The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (37 page)

Lorraine had already sent 600 dragoons under Colonel Heisler to Klosterneuburg, and General Mercy now took other mounted troops to reconnoitre the Wiener Wald itself.
²⁸
While the army was still assembling at Tulln, several units began to move out of the camp. The main advance began on 9 September and by the end of the first day had reached the villages of St Andrä
*
and Königstetten, three miles apart, where the plain ends and the hills begin to rise up sharply; they were the two obvious points of departure for routes through much more difficult, thickly-wooded country. Lorraine meanwhile received news of the most recent Turkish failure to capture the Burg-bastion, and Mercy reached him again after a strenuous traverse across the Wald, having met with little in the way of Turkish or Tartar opposition. Lorraine’s staff now complained that Sobieski, previously so anxious to hurry on at all costs, held back; but the King may well have been reluctant to advance without the baggage (and troops) still in transit across the Danube. In any case Polish forces reached Königstetten by the evening of the 9th. That evening, officers spoke to foresters with a detailed knowledge of the ground ahead, the command sifted intelligence from various sources, and made its dispositions for the next morning.
²⁹

On the 10th, Lorraine at St Andrä split his forces. Some cavalry (including Lubomirski’s Poles) were sent round the northern edge of the hills, close to the Danube; others, including probably most of the German infantry, took the road across the hills. Both converged on Klosterneuburg. Sobieski’s cavalry, with his infantry well in the rear, began to climb up towards the villages of Kirling and Kirchbach. The intention was to make a rendezvous in the valley of the Weidlingbach,
³⁰
which lies beyond Klosterneuburg beneath the topmost ridge of the Wiener Wald, but the slopes were excessively steep, and particularly the haulage of artillery carriages and carts proved an arduous, heart-breaking business. The foremost troops on the left did indeed spend the
next night on the Vienna side of Klosterneuburg, but others bivouacked on heights west of the little town, while the Poles were farther behind.
³¹
They were still sufficiently in touch with forces in the centre, and the centre with those of the left, on sheltered ground which enemy forces did not venture to dispute. Sobieski moved ahead of his men, and conferred with Lorraine in full view of the great ridge which the army would have to climb.
³²
The suggestion that this could be attempted at once was turned down; but plans were made for the day following, 11 September.

During the night Lorraine, tireless in his tours of inspection, had second thoughts. At 2 a.m. he sent forward reinforcements to Heisler, and an attack was launched on the Turkish outposts which guarded the ridge from the ruined Camuldensian monastery at the top of St Joseph’s Berg (now called the Kahlenberg) and the Chapel of St Leopold on the Leopoldsberg, the two most northerly heights of the Wiener Wald. The Turks were successfully thrown out, and pushed back down the other side of the ridge. Rockets or flares shot up into the night to cheer the inhabitants of Vienna, five miles distant.

At dawn the troops began to move again, and the arrangement of the whole force becomes gradually clearer to us; even though, at the time, heavy rain and a storm must have obscured the view and depressed the spirit of everyone present. Heisler’s dragoons were already on the northern end of the ridge. Below them, on their left, were Habsburg and Polish cavalry moving alongside the Danube, pushing round the last shoulder of the hills fronting the river. Behind the dragoons were regiments of Habsburg infantry under Herman of Baden, and the Saxon infantry, followed by Saxon troops of horse commanded by the Elector himself. In the centre marched the Bavarians under Max Emmanuel, together with the Franconians under Waldeck. The foremost of all these contingents had reached the ridge by 11 a.m., holding it from the Leopoldsberg on the left to the Vogelsangberg on the right, with the Kahlenberg in the centre. Farther right still, regiments of Habsburg cavalry and dragoons, Bavarian and Franconian cavalry, were climbing up from the Weidlingbach and soon they too reached the top.

The Poles faced a much longer ordeal on the 11th. At the start they were farther behind, but they made progress, crossed the Weidlingbach, and by nightfall an indeterminate proportion of their cavalry was up on the high ground, fanning well out to the south. They were being followed by part of their infantry, but other units advanced very slowly; and a Polish artillery officer admits that more and more of his equipment had to be abandoned in the course of the day. In any case, his unit was still at the foot of the ridge when night fell. If there were more accounts like this, it is almost certain that we should have a picture of numerous contingents, German as well as Polish, moving many hours behind the foremost troops, leaving their carts and guns in the rear, climbing desperately up and forward during the hours of darkness, and then groping past positions which were already packed with other companies and squadrons.

Much earlier in the day, Father Marco had climbed the heights and written a letter to Leopold ‘dal monte a veduta di Vienna’, praising the good order of the men and the harmony of the generals, the stout action of the city’s beleaguered garrison and the providence of God. In front of him Christian volunteers were already skirmishing down the slopes, and brushing with parties of Janissaries who hastily started to dig entrenchments at various points.
³³

Marco’s harmonious generals and princes now inspected the great panorama to the south. Some of them had travelled hundreds of miles to see it, with the city in the middle-distance, surrounded by Turkish siegeworks and camps, the Danube on their left and the greater wooded hills to their right, with everything somewhat dimmed by the smoke rising from the guns, mines, and campfires of a siege in its final stages. Their principal concern was the ground between them and the walls of Vienna, and John Sobieski for one was grievously disappointed. Misled (as he thought) by maps previously submitted to him by Habsburg commanders who should have known better, he had expected the contours to fall away smoothly to the plain in which the city stood. Instead he saw precipices, ravines, dense woodland on steep slopes, and farther ridges in the immediate foreground, with the more level terrain far in the distance. He felt tempted to conclude that the whole direction of the army’s march in the last few days involved an error of judgment: either a long detour to the south was now advisable or, at the least, a slow advance inch by inch ‘à la Spinola’ would be necessary from the Kahlenberg, a tactic requiring time and caution. His French engineer, Dupont, supported and possibly inspired these arguments.
³⁴
In conference with the other generals, including Lorraine, the first of these ideas was firmly overruled; a full-scale attack from the ridge of the Wiener Wald was approved, but another council was called for the following morning, and it seems probable that a final decision about the timing of this attack was deferred. Sobieski also secured from Lorraine the transfer of four Habsburg infantry regiments to the right wing in order to give support to the Polish cavalry. Undoubtedly his nervousness was counterbalanced by a firm conviction that the Grand Vezir was a poor commander. He noted that the Turks had been foolish in not trying to defend the routes across the Wiener Wald, and even more so in not fortifying their encampments round Vienna. This was also Lorraine’s opinion. During the hours of darkness the King composed a long letter to his Queen, floridly outlining the situation, his hopes, and his fears; he gives the hour as three a.m. and only stopped writing when the time came to go and meet the other commanders again.
³⁵

*
For these, see the maps on
pp. xiv-xvii
and
p. 163
.

*
For St Andrä, see
Illustration XI
and, for the hills, streams and villages mentioned here, the map p. 163.

IV

What had Kara Mustafa been doing? He made many mistakes in 1683, but the fundamental miscalculation was the span of time and the amount of effort
needed to capture Vienna itself. He underestimated the tenacity of the defence. Therefore he concentrated all his efforts on the siege after the first month; therefore he neglected to take measures which would have safeguarded the besieging army. He took too little interest in the no-man’s-land of the Wiener Wald. He could have tried harder to occupy Klosterneuburg. He could have sent more Turkish cavalry, as well as the Tartars, to patrol the plain round Tulln, and it is possibly an oblique admission of this error that one Turkish writer of the period invariably abuses the Tartar Khan. He relates a story that the Khan was close enough to Tulln to observe the crossing of the Danube by Polish troops, and was advised to attack them. He refused, alleging that he had never been given sufficient support or encouragement by Kara Mustafa who always insulted him: he would not move to save this despicable general.
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In addition, the Ottoman command had not seriously attempted to stiffen its observation-posts on the ridge of the Wiener Wald, and only at the last moment were instructions given for ditches to be dug, and guns set in position, at selected points in the area between the eastern slopes of the hills and the encampments—with all their baggage and supplies—of the Turkish troops.

The Grand Vezir’s serious consideration of dangers threatening from behind the Wiener Wald dates back to 4 September. On that day a captured prisoner seems to have given him detailed, if exaggerated, accounts of the relieving army; the Poles and Germans combined were said to number 80,000 foot and 40,000 cavalry. Kara Mustafa at once ordered old Ibrahim of Buda, the one man who had boldly criticised the whole plan of campaign two months earlier, to bring all his troops from Györ to Vienna immediately.
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Four days later another prisoner was taken, who knew that Lorraine’s and Sobieski’s forces had crossed the river at Tulln, and were advancing towards the hillcountry with 200 pieces of artillery.
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The Pasha of Karahisar was sent westwards to get confirmation of this. Ibrahim arrived with 8,000 men and large supplies. The same evening and on the following morning (8 and 9 September) councils of war were held. Some commanders argued that the whole armament of the Turkish force should be employed to oppose Lorraine’s advance. The Grand Vezir disagreed, and determined to maintain full pressure on the city. On the 9th it was finally decided to adopt this second course. The Turks had very little experience in dealing with a difficult military problem familiar to western soldiers: the command of a force caught between a powerful garrison and a powerful relieving army. Probably no Christian general of this decade would have neglected to fortify the outer lines of a great camp from which an army was besieging a city.

Significantly evidence for the whereabouts of the positions west of Vienna, which were in fact fortified or entrenched by the Turks, is very uncertain. Something was certainly done to strengthen Nussdorf, a ruined village in the area farthest north, close to the Danube and underneath the Leopoldsberg. Other accounts refer to a redoubt constructed at Währing two miles southwest, the ‘Türkenschanz’ of which the alleged site survives to this day; but
the Turks did not, apparently, attempt to defend it seriously.
³⁹
At the other end of the whole terrain, on the ridges above the left bank of the Wien, they strengthened a number of points with ditches and guns. Between Währing and the Wien, they hoped to make good use of the walls and buildings of vineyards on the lower slopes of the hills; behind these the ground was left open, presumably to give greater freedom of movement to the cavalry. In all, about sixty guns were withdrawn from the siegeworks and some 6,000 infantry. They employed in the field 22,000 horsemen,
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so that the relieving army was infinitely superior in manpower. The total Turkish force employed in the battle numbered perhaps 28,500 men a total increased but not strengthened by an indeterminate quantity of Wallachian, Moldavian and Tartar auxiliaries. The left and centre of Lorraine’s army alone numbered over 40,000 and the right wing under Sobieski’s immediate command was probably 20,000 strong. Lorraine and Sobieski together employed up to twice as many fieldpieces as the Turkish commanders.

There are signs that Kara Mustafa, between 9 and 12 September, altered his dispositions in a way which later enfeebled his power of resistance. By the 9th, enough information had been gathered from prisoners and from the Tartars to make preparations to deal with their opponents a matter of the utmost urgency. After a council of war in the morning, the Grand Vezir and other commanders toured and inspected the whole area west of the city in the afternoon; and they conferred with the Tartar Khan. The cavalry was divided into a vanguard under Kara Mehmed of Diyarbakir (5,400) and a main body under Ibrahim of Buda (23,000), and allotted the task of resisting Lorraine and Sobieski. The Grand Vezir was to stand firm in his headquarters at St Ulrich while troops under the command of Abaza Sari Hussein guarded both banks of the Wien. In this way the Grand Vezir’s camp was regarded as the core of the Turkish defence, with powerful forces protecting it on each side. On the 10th and 11th these preparations were intensified but fresh information showed that the immediate threat was bound to come from the north, from the area of the Kahlenberg and Leopoldsberg; units were then brought over from the other side of the Canal, while the great majority of Ibrahim’s troops moved into position behind the vanguard which was now in Nussdorf and Heiligenstadt (on the road between Nussdorf and Vienna).
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Accordingly, to meet the threat from the Kahlenberg there was a general shift of weight to the Turkish right, facing Lorraine. This probably weakened their defences elsewhere.