step at a time, but recognised with great perceptiveness the unalterable facts of their situation. In consequence they were remarkably consistent statesmen. It was necessary to satisfy the Sultan, and this meant giving him funds enough to lead the easy, expensive life he craved, dedicated above all to the pleasure of hunting on a fabulous scale. It was necessary to tame the capital city, and the unruly elements there which had supported so many palace upheavals in the past; significantly Mehmed IV did not visit Istanbul once in ten years (1666–76).15 Finally, the Köprülüs had to accept the whole burden of empire, to keep in due subordination the provincial pashas, the tributary rulers along the frontiers, and neighbouring princes who threatened the frontiers. All these needed resolute and aggressive statesmanship. Under Fazil Ahmed, himself an administrator rather than a military commander by training, it became clear that intensive military activity presented the most reasonable answer to this threefold problem.
Warfare was expensive, but it justified heavy taxation from which the Sultan took his full share. It beat the big Moslem drum against the non-Moslem world, which helped to control the religious fervour inspiring ordinary public opinion at a time when tension between orthodoxies and heresies kept such fervour at a high pitch. War likewise drew off troublesome forces from the capital, both the Janissaries and the tradesmen who worked for them. More important, campaigning on a large scale justified enlarging the army to a maximum, and within this expanded force it was easier to contrive a balance of power which subdued the more refractory elements. Even among the standing troops the Köprülüs checked the Janissaries and the cavalry (these Spahis, recruited from the household pages, had been one of the most uncontrollable bodies of men in the 1650s) by careful attention to the separate cadres of gunners and armourers. All these units were counterweighted again by the fiefholders and their contingents summoned from the provinces, by other groups of paid soldiery, and by the increasingly large personal followings of provincial governors. By his emphatic and peremptory summons the Grand Vezir rallied the empire’s military resources. All together, if the giant Ottoman armament wasted the many areas through which the contingents passed on their way to the allotted theatre of war, it also maintained stability and discipline by an approximate internal balance of power. Of course, the manoeuvre roused grumbling. The more closely many ortas, or companies, of Janissaries became associated with the guilds and the artisan population of Istanbul, the more they aspired to be civilians with the privileges of soldiers, and the less they liked a summons to war which seemed partly designed to decimate them. The more the old fiefs (the so-called timars and ziamets) tended to become negotiable sources of revenue for courtiers and politicians, the less enthusiastically many fiefholders obeyed the same summons. Yet, for the government, the policy justified itself, forcing the old military institutions to continue functioning, with some benefit to the empire.
Distant warfare strengthened the Grand Vezirs at court. Mehmed IV had now realised that his own interest required a strong chief Vezir to govern for him, but he could hardly help hearing the whispered hints of his household servants, or realising that the Köprülüs enjoyed a power which might be said to rival his. Intrigue always continued, and there was a danger that the Sultan would one day be tempted to depose the man who was nominally the Sultan’s ‘slave’. At court, also, the Vezir was overshadowed by the Sultan’s precedence. Almost paradoxically he became stronger in absentia. Whatever his enemies might suggest to discredit him, it was on balance dangerous to tamper with his appointment in the course of a military campaign. Then, if he concluded it successfully, it seemed senseless to try and depose him at a moment when victory enhanced his prestige. A little later was too late: campaigning had already recommenced, so that the cycle of events which left the Grand Vezir in power, and his enemies partially silenced, began again.
The assault on Vienna was therefore only one of a long series of campaigns, all caused in part by the special character of Ottoman court politics. But its timing and direction owed even more to the complex history of the Ottoman frontier lands in Europe. These stretched in a wide arc for 1,200 miles from the Adriatic to the Sea of Azov, combining military strongholds with an amazing variety of political checks and balances. They were the outworks in Dalmatia, Slavonia, Hungary, Transylvania, Moldavia, Podolia, the Ukraine and the Crimea, which protected the inner Balkan lands and the Black Sea. They confronted the enemy states of Venice, Austria and Poland, as well as the Cossacks and the Muscovites; they confined, and helped to control, the Christian populations under the Sultan’s rule. From one point of view Kara Mustafa inherited and exploited a remarkable system of defence, which the Ottoman government had built up in Europe after two centuries of experience. From another he mishandled and perverted it, thereby compelling the Poles and the Austrians to unite against him.
In Hungary direct occupation of the frontier had existed since 1541. The pashas of Bosnia and Kanisca faced a miscellaneous array of forces, garrisons, irregular bands and noblemen’s troops nominally subject to the government of Inner Austria at Graz, or to the Ban (the Viceroy) of Croatia. The pasha of Buda kept watch over the Habsburg citadels on or near the Danube below Pressburg, as well as over the mountainous territory north and north-east of Buda. The pasha of Timisoara meanwhile governed an inner part of this broad frontier zone, and with other commanders in the Tisza valley safeguarded the Ottoman interest in Transylvania, lying east of Hungary.16
The forces controlled by a man like the pasha of Buda were usually a match for the local Habsburg commanders, or for Magyar raiders along the middle Danube. Yet this was a remote frontier, close to one of the stronger Christian states. Larger armaments were needed from time to time. In such an emergency the standing troops of the Sultan, and the enormous reserves of manpower available in the empire, could be moved up from the Balkans and Asia to Belgrade and Buda. His permanent military strength distinguished the Sultan’s dominion from almost every Christian government until the mid-seventeenth century, and the campaigns in Transylvania and Hungary between 1659 and 1664 showed that it was still effective.
Moreover, the Turkish administration had now lasted so long in Hungary that the subject populations were acquiescent. Though oppressive, it avoided certain major errors which might have caused trouble. The Turks tended to keep to the towns, where they often pushed the Magyars into the suburbs. Inside the walls Moslemised Serbs and Bosnians, rather than the Turks themselves, replaced the native inhabitants and for their benefit mosques were built or, more commonly, old churches were converted into mosques. The secular testimonies of this Moslem dominance appeared at the same time, the baths and fountains and hostelries. Negotiations between Turkish officials and ordinary folk were made easier by a small class of Magyar scribes who had attended both at Christian and Moslem schools.17 Outside the towns, the conquerors never tried to ‘plant’ the countryside. There could be no immigration of the kind noticeable in Bulgaria out of Anatolia in this and earlier periods. In Hungary the Turks simply took over from the old, and became the new, absentee landholders. They funnelled taxes and revenues from a given piece of ground into their own feudal system for the upkeep of troops, into their tax-farming system, and into their system of charitable and private endowments of various kinds. The treasury at Istanbul tried hard to keep copies of the main local schedules which listed the proper allocation of Hungarian resources. In a few areas, curiously enough, families long resident in Habsburg Hungary were able to preserve fragmentarily some of their original sources of revenue in spite of the Turks; but this was part of the double-taxation and mutual raiding common along the fringes of Christian and Turkish dominion, the normal fate of boundary lands which were ‘contribution country’. Apart from this special type of exception, the class of substantial or hereditary Christian landowner had disappeared after the Turkish conquest, a fact which was one guarantee of the regime’s stability. Others were a population gradually declining (in all probability), and a feeble economy. It was stability of a dismal kind, but adequate for its predominantly military function north of the area already protected by great and uncontrollable rivers, the Danube, Drava and Tisza, flowing amid miles of marshland in the region where their courses converge.
The Turks also treated religious problems with considerable shrewdness. They did not proselytise in Hungary, because they wanted subjects not Moslems, nor did they conscript Christian boys for a military education in the schools of Istanbul, as occurred in the Balkans. On the other hand they limited strictly the right of Christians to protect, repair or build churches, though without persecution by dragonnade on the Habsburg or Bourbon model. Denying the Catholic hierarchy any chance of exercising public authority, they made it easier for Calvinism to survive in Hungary. The rival Christian faiths could quarrel under the eye of Moslem pashas claiming authority over both.
These arrangements also suited the Ottoman interest across the border, in Habsburg Hungary. Here the Magyars never learnt to combine for long under the Habsburg dynasts whom they nevertheless accepted as kings of Hungary. Whenever the royal authority appeared too weak to enforce order, or too harsh to be endured, there was always the strong probability that a party of patriots or rebels would look for Turkish support. A great conspiracy of the magnates Zrinyi, Nádasdy, and Wesselényi against Leopold in 1668–70, after a period of Habsburg military activity in warfare against the Turks (1660–64), and the rebellion which broke out in 1672 after the first rising had been crushed, were due to increased autocratic pressure by the Vienna government, and both illustrated the iron law of Hungarian politics in this century: that Magyar liberties under the Habsburgs depended on the presence of the Turks in the rest of Hungary. The constitutional weakness, a very old one, was intensified by the relatively modern antagonism of Catholics and Protestants. The Protestants, given the impartiality which the Turks mixed with oppression in matters of religion, were bound to look to them for support. Otherwise there would be no means of checking the Catholic counter-offensive to recover lost ground, which was perhaps more powerfully mounted in Habsburg Hungary after 1648 than anywhere else in Europe. The seminary for clergy at Trnava came into Jesuit hands in 1649; and the Jesuit academy in the chief Protestant city of eastern Hungary, Kassa (Košice), was accorded the status of a university in 1660. From these two major points, and a host of lesser ones, Catholic influence radiated fast. The bishops now formed a strong and zealous body of men, headed after 1665 by the implacable Archbishop of Esztergom, George Szelepcsényi. They enjoyed the Vienna government’s firm support, because the Emperor Ferdinand II and his successors held explicitly that the Catholic creed was the surest test of political loyalty. Measures based on this premise were bound to push the Protestants into further acts of disloyalty.
As a result the Turkish authority in Buda, always confident of its power to hold Hungary with the standing Ottoman forces, viewed with pleasure and attention the predicament of the Christians across the frontier. Of course, the Moslem commanders were not dispatched to this distant exile for the sake of a quiet life, but their security was no greater than they would have wished. If the seventeenth-century courts of Vienna and Istanbul kept peace with one another between 1606 and 1663, and between 1665 and 1683, the border lands dividing the two empires were disturbed by continual forays. Raiders from both sides conducted their expeditions with varying success. The Turks expected a reasonable annual revenue from the capture of cattle, horses and prisoners, by looting or taxing the border villages. This contributed to the fortune of high provincial officials who were never left long at their posts by a suspicious central government, and government in turn increased its revenue by making them pay heavily for the privilege (sometimes unwelcome) of their appointment. But petty anarchy and violence never detracted from the essential strength of the Turkish position in the lands which marched from the middle reaches of the Sava and Drava northwards to Buda and Esztergom, and then gradually east and south to the Transylvanian frontier.
From here to the distant steppe of the Don basin, the Ottoman defences rested to a greater degree on political manoeuvre. The principalities of Transylvania, Wallachia, Moldavia, Polish claims in the lower Dniester and Dnieper valleys, the complicated rivalry of different Christian Cossack groups with one another and with Tartars in the same area (the outlying Tartars in the Dobrudja by the Danube delta or the more organised followers of the Khan in the Crimea) all had to be combined in one gigantic jigsaw, the pieces of which continually altered in shape and significance. The general strategy of the Turks was to restrain each by means of the other, with the minimum possible use of their own strength. This extraordinary system, comparable in its own way with the elaborate network of Bourbon diplomacy in northern and eastern Europe under Louis XIV had been devised gradually, first round the Black Sea, and then covering more and more ground towards the west.
In 1478 Mehmed II reduced the ruling Ghiraj dynasty of the Crimean Tartars to an honoured but subordinate status. The Black Sea was closed to western trading fleets. In the seventeenth century the revenues of the busy port of Caffa18 in the Crimea, fell to the Ottomans who garrisoned it, by this means supervising and subsidising the Khans who held sway over the rest of the peninsula from their splendid palace at Bagchi Serai in the hills above Balaclava. Some members of the Ghiraj family were usually held in Constantinople as hostages for the Khan’s good behaviour and would be sent to replace him if necessary. The subsidies partly paid for the great forays to the west—to Polish and Transylvanian territory or elsewhere—which the Sultan from time to time ordered the Tartars to undertake. The balance of their payment was found in the actual booty of an expedition, particularly the slaves who were disposed of at Caffa. These, with the profits of other raids carried out against or without Ottoman consent, and of the more ordinary commerce flowing south from the Russian lands, once again swelled the revenues of the Crimean ports. The total result in terms of high politics was to place at the Sultan’s disposal a large if erratic force of nomadic cavalry which could usually be directed where it was wanted. The activity of the Tartars in Poland in 1657–8, in Transylvania in 1660–2, in Moravia and Hungary in 1664, in the Hungarian campaigns from 1683 onwards, was remarkable. They preferred to cross the steppe while snow still covered the ground, and in consequence reached the western lands no later than an army coming up from the Balkans. They pushed through the Carpathian passes, or traversed Moldavia and Wallachia to join the Turks farther south. It is arguable that they were far more destructive, and did far greater damage to a countryside than the more tightly ordered Ottoman troops. However difficult to control, they were effective auxiliaries. If not disciplined, they were highly trained.
The Sultan, meanwhile, kept his grip on the lands which lie along the eastern slope of the Carpathians. Without much difficulty, pliant candidates were placed on the thrones which controlled uneasily the Moldavian court at Iasi, and the Wallachian court at Targoviste or Bucharest. In spite of their very mixed origins, Greek, Albanian, Polish, as well as Romanian, these princes or ‘hospodars’ were still closely linked with local and patriotic interests. They intermarried with descendants of the native dynasties. They were patrons of Romanian and Greek literature. But the Ottoman government nearly always maintained its suzerainty and squeezed a large revenue from the two principalities in the shape of douceurs, tribute and military supplies demanded from the hospodars. The dominant families transferred the burden to a peasantry gradually declining in status. The Turks also relied on their substantial garrisons along the Danube below the Iron Gates, which in emergency they could assist with much larger forces. Instead of taking the Belgrade road, an expedition for this purpose followed the other old Roman itinerary which climbed the most easterly pass through the Balkan range, and was at once ready for action.
Farther north the Turks either built new or, more commonly, used old fortifications: at Chotin and Akermann on the Dniester; at the mouths of the Dnieper; at the strait leading into the Sea of Azov and the mouth of the Don. Sometimes but not always, garrisons were left at these points. A navy on the Black Sea was an additional safeguard. Political management, occasionally braced by the deployment of great military force, held their position intact from Azov to Bucharest.
Transylvania remained the most important Turkish dependency, because its obedience or disobedience affected profoundly the security of the frontiers farther east and farther west. The country consisted of a central lowland surrounded by great afforested ramparts and these were pierced by a number of passes, so that invasion (or punitive raiding) was always possible, but at the same time difficult and costly. Although a part of the medieval kingdom of Hungary, by 1500 its viceroy enjoyed extensive and princely authority. When Hungary collapsed in the sixteenth century under Turkish pressure, the Transylvanian princes and estates struggled hard to keep their precarious freedom by never deferring completely to the dictation of Istanbul or to that of the new line of Hungarian kings, the Habsburgs; but they normally had to recognise the Sultan’s suzerain power and to pay tribute to him.
Such was the situation in eastern Europe down to 1648, and twenty-five years later the political system of the Ottoman frontier still seemed in good working order. In 1683, the Sultan’s grand army came up to reinforce the troops at the disposal of the pashas in Hungary. The princes of the Crimea, Transylvania, Moldavia and Wallachia obediently crossed the hills to join Kara Mustafa in the Danubian plain. The eastern sections of the frontier were docile while battle was joined with the Habsburg Emperor. But the fact was that there had also been successive upheavals and violent dislocations, which step by step transformed the situation.
Indeed, one can watch the action of something like a magnetic pull from central Europe during these decades. It was to be exerted with the greatest force in 1683, when the Ottoman besiegers drew towards Vienna the German and Polish soldiers who relieved the city; it was only just not strong enough to bring in the French as well, and the Lithuanians, and the north German princes. But earlier there had already been a displacement of Turkish power itself from east to west. Crises in Transylvania, Poland and the Ukraine were followed by the crisis in Hungary, which first tempted Kara Mustafa to frame his plan for an attack on Austria. In the background France contributed to this pull towards the centre of the continent. Louis XIV’s agents, in Istanbul and Warsaw and Transylvania, did their devious best to divert Ottoman forces from the area beyond the Carpathians, and to make them advance up the Danube instead.
The Polish colonising movement into the Ukraine was the most spectacular enterprise of the Poles in modern history. Gathering momentum in the second quarter of the century it progressed in an easterly direction towards the Dnieper, but the strains set up by this expansion proved intense. The antagonism of the Ukrainians to the Poles, of Orthodox to Catholics, of free settlers to the menace of serfdom imposed by the greater landlords, of nomads to colonists, caused the mammoth Cossack rebellion of 1648, with which was soon linked Russian and Swedish attacks on Poland. All this favoured the Turks, who welcomed the disarray of neighbour states. However George II Rákóczi Prince of Transylvania, tempted by these developments to try to rise above that modest station in life which the Ottoman court required from a subordinate ruler, intrigued in Moldavia and Wallachia, and intervened in Poland. In 1656 he joined an alliance of Sweden, Brandenburg and the Cossacks for partitioning that country. He threatened to become so much more powerful that it appeared a matter of obvious urgency for the Sultan’s government to crush him; and, just then, the hard-headed Mehmed Köprülü took over the office of Grand Vezir. He was nothing if not thorough; under him, both Turks and Tartars made terrible incursions into the three Carpathian principalities. Rákóczi was deposed and in 1662, after a confused interregnum, a subservient nominee of the Sultan was brought in to govern Transylvania: Prince Michael Apafi who loved his Calvinist books and his bottle, and hated politics.19
At the same time, it became clear that the restoration of order in the Ukraine depended not only on the Poles but on the Czar of Muscovy. They bargained and reached a settlement at the famous truce of Andrusovo in 1667, which divided a vast tract of land on both sides of the Dnieper into Polish and Russian spheres of influence. But there had already been signs that the ‘free’ Cossacks would prefer the Sultan as a distant overlord to either the Czar or the King of Poland. Led by Peter Doroshenko, their Hetman, they formally offered to recognise Ottoman suzerainty in 1669. The Grand Vezir seized this opportunity. He could buttress his regime at home by continuous military activity in a remote area. He could use his dominance in the principalities, now firmly re-established, as a base for intervention and expansion farther north. The Polish and Ukrainian campaigns of Fazil Ahmed Köprülü and his successor, Kara Mustafa, covering an apparently limitless territory, soon began. In 1672, the Turks captured Kamenets, a stronghold in the Dniester valley, and a key to the security of southern Poland. In 1673 the Poles counterattacked with some success but thereafter the full force of Ottoman arms was exerted, and in 1676 the Turks compelled the new Polish King, John III Sobieski,* to agree to a truce which gave them Kamenets and much else besides. Unfortunately, inevitably, the completeness of their victory had alarmed the Cossacks; Doroshenko the Hetman changed sides and appealed to Moscow. The Czar intervened, and at this moment Fazil Ahmed Köprülü died and Kara Mustafa succeeded him.
The records are too meagre, there can be no proper biography of this cardinal figure in European history.20 We must surmise that he was born in northern Anatolia at some date between 1620 and 1635, that his father was a soldier named either Uradj or Hassan, and that he was educated in Mehmed Köprülü’s household. He married into the Köprülü family. In 1659 he secured the important post of governor of Silistria, and from 1660 onwards held a number of influential appointments. Ten years later he acted as Fazil Ahmed’s deputy at the Sultan’s court when the Grand Vezir was absent, and in 1675 was betrothed to one of the Sultan’s daughters. No one expressed surprise when he became the new Grand Vezir and gathered up the reins of power without any visible challenge. All agree that his swarthy complexion justified the nickname of Kara, or black; in other respects, reports about him are very contradictory. There is occasional praise by diplomats for his courtesy. More often they were bewildered, and cowed, by his arrogance when he granted them official audiences. Possibly the displays of anger were well-controlled; intimidation is a point of politics. There are many references to the size of Kara Mustafa’s household, the splendour of his stables and horses, the number of his concubines, and the avarice which sustained them all; but one Englishman, resident at Istanbul in 1676, added that he had earned the reputation of a ‘Great Souldyer, and a Great Courtier and of a very Active Genious.’21 Venetian and French ambassadors analysed his qualities at more length, but in substance failed to improve on that somewhat slight appraisal. The actions of this Ottoman politician, rather than the words of others about his character, prove to be his only trustworthy memorial. They were at least in part dictated by historical forces of more permanent significance than one man’s intense personal ambition.
It was believed a few years after 1676 that Kara Mustafa had disapproved of the course of events in the north.22 He did not understand, it is reported, why Fazil Ahmed Köprülü concentrated on warfare in the Dniester valley, or treated so coolly the Magyars in rebellion against Leopold who appealed to him for aid. But there is no solid evidence that Kara Mustafa, on his accession to power, hoped to attack the Habsburg lands in the near future. Certainly, he could not easily disengage from the Ukraine. The Poles had recognised the Turkish claim to keep garrisons along the Black Sea coast, and at one or two points on the lower Dnieper. This safeguarded communications by land with the Crimea, and no responsible Turkish statesman wanted to whittle down the advantage of the concession by failing to press for an equally satisfactory settlement with the Cossacks and Muscovites. Moreover, the Hetman’s disobedience was a blow at the whole system of dependent princes which the Köprülüs had restored to good working order. So the Ukrainian war against the Czar and the Cossacks went wearily on. A new Turkish nominee for the post of Hetman was found. Dreadful devastation took place, which pushed innumerable families from the right to the left bank of the Dnieper. Kara Mustafa accepted enormous losses in manpower, wasting the Janissaries and other standing corps severely, in order to defeat the enemy. Above all he tried to capture the Cossack capital of Chigirin, ‘that unsupportable place Chagreen’23 as an English envoy to Moscow called it, and also their advanced base 200 miles farther down the river. In 1677 a massive Turkish army failed to accomplish anything. In 1678, under Kara Mustafa himself, they took Chigirin but were next year driven back again. The fighting degenerated over a wide area into a purposeless deadlock for the main protagonists. The reasons for putting an end to it gradually impressed them both. An ambassador from Moscow reached Istanbul in March 1680, and negotiations began.
In consequence, close observers felt that the time was coming nearer when the Ottoman politicians would need ‘fresh woods and pastures new’, if the system and initiative of the last two Grand Vezirs were to be maintained. The Poles foresaw that Lvov and even Cracow were vulnerable to a renewed Ottoman attack, although they had accepted Kara Mustafa’s draconic terms for a treaty of peace in 1678.24 The Venetians, far to the south, feared for the fate of what remained of their Adriatic empire. They showed themselves nervously ready to swallow every insult, and to comply with every demand for extravagant financial compensation, when small frontier incidents occurred in Dalmatia. Luckily for Venice, luckily for Poland, the affairs of Hungary offered the Grand Vezir a much clearer opening.
Here the Viennese court had governed autocratically after 1670, discontent led to disorder, disorder to more repression which then touched off a rebellion. A stream of exiles—the ‘Malcontents’—found their way east to Transylvania, and organised a number of raids back into Hungary from 1672 onwards.25 Fazil Ahmed Köprülü refused to support these and instructed Apafi to hold aloof, but some of the rebels took refuge on Turkish territory in Hungary, where the local commanders allowed bands of their own soldiery to help in attacking neighbouring Habsburg districts. A pattern of guerrilla warfare was soon imposed on northern Hungary. Desultory but brutal fighting disturbed a part of each year. Desultory but inconclusive negotiations between Vienna and the rebels tended to take place each winter and spring.
An influential Magyar nobleman, Stephen Thököly, died in 1672; Habsburg troops had captured his stronghold of Árva in the extreme north-west corner of Hungary, and confiscated his property. His son, Imre, grew up in Transylvania where he secured by inheritance very extensive revenues. He was alert, attractive, and passably well-educated. He possessed the talents and personality of an instinctive leader. He never felt timidity or scruple, he had craft rather than judgment, but men followed him. In 1678 the Malcontents summarily chose the twenty-five-year-old Thököly as their commander and immediately, in the course of a few months, they won a series of spectacular engagements. The important points of Murány, Baňská Bystrica and Árva were taken. Booty, especially in the form of coined and uncoined precious metal from the Slovakian mining areas, was considerable. Thököly’s prestige soared, and he soon enjoyed unchallenged control of the Magyar patriot force. During the next two years he held his own against the Habsburg garrisons in Hungary; he rattled and weakened them. He discredited the authority of Apafi’s chief adviser in Transylvania.26 Agents from Warsaw and even Paris bid high for his support. Kara Mustafa, inactive but watchful in Istanbul, slowly learnt to appreciate Thököly’s nuisance value in the politics of the intricate Carpathian world, of which he may have felt that he knew too little. He had still to decide how best to use this new star in the firmament.
Early in 1681 Leopold at last summoned a properly constituted Hungarian Diet.27 His ministers recognised, very late in the day, that their costly autocratic experiment in this region weakened Leopold’s whole position in Europe at a time when they were determined to resist Louis XIV’s expanding power. They had to admit the advantages of the old Magyar constitutional procedure. But long before the Diet opened in May, in the town of Sopron by the Neusiedler See, Kara Mustafa took definite counter-measures. He persuaded Thököly to repudiate it by instructing the rulers of Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania, as well as the Turkish command in Hungary, to bring substantial assistance to the rebels.28 Thököly turned down Leopold’s invitation to come to Sopron. Although discussions continued during the summer between Habsburg statesmen and those Magyars who were willing to work for a settlement, Thököly still refused to appear. Forces gathered in the north-east, both Christian and Moslem fighting men, in order to help him against Leopold’s troops in Upper Hungary. The Transylvanians under Prince Apafi at length arrived but the hostility of the local Turkish pashas towards them, and their own unwillingness to reinforce Thököly, were equally evident. Then Apafi withdrew, and the campaigning season came inconclusively to an end. It was still possible that the tranquil close of the Sopron Diet, which had solved one or two of the outstanding constitutional and religious problems of the day in Hungary, would draw off some of the Malcontents. Thököly stood where he was. The Ottoman government, on this occasion at least, had moved somewhat cautiously, promising more than it cared actually to give. Far away to the south, Kara Mustafa had to digest the affront of Admiral Du Quesne’s demonstration of French naval power in the Aegean between July 1681 and March 1682.
During the winter Kuniz, the Habsburg envoy at Istanbul, tried to negotiate seriously for a renewal of the treaty between Emperor and Sultan which was due to expire in 1684. His political opponent, the French ambassador Guilleragues, soon swung into action. He resisted the Ottoman demand for satisfaction from Louis XIV for Du Quesne’s exploits but incited the Grand Vezir to attack the Habsburg Emperor. On Louis’ instructions, he suggested that the King of France would not refrain from helping the Poles if the Turks attacked up the Dniester, but on the other hand would refuse to help the Habsburgs in the event of war between Emperor and Sultan.29 The language of these colloquies was shrouded, and their influence on the Ottoman minister is open to debate. The political condition of eastern Europe both drove and tempted the Turks to intervene on an increasing scale in Hungary, but the arguments of Louis’ envoy at least did nothing to deter them. For that matter, neither did those of Kuniz. He gloomily reported to Vienna the Grand Vezir’s unbending refusal to discuss a settlement. His letters persuaded Leopold to make a new move on the board, by instructing a second envoy to go to Istanbul. Unfortunately, although this decision was reached in August 1681, the ambassador extraordinary—Albert Caprara*—only left Vienna in February 1682, and reached Istanbul in April.
Such sloth was partly explained by Thököly’s skilful tactics. He never allowed the Habsburg court, and the powerful party at Vienna which preferred to neglect the dangers in Hungary, to write him off as irreconcilable. Indeed, he had very strong motives for following a sinuous and complicated line of action. First of all, it was obvious prudence to force the Ottoman government to raise its bid for his support. Then, while he wanted to reap a due reward for military victories over the Habsburgs, he also wanted to strengthen his territorial position by one of the commonest gambits open to princes and magnates. In north-east Hungary, without any doubt, the greatest single complex of lands and revenues still belonged to the combined inheritance of the Rákóczi and Báthory families. The Habsburg government relied much on the goodwill of that militant Catholic lady, Sophie Báthory, the widow of George II Rákóczi. The opposition relied on Helen Zrinyi, whose father was executed after the conspiracy in 1670, now the widow of Francis I Rákóczi (who had died in 1676). Therefore Thököly contemplated a match with Helen. Unfortunately, Sophie Báthory countered this by tying up much valuable property in her will and appointing Leopold the executor for Francis Rákóczi’s young children, and their guardian. She died in 1680, and it became a part of Thököly’s policy to secure Leopold’s consent to his union with their mother, Helen. This became one of the agenda in diplomacy which continued during the winters of 1680–1 and 1681–2; for both parties it seemed a useful lever for putting pressure on the other. Vienna miscalculated: it could neither bully nor befriend its opponent. Leopold finally consented to the marriage, his representative was present at the festivities in the great castle of Munkács (Mukachevo) during June 1682. Immediately afterwards Thököly unmasked again, to become the Sultan’s firm and formal ally.
In fact when Caprara reached the last stage of his long journey south, at Adrianople, he met the Magyar envoys returning from Istanbul. They had reached an agreement with Kara Mustafa, and therefore Thököly soon prepared for a fresh campaign. The Turks once more ordered up men and supplies from the principalities, and also from Bosnia and Serbia. The pashas and the Magyars began active collaboration in July. In August the great council of state was held at Istanbul, which foreshadowed fighting on a much grander scale in the following year; and the Diploma was drawn which proclaimed Imre Thököly the prince of ‘middle’ Hungary under the Sultan’s protection.31 It reached the theatre of war after the city and citadel of Kassa had fallen to the Malcontents, and a combined force of Magyars, Turks and Transylvanians had completed the destruction of Fülek (Fila’kovo)—forty miles north-east of Buda—by a devastating siege. Thököly received the insignia of authority under the Sultan from the governor of Buda.32 The Magyars continued for a few weeks to push farther into the territory still held by Habsburg garrisons, causing particular alarm to the Poles on the other side of the Carpathians, and then the campaign came to an end33 just when the Sultan and the Sultan’s troops set out from Istanbul to Adrianople.
* Sobicski’s election as King of Poland in 1674 was partly due to the prestige which his success as a military leader had given him the year before.
* A professor of moral philosophy at Bologna University, who wrote a charming version of Aesop’s Fables, Albert Caprara (1627?–1691) was more a man of letters, and an ‘orator’ who took formal messages of condolence or congratulation from court to court, than a serious politician. Albert is to be distinguished from his cousin Aeneas Caprara, the Habsburg general. This was a most curious and unsatisfactory appointment.30
It is clear that the Grand Vezir now judged the situation ripe for major changes in Hungary and the adjoining lands. The Magyar rebellion had continued for many years, but only in 1682 did Kara Mustafa decide that he could exploit it fully. Moreover for him, as for other Turkish statesmen, Hungary itself was primarily a frontier province with a cluster of fortresses in water-logged country, which served to protect the inner lands of the Balkan empire. It was not a rich or fruitful territory, even if richer than the empty plains of the Ukraine in which they had fought against the Muscovites before 1681. The gains to be expected from a modest local advance, such as the capture of Györ or Komárom, and the squeezing of the nearby lordships of Magyar magnates, would be correspondingly meagre. On the other hand Vienna, a hundred miles beyond Györ, was a glittering prize. Those Turks who had been there, as members of an embassy which visited the city in 1665, seem to have brought home impressions completely in harmony with the old Moslem legend of the ‘Golden Apple’; that apple of the heart’s desire, said the legend, was the splendid Christian city of the infidel Emperor, to be captured at some golden moment in a future age.34 Evliyá Chelibi accompanied this embassage, and what seemed to western travellers of the seventeenth century a rather dull city, and a dull court, appeared to him staggeringly rich and attractive. The ambassador himself was Kara Mehmed, one of Kara Mustapha’s most trusted advisers and commanders in 1683. Useful information about the military defences of Vienna meanwhile came from renegades in the Sultan’s service; an un-named ex-Capuchin friar, for one, claimed to be an engineer and know the city well.35 The relative poverty of Hungary, the alleged wealth and weakness of the centre of Habsburg power, as well as the effect on Leopold’s position of Louis XIV’s strength in the west: these must all have been commonplaces of discussion in Istanbul. At the very least, in the summer of 1682 the expansion of the Ottoman empire into Habsburg Hungary was planned for 1683.36 The army would march, there would be conferences with Caprara in order to discover whether he had been given authority to surrender territory or citadels, the army would in any case occupy still more territory and live on the spoils; and whatever transpired in the immediate future, an attack on Vienna was also to be regarded as an item in the Grand Vezir’s secret catalogue of possible objectives.
Caprara was in fact instructed simply to try and renew the treaty of peace on its existing basis. Already in the course of his journey through Hungary he learnt enough to report home that his prospects were hopeless unless he offered territorial concessions, or disposed of sufficient funds to bribe the Istanbul politicians on a redoubtable scale.37 Arrived at the Sultan’s court, he wished to delay negotiations, trusting that new orders would reach him from Vienna. He heard nothing. At a meeting held on 23 June the Turks ran through a long list of alleged Habsburg infringements of the old treaty—such as the building of new Habsburg fortified points, and the taxing of Turkish subjects, in Hungary—and with scarcely veiled threats asked Caprara what price the Emperor was willing to pay for a fresh agreement. They argued that compensation by Leopold for his breaches of the existing treaty was the only acceptable basis for a new one. The envoy felt disturbed, but not yet desperate, and his report on this discussion reached Vienna in time to be considered by the statesmen who advised Leopold on 11 August.38 On the other hand, his despatch analysing a second conference (of 6 July) could hardly have been gloomier, and it was an added misfortune that no courier could at first be found to forward it, so that the Habsburg government did not understand the true position until mid-September.39 The Turks asked for a number of changes in north-west Hungary but constantly shifted their ground, substituting one explicit demand for another. They began by requesting Leopold to demolish the fortifications at Leopoldstadt,* and they wanted him to acknowledge their right to take larger contributions from territory along the frontier. Caprara retorted that the Sultan himself had broken the old treaty by recognising Thököly, to which the smooth and menacing answer was given that Thököly first appealed to the Sultan, who could not refuse him protection.
Then, finally, the Turks demanded Györ as the price of peace. But Györ was universally considered a cardinal point in the defence of the Habsburg position in Hungary and in Austria. Its loss and recapture by the Christians were famous incidents in the warfare between 1593 and 1606. It could not have been given up again, by a mere stroke of the pen, without a catastrophic sacrifice of military strength and political prestige. If the Turks were in earnest, this demand was really a declaration of war because no diplomatic bargain would justify, from the Habsburg standpoint, the surrender of the place. From the Turkish standpoint it was equally a rational military objective. Yet military considerations, in the strict sense, hardly determined the Grand Vezir’s policy. The character and constitution of the Ottoman empire at this period did determine it. The demand for Györ was an explicit admission that the state of war, with all its opportunities for further expansion, was preferred to the maintenance of peace.
At Adrianople the demand for Györ was repeated. Yet the idea of an assault on Vienna appears to have attracted Kara Mustafa increasingly. Caprara wrote on 20 March40 that Thököly’s emissaries warmly pressed it, and he was informed that in Vienna other agents of Thököly (ostensibly negotiating with Leopold) were making drawings of the city; but his considered opinion was still that the plan of campaign had not been finally settled. At Belgrade, he gleefully told the Turks of an alliance recently completed between Leopold and the Republic of Poland. We cannot be certain, but the Grand Vezir may have argued that this news strengthened the case, not for a more cautious strategy, but for keeping his enemies guessing about his intentions. A subtler diplomatic sense would have suggested that the Poles were less likely to prove good allies to the Austrians if he had made it clear, at a much earlier date, that they were not the target of his forthcoming attack on the Christian world. Nor are we better informed of the views of Kara Mustafa’s opponents in the Sultan’s entourage at this point. But the more insistent their criticisms, the more tempting was a military operation of the most spectacular kind, intended to place the Grand Vezir on, the highest possible pinnacles of prestige and power.
At Belgrade Caprara also handed in a letter from Herman of Baden, President of Leopold’s War Council.41 It said, quite simply, that the Emperor had made every effort to keep the peace; but he now recognised, with infinite regret, that a state of war existed between the two great empires, and in accordance with the law of nations the President asked the Grand Vezir to arrange for Caprara’s departure from the Ottoman camp. This letter reached Belgrade on 11 May. Kara Mustafa at first delayed his reply. Then, at Osijek, he returned a reasoned and sober answer, ‘courteous in tone’;42 Caprara, with this message, was able to leave for Buda on 12 June. Kuniz remained with the Ottoman army, a more or less privileged captive. By now the Grand Vezir certainly knew what he wanted to try and do. Thököly had arrived with a large following at Osijek on 10 June. He seems to have promised to put sizeable forces of his own into the field, and the Turkish accounts suggest that not only was the Vezir strongly urged by his Turkish servants (particularly by the director of his chancery) to attack Vienna, but that he himself informed Thököly of such a plan—which included a vague proposal to make the ‘king’ of Hungary a ‘king’ in Vienna. The two men in conversation undoubtedly spurred each other on to adopt the most aggressive tactics possible, and this at a moment when news reached them that the Habsburg army was besieging Neuhäusel north of the Danube. Next day, Kara Mustafa crossed over the Osijek bridges.
A week later, while the troops moved northwards, it became known that the siege of Neuhäusel had been raised.43 No other item of news could have encouraged militant leaders more thoroughly. The army moved on again, and its commanders duly arrived at Székesfehérvár.
Here the Grand Vezir held his final council of war before the fighting began.44 Among those present were certainly the Khan of the Tartars, Murad Ghiraj and members of his family, the Aga of the Janissaries, Prince Apafi of Transylvania, and a number of senior Ottoman provincial governors. It is possible that the aged and experienced Ibrahim, beylerbeyi of Buda, was deliberately not summoned to attend, even though he knew far more about conditions on this frontier than anybody else. Kara Mustafa announced that, although it was his intention to march towards Györ and Komárom, this alone could not result in a sufficient extension of the Sultan’s power. He proposed to advance on Vienna itself. A section of the defences in front of the Habsburg Emperor’s palace there, he claimed to know from first-hand accounts, was unable to stand an assault. The Tartar ruler demurred, arguing that the wiser course was to capture Györ and Komárom first, ravage the Austrian countryside, and winter in Hungary.45 He suggested an attack on Vienna in the following spring. Apart from the Khan, and with the possible exceptions of Sari Hussein beylerbeyi of Syria, Ahmed of Timisoara, and Ibrahim of Buda (if he was present, which is not certain), no one ventured to disagree with the Grand Vezir. Undoubtedly Ibrahim thought the decision a profound mistake. He either said so at the conference or during a separate interview soon afterwards with the Grand Vezir, who brusquely called him a cowardly old grey-beard. He was ordered back to Buda.
Caprara long hesitated to believe that Vienna itself was in any danger, because he despised the whole Turkish military force. He emphasised its ‘weakness, disorder, and almost ludicrous armament’. It could never resist, he wrote, the ‘genti d’Allemagna’.46 At Belgrade, he estimated that there were 20,000 good fighting men in the entire army; his secretary Benaglia put the figure considerably higher, at 39,000; the rest were a rabble.47 Later on, the ambassador set out the opinion which he had formed before he left Osijek in these emphatic terms: ‘I cannot believe that the Vezir proposes to go to Vienna, and that so ambitious a design can be based on such mediocre forces. It is possible that brutal resolutions of this kind may be inspired by sheer pride; but the judgment of God will fall upon them.’48 The Grand Vezir himself took a different view of his resources. He was right. His audacious bid for a sensational victory only failed by a hairsbreadth, and his defeat was due to serious errors of his own making at a later stage of the campaign.
* By the treaty of 1664, Leopold gave up to the Turks his fortress of Neuhäusel, twenty miles north of Komárom, together with a small area surrounding it. He soon began to build Leopoldstadt north-west of Neuhäusel, which remained a Turkish enclave in predominantly Habsburg country. See illustrations I and II and the end maps (pp. xiv–xvii).