The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (28 page)

Kuniz again sent a servant, a man named Heider, to give warning of mines likely to explode (so he thought) close to the Schotten-gate. Heider entered the city safely, and began the return journey almost immediately, carrying a dispatch for Lorraine which the garrison hoped that Kuniz would be able to forward. No doubt Heider had described the envoy’s contacts with the Prince of Wallachia, the Turks’ unreliable ally; these could surely be used to transmit information through the Ottoman camp, from the city to the Christian world beyond the Wiener Wald or the Danube. But Heider was caught by the Turks. He loudly protested that his only business in Rossau—where he was taken—had been to look for supplies of wine for his employer, but it needed a handsome bribe from one of Kuniz’s interpreters to save his life. On 26 July the Turks shot an arrow into the Burg-ravelin, having attached to it the intercepted letter in cipher of the 21st. They added a superscription, saying that the plight of the city was perfectly well-known to the Grand Vezir who
once more promised mercy to the citizens if they surrendered immediately, or death and total destruction if they hesitated an instant. There was no reply, Starhemberg held firm, but for the next week Vienna was cut off from Kuniz, Lorraine and the government at Passau.

Lorraine soon had to concentrate on the threat from Thököly, while Kuniz was obviously vulnerable to Turkish reprisals after the arrest of his servant. The authorities in Vienna failed to find any more volunteers for an enterprise so manifestly dangerous as this journey in disguise through the dense numbers of the enemy. At last, on the night of 4 August a cavalryman who knew Turkish and was dressed in Turkish clothes got into Vienna, bringing with him letters from Passau.
²³
Details were given in these about the size of the forces which it was hoped to assemble for the army of relief, although the government referred only vaguely to the timing of future operations. Caplirs and his colleagues drafted an answer, advising that they could not reckon to hold on much longer to the strip of counterscarp in front of the threatened bastions; but nobody was willing to take the message out of the city. Caplirs and Starhemberg wrote again on 8 August to say that the enemy was now in the counterscarp, and this time they found a volunteer, one Lieutenant Gregorovitz, to whom a company was promised if he succeeded in his mission and returned to Vienna. Recently a prisoner of the Turks, who had escaped, he claimed to know enough of the language to risk the journey. It was agreed that he should signal his arrival in friendly country from the beacon on the Bisamberg, the height nearest Vienna across the Danube, and easily visible from the city.

He set out, and there was great disappointment within the walls as one night passed and then another, and still the watchers in the tower of St Stephen’s saw no beacon-light on the Bisamberg. In fact Gregorovitz was deviously doing his best, but took a long time to get over the Wiener Wald as far as Herzogenburg,
*
and from there to Mautern and Krems. Starhemberg (or Caplirs) had already decided to try again; and on this occasion a man of Armenian extraction, once an interpreter in Istanbul and Buda, and now a member of Frank’s volunteer company of civilians, was brought to the notice of the burgomaster and sent by him to Caplirs. This person, named Koltschitzki, either had a flare for publicity or had fame thrust upon him by the pamphleteers of the period. By the end of the year he became easily the most famous of the messengers in the story of the siege, which makes it very difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction in the accounts given of his adventures between 13 and 17 August 1683. He and his servant named Seradly dressed up as Turks, and went over the counterscarp on the Rossau side of the city. They passed without incident through the Turkish guards and encampments, a little farther on climbed round the slopes of the hills which descend sharply to the Danube, and then
themselves came down to the water’s edge. Attracting the attention of peasants and boatmen who had taken refuge on an island in the stream, both were ferried safely to the north bank, and soon came up with Colonel Heisler and some of his dragoons. They hurriedly rode across the plain to Lorraine’s quarters on the Morava, and reached him a few hours after the arrival of the dispatches brought out of Vienna by Gregorovitz.

At last the commander in the field had authentic information, even if a little out of date, about the condition of Vienna’s defence and the progress of the Turks.
²⁵
The text of one of Caplirs’ letters survives, addressed to Leopold.
²⁶
It states that the Turks had begun to mine and undermine the Burg-ravelin, that the defenders’ supply of grenades was nearly exhausted, and that they were severely handicapped by the lack of trained miners. The numbers killed in the recent fighting were high. Disease took toll of many others. Starhemberg himself was ill. The immediate future was grim indeed, and particularly because the design of the Burg-bastion
²⁷
made it peculiarly vulnerable to mines.

Almost at once Koltschitzki and Seradly started back. They followed much the same route, according to their own story coming very much nearer to arrest by the Turks in the no-man’s-land outside the city, and by 17 August were safely inside the walls. Smoke was used to signal their arrival to the army in the field and, when night fell, rockets were sent up. The two men had earned the 200 ducats promised them; next day, they were paid. The actual content of the letters which they carried amounted, and could amount, to no more than a general promise from Lorraine to come to the relief of the city as soon as possible. Starhemberg replied in relatively confident terms,
²⁸
because the Turks made slow progress from the counterscarp into the moat, and they were still a long way from capturing the ravelin. All their advances towards the two bastions had been repulsed, and their losses—to judge from the confession of prisoners—were very high, while they were running short of essential supplies. On the following day, 19 August, he added a postscript which stated that one more assault had been beaten back. The authorities meanwhile improved on their offer to any man who volunteered to carry the next dispatch. Koltschitzki and Seradly had been given 200 ducats when they returned to the city. Now 100 ducats were offered before the volunteer set out, with a promise of another 100 if and when he came back; and Seradly accepted the bargain—unlike the canny Koltschitzki, his master. He left on the 19th, a signal went up from the Bisamberg on the 20th, and he returned by the 23rd with the usual promise of a speedy relief, now planned to commence at the end of the month or at least early in September.

For the moment, there was little more that Starhemberg could say or do except continue his grim defence of the bastions, then coming sharply under attack. But he must have guessed that his dispatches played a useful part in building up the diplomatic pressure on Leopold’s allies to hasten their advance to Austria, just as the messages from Lorraine helped to assure soldiers and
civilians in the city that a powerful relieving army really was on its way to draw off the enemy from the siege. So he wrote again on 27 August, and Caplirs also.
²⁹
A man named Michaelovitz took the letters and the ducats, and completed the double journey successfully. The two commanders pressed their case in much more urgent language than in earlier messages, referring to the sad loss of manpower from casualties and disease, together with the running-down of the stock of grenades; many, said Caplirs, who began the siege as corporals were now lieutenants. Their seniors had been killed in action. They would not be able to hold on to the ravelin for more than one or two days longer, and the Turks were beginning to mine the Burg-bastion. These ominous facts were promptly relayed by Lorraine to Sobieski, who appeared to the Austrian commander so agonisingly slow in his advance through Poland.

Starhemberg and Caplirs wrote once again on 1 September. They re-emphasised the fact, no doubt familiar to all military men who had visited Vienna, that the faulty design of the bastions under attack made it very difficult to defend them for any length of time, so that only an immediate attempt at relief could save the city. They lamented, as before, the shortage of skilled miners in the garrison, so that opposition to the Turkish workers underground was ineffective. At the very moment of writing, they stated, the enemy was
under
the Burg-bastion! They pleaded that they did not say these things for lack of courage, and would fight to the bitter end. Even so, they concluded, defeat was possible and the city might fall.

Michaelovitz was willing to transmit this solemn warning but raised his price, insisting this time on the immediate payment of 200 ducats. He left on 2 September and by the evening of the same day reached Lorraine’s new camp at Korneuburg. Wisely, perhaps, he did not return to Vienna; he already had his money and preferred to save his skin. He set out on the journey home, but then vanished. Perhaps the risks were greater than ever before. Indeed, many contemporaries believed that the Turks captured and killed him, and few of them knew that he survived until 1699.
³⁰

Lorraine himself had by now marched westwards with his troops from the Morava, in order to be within reach of the Danube bridges upstream—the old bridge at Stein near Krems, and a new bridge rapidly being constructed from a point opposite Tulln, twenty miles from Vienna.

*
Here, dressed in Turkish clothes and talking the oddest German, he had great difficulty in convincing people that he was not an enemy agent.
²⁴
The Bisamberg appears in
illustration xi
.

IV

At Passau, where the Inn flows magnificently from the south and the little River Ilz comes down from the Bohemian hills and both join the Danube, Leopold’s court was in residence from 17 July to 25 August. Quarters were difficult to find, and the Italian diplomats Pucci and Buonvisi preferred to live in the smaller towns nearby, Schärding and Braunau. Buonvisi hoped that from Braunau it would be easier to retreat farther into the mountains,
if another emergency threatened and the Turks pressed forward to Linz or even to Passau.
³¹
Meanwhile the Hesse-Darmstadt envoy was unfeignedly thankful to continue his journey up the Danube to Regensburg and so home; unfortunately for us, he passes out of this history. But the court remained uneasily anchored at Passau. The officials tried hard to observe their normal calendar, to celebrate the birthdays and name days of princes and the festivals of the Church, lamenting that they had not with them the proper clothes.
³²
They accompanied Leopold when he attended services in St Paul’s and in the Cathedral—in which at least one of their number admired the new Baroque decoration just then clothing the medieval shell of the building—or crossed the Inn and climbed up to the pilgrimage church of Mariahilf. The wheels of government also began to revolve again. The Treasury, War Council, and Chanceries were soon hard at work.
³³

Their first obvious preoccupation was the question of reinforcements. They turned confidently to the Elector of Bavaria.

Max Emmanuel, travelling slowly homeward through Bohemia after his visit to Vienna and Kittsee in the spring, did not reach Munich before the beginning of June. Here he was careful to remain on friendly terms with Louis XIV, but the terms of his treaty with Leopold speedily committed him to send troops to the eastern theatre of war. The Turks advanced, and he readily accepted this obligation.
³⁴
By the time the Habsburg court reached Passau the two governments had only to work out the details of an agreement, on such matters as the pay and supply of Bavarian regiments after their entry into Austrian territory; and a final treaty was signed on 6 August providing for the dispatch of 8,200 at once. Ten days earlier, the Bavarian foot regiments had already assembled at Straubing on the Danube. On the last day of July they, and also the Elector’s horse, were reviewed by Leopold at Passau. Max Emmanuel himself arrived. Contingents from the Bavarian Circle of states came on a little later. The foot went down the river, the horse travelled overland. The total reinforcement of 11,300 men was quartered in the area south of Krems by the middle of August, under the command of General Degenfeld. It was the first undoubted and substantial contribution of Habsburg diplomacy and administration to the relief of Vienna.

Leopold’s ministers were no less successful in Franconia and Thuringia. Their appeal for the instant dispatch of troops was discussed by the Franconian and Upper Rhine Circles during the second half of July at meetings in Kassel, Darmstadt, Schmalkalden, and Hassfurt-on-the-Main. Count Waldeck himself came from Holland and inspired the final decision. Soon 6,500 infantry and 1,500 horse made ready to go down the Danube from Regensburg to Krems.
³⁵
It was a powerful reinforcement, swift and apparently generous. The sentiments of loyalty to the Emperor and fear of the Turk were no doubt effective strings for the Habsburg ministers to pluck, and they made good use of them during the crisis of the siege. The central German states had also another argument to consider. If both Leopold and Max Emmanuel were fully engaged in
Austria, and if in consequence Louis XIV took the opportunity to invade the Rhineland, they themselves could not hope to resist Louis unaided. But their troops had already been raised for the defence of the Empire. Unemployed, they were expensive. It was therefore expedient to lend them to the Emperor, and to quarter them in Austria. Motives were as usual mixed, but the action of the Franconian princes was pure gain for the hard-pressed administration at Passau.