The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (7 page)

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 March
⁴⁰
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
).

2

Leopold I

and the City of Vienna

I

The target of this great assault was the Habsburg authority in central Europe, an authority vested formally in the hereditary prince who was also Holy Roman Emperor.

In 1680, Leopold I’s powers of judgment should have been well matured; he was forty years old, and had ruled over Austria and Bohemia and Habsburg Hungary since his father died in 1657. Observers at his court agree that he was highly educated, dignified, and eager to understand the sequence of political events which occupied him in the course of business. If he liked best to take part in religious ceremonies, to hunt and read and direct the music-making of his household, he never neglected affairs of state; and he had strong general convictions, such as deep piety and a firm belief in the divinely sanctioned status of the Habsburg family. Unfortunately he only made up his mind on practical questions with timorous reluctance. Protestants, and the Venetian ambassadors at Vienna, blamed the Jesuits for an education which had moulded him too severely and repressed his native energy. They chose to assume that, as a boy, he showed signs of a more active spirit which his teachers took care to subdue. There can be no proof of this, although he was destined for high ecclesiastical dignities before his elder brother Ferdinand IV died, during his father’s lifetime; and a number of Leopold’s most sympathetic clerical advisers vehemently criticised him for his irresoluteness. Other men held, very plausibly, that it was a mistake to exaggerate this failing which the Emperor counterbalanced by an underlying obstinacy.
¹

His traits as a ruler were fixed by 1680. He had no doubt that the final responsibility was his, and no one ventured to browbeat him. The ‘favourite’ (the
valido
of the Spanish Habsburgs) had no place in Leopold’s system of
management. Instead, he considered it his duty to listen attentively to his ministers and courtiers, and to listen to as many ministers and courtiers as possible. Up to this point he was enlightened; beyond it, his gifts failed him. Infinitely susceptible to contradictory counsels, he was betrayed into excessive caution and only too often the results were inaction and delay. He foresaw but never anticipated. When it was his duty to choose men for high office, he listened once more to rival suggestions and dithered long before making up his mind. Thereafter he was unwaveringly loyal to the officeholder, and indulgent to a fault. These hesitations also involved a tame acquiescence in the traditional framework of court and government, the old hierarchy of offices, and the customary overlapping of responsibilities between them. He never dreamt of himself as a reforming statesman; he inherited the duties of an autocrat surrounded by privileged orders, and felt unhappily that God had chosen him to play a part for which he had no talent. Leopold was colourless, he was cautious, patient, weak, but sometimes unyielding.

He preferred to have men about him, in the superior offices of his own household, who came from the great Austrian, Moravian and Bohemian families with a tradition of service to the Habsburgs. John Maximilian Lamberg, an old friend, had been Chamberlain and then
Hofmeister
since 1661, and his death in December 1682 was a sorrowful landmark in Leopold’s life. One of the Dietrichsteins succeeded Lamberg as Chamberlain, and Ferdinand Harrach (the great collector of fine pictures) became Master of the Stables in 1679. In the same year Albert Zinzendorf was appointed Marshal of the Court and, later, the
Hofmeister.
None of these men held emphatic political views, but they were extremely close to the ruler and their own connections linked them with other figures of distinct political importance. Montecuccoli, the great Italian soldier who served the Habsburg Emperors so faithfully and well, President of the War Council until 1680, had married into the Dietrichstein family. Zinzendorf supported, and was normally supported by, Sinelli the Capuchin preacher who commended himself to Leopold by a useful blend of piety and apparent shrewdness. This highly influential adviser was made Bishop of Vienna in 1680.

The character of the ruler was reflected in the composition of his household. On the other hand the disorderly cluster of the institutions of government owed even more to past Habsburg history, and it is not always clear which were the outer or the inner works of a very complex structure.
²
The Holy Roman Empire had created a chancery, treasury and tribunals. The different hereditary kingdoms and duchies of the Habsburgs had done the same. To a bewildering extent Imperial and Habsburg institutions now co-existed in Vienna, and Leopold would normally rely for guidance on the chancellors or presidents of most of the principal offices; but not all office-holders of this rank were counsellors in matters of high policy; and there were unofficial advisers like Sinelli. At this period, Hocher the Court (or Habsburg) Chancellor, Königsegg the Imperial Vice-chancellor, and Schwarzenberg the President of the Imperial
Council, were men of the very greatest importance. The Emperor constantly asked for their written opinions on matters of foreign policy. The senior Bohemian chancellor, Nostitz-Reineck kept more in the background. After 1680 the President and Vice-president of the Treasury, Christopher Abele and John Jörger, were both weighty men, the latter a classic instance of the loyal Catholic aristocrat whose forebears had been strong Protestants and rebels against Habsburg authority.
³
The Presidents of the War Council, first Montecuccoli and then Herman of Baden, shared in the determination of general policy. They handled Leopold’s diplomatic correspondence with the courts of eastern Europe, and therefore in 1682 Baden was the statesman responsible for sending instructions to Caprara at Istanbul.