ONE OF HISTORY’S INFLECTION POINTS (SECOND RIVER CRUISE MISSIVE)

“Let him come; I’ll fight to the last drop of blood.”

                                  Count Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg

                                  Commander of Vienna’s Garrison

“To the Turks it seemed ‘as if an all consuming flood of black pitch was flowing down the hills' at whose head fluttered proudly a large flag with a white cross.”

                                   Ludwig Heinrich Dyck

                                   “Islam at Vienna’s Gates”[1]

What are the true turning points in the history of western civilization?

I call these inflection points.

I stumbled across one of these inflection points—one that I had never really considered before—during our recent Viking river cruise (The Grand European Tour, March 12-26, Amsterdam to Budapest), as we approached the great city of Vienna on the Danube River.

Our cruise director was pointing out various sites of interest along both banks of the river when we passed under a green bridge near Krems an der Donau. He pointed out—almost in passing—that a decision by one of the subordinate Ottoman commanders in 1683 to not defend the crossing (despite the orders of the Grand Vizier to the contrary) allowed the river crossing by a combined Polish-German force that subsequently resulted in lifting the Ottoman siege of Vienna.

Great events in history, in my view, turn on these types of individual decisions.

Why is it a big deal?

Today, it is hard to imagine the sheer terror felt by Christian communities along the Danube River when it came to constantly marauding and pillaging Turkish horsemen. We got a taste of that during our cruise: the special fortifications at churches and other redoubts along the river designed to thwart such raids; and the beautiful altar artwork at the mountaintop Stift Melk (abbey) where the evil participants in the story and passion of Christ were portrayed as dark-skinned Turks dressed in Ottoman-era garb. Then there was the two-hundred-year-old mystical prophecy of the German Franciscan monk Johann Hilten who not only predicted the end of the papacy and monasticism but also the conquest of Italy and Germany by the Turks before the world ended in the late 1600’s.[2]

At any rate, the failure of the Ottomans—the Islamic forces—to take Vienna marked the high-water mark of the Ottoman military penetration into central Europe. Thereafter, Christian forces steadily rolled back Ottoman elements throughout the region. If the Turks had taken Vienna, on the other hand, they could have used the city as a citadel to launch invasions into German territories—an area completely devastated by the religious Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

Are you a movie buff?

One of the most memorable scenes in Peter Jackson’s cinematic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings (in “The Two Towers”) took place at dawn—as promised to Aragon—when Gandalf the wizard led the Rohirrim cavalry charge down the mountain to raise the Orcs’ siege of Helm’s Deep.

Just in a nick of time.

The visual sequence is etched in my mind and was truly unforgettable. 

It occurred to me that Tolkien may have been thinking about the siege of Vienna when he penned the battle scene in his book (written in 1954-1955). The similarity between the two events—one historical and one fictional—are almost identical.

Let me provide a bit of the back story. In 1648, Mehmed IV (1642-1693), also known as Mehmed the Hunter, became the Ottoman Caliph (and Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques) ruling from the Topkapi Palace in Constantinople (Istanbul). He came to the throne at the age of six, after his father Ibrahim (known as the “Debauched” in history, who had 280 ladies of his harem drowned in the Bosporus) was overthrown in a coup. Mehmed IV would become the second-longest-reigning sultan in Ottoman history after Suleiman the Magnificent. Known as a pious Sunni Islam ruler, Mehmed IV was primarily known for two things: a revival of the empire’s fortunes and an era of reforms ushered in by the Köprülü family and expanding the territorial scope of the empire. The Köprülü family, in turn, produced a series of Grand Viziers, the best known of whom was Kara Mustafa Pasha. In the summer of 1682, Mustafa convinced the Sultan to abrogate the Peace of Vasvàr and lay siege to Vienna.

Kara Mustafa believed that after the Ottomans conquered Constantinople two centuries earlier, they became the true heirs of the Roman Empire and that the Habsburgs in Vienna were imposters who needed to submit to the rule of Islam. A century-and-a-half had passed since the last attempt of sultan Suleiman the Magnificent to lay siege to the city.

To that end, Mehmed IV and Kara Mustafa led a huge Ottoman force across the Bosporus—including 12,000 elite janissaries—and wintered in Adrianople where Mustafa read the accounts of the previous campaigns and prepared the way to Vienna. They were joined there by drafted auxiliaries of Arabs, Bosnians, Bulgars, Greeks, Macedonians and Serbs, along with the Sultan’s shock-action cavalry—the Tatars—who terrorized Christian villagers on borders with Hungary and Poland.

By March 1683, the Ottoman Army—now swelled to over 150,000 men—left Adrianople for Belgrade, but not before a bad omen occurred: a sudden squall blew the Sultan’s turban off his head. When the huge army arrived in Belgrade, the Sultan stayed behind to hunt and play, handing over the Flag of the Prophet and command of the army to his Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa. Thereafter the force pressed on to Buda (on the western side and more hilly area along the Danube)—occupied by the Turks since 1541—with Kara Mustafa sending siege cannons on barges up the river.

As an aside, Grand Vizer Kara Mustafa (1634-1683) is one of history’s truly interesting characters. Dignified, handsome, brave in battle, and a devout Sunni believer, Kara Mustafa hated Christians with a passion. He was also capable of acts of extreme cruelty such as the time he flayed captured Poles alive and sent their stuffed hides to the Sultan as trophies. He readily used blackmail and deceit as tools and was arrogant to a fault: he was determined to surpass the accomplishments of the great Islamic conquerors of old. He risked everything on his campaign to take Vienna, in fact defying the Sultan’s orders to take only the bastions on the approaches to the city.

In Vienna, the approaching force was viewed with trepidation. The Habsburg ruler and Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, more inclined to enjoying the arts and writing music than fighting on the battlefield, was “talked into” leaving the city and turned over the city’s defenses to Count Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg and the Duke of Lorraine, both of whom acquitted themselves admirably during the upcoming two-month siege of the city.

On July 12, 1683, the Ottoman force arrived at the city and the next day sent an emissary with an invitation to surrender the city and submit to Islamic rule. Starhemberg refused. The next day (the 14th) Kara Mustafa’s forces began a massive bombardment of the city’s walls, digging encirclement trenches, and sappers mining beneath the walls to plant explosives. In the days ahead, Turkish mines and bombardments opened huge gaps in the walls; sewage, rubble and corpses littered the streets and disease ran rampant. The city’s garrison fended off 18 major Turkish assaults and only one-third of the garrison remained fit for combat.

The city and its brave defenders were exhausted and at the point of collapse.

Four days after the siege began, John III Sobieski—King of Poland and so fat he needed help to mount his horse—marshalled an army of some 40,000 men to begin the 435-mile march toward Vienna. At the same time, a similar force under John George III Elector of Saxony set out from Dresden to be joined by a third force of Bavarians from Munich led by Maximillian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria. They united at Krems—where our story began—some forty miles upriver from Vienna.

By September 11, after a difficult march, the relief force arrived in the treacherous wooded foothills that dominated the terrain southwest of Vienna, where they could see the vast expanse of brightly colored tents of the Ottoman host around Vienna. As the sun rose on the next day, what some historians regard as the largest cavalry charge in history took place with Polish and Saxon horsemen leading the way. One source describes it this way:

“By late afternoon, Sobieski’s army had reached the plain, and he was now positioned to exploit his greatest asset, the famed Winged Hussars. Drawing up these courageous cavalrymen, their feathered plumes streaming off their backs, he led them himself, lances couched in a full-tilt charge at the center of the Ottoman line. Shouting ‘Jezus Maria ratuji!’ (Jesus Maria help) they charged and reformed, charged and reformed, charged and reformed. The Polish horsemen followed their intrepid king deeper and deeper into the army of Islam, smashing what remained of their resistance, setting the followers of Muhammad to flight, relieving the siege and carrying the day.

‘We came, we saw, God conquered,’ Sobieski would later write to Pope Innocent XI.”[3] 

What about Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa and the mighty Islamic force? As described by another source:

“Boiling with vengeance, Kara Mustafa ordered the troops in the trenches to stop the bombardment of the city and called for the destruction of the equipment and massacre of captives… With lance in hand, he [Mustafa] led his personal bodyguard in a heroic but doomed assault against the Christians. One by one his personal retainers, his private secretary, numerous pages, and his whole Albanian bodyguard fell to the fire and swords of the   infidel. Only the argument that his own death would cause the destruction of the remaining Ottoman troops persuaded Mustafa to break off the melee. Seizing the Holy Banner of the Prophet and his private treasure, the Grand Vizier fled the battlefield at around 6 in the evening to lead the retreat back to Györ.”[4]

If the Grand Vizier thought the Sultan would overlook the failure to take Vienna, he was wrong. Kara Mustafa blamed his defeat on subordinate commanders rather than acknowledge his own tactical mistakes: he failed to properly fortify his army from outside attack and kept his best janissary units in the trenches facing the city walls far too long. Kara Mustafa would pay dearly for his failures. On December 25, 1683, while staying in the palace in Belgrade, the Sultan ordered his emissaries to eliminate the Grand Vizier using the method of choice for ridding the sultanate of failing elites: strangulation by a silk chord.

So, we have come full circle. After the siege of Vienna was lifted, the Ottomans would be steadily pushed back by troops loyal to the Habsburg Dynasty and Holy Roman Empire. The broader geostrategic picture that coalesced in the siege of Vienna would involve France’s “Sun King” (Louis XIV), who refused to aid his Habsburg neighbor, volunteers like the dashing Prince Eugene of Savoy, Polish kings and German princes, Protestant forces that sided with the Ottomans, the Pope in Rome, and Ottoman strategists at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.

That is the macro-picture.

But at the micro-level—where the great events of history are really decided—it was the individual failure of an Ottoman commander to obey his superior’s orders to control the Danube bridge crossing at Krems that really mattered.

The great wheel of history turns on these types of decisions.

[1] Ludwig Heinrich Dyck, “Islam at Vienna’s Gates,” History Warfare Network, Oct. 2022. Dyck’s account provides a meticulous overview of the battle to life the siege of Vienna from mid-July to September 1683. 

[2] Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, (2019: Basic Books), pp. 300-301.

[3] Christopher Check, “Under Mary’s Holy Name: Victory in Vienna, September 12, 1863,” Sep. 11, 2014.

[4] Dyck, “Islam at Vienna’s Gates.”