The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (4 page)

No Ottoman commander possessed greater military experience. In 1672 on the river Dniester Kara Mustafa had outwitted the great Polish soldier, John Sobieski, to secure the fortress of Kamenets
Podolsky for the Turks and their Tatar vassals. Two years later he had taken the town of Uman, having his Christian captives flayed and sending their stuffed hides as a gift to the Sultan. His
origins remain decently obscure; he was not a Köprülü by birth, but had been educated and personally advanced as if he were Fazil Ahmed’s foster-brother; and in June 1675 he
strengthened his power at court by marrying Princess Küçük, daughter of the recipient of those grisly trophies from Uman. It was rumoured that the Grand Vizier brought with him a
full complement of camp followers, including 1,500 concubines and 700 black eunuchs to guard them. Many grotesque tales of his way of life rest on a basis of fact, but this legend is almost
certainly apocryphal. Nevertheless, he seems to have possessed a sexual appetite difficult to satisfy and matched only by the scale of his ambition. To succeed where Suleiman failed would make him
as famous a commander on land as Hayruddin ‘Barbarossa’ at sea, more than a century before.

He began by showing great efficiency. Within two days of inspecting Vienna’s outer defences he completed the investment of the city. On 14 July a bad fire wrecked many town palaces of the
magnates, the smoke drifting over the Ottoman lines causing Kara Mustafa to fear that Vienna might be in ruins by the time the prize fell into his hands. Accordingly he gave orders for the
construction of a huge camp beyond the fortifications and siege works, a military headquarters which would make a worthy home for the Sultan’s paladin. Within little more than a week a tented
city sprang up between Vienna itself and the north-western hills of the Wienerwald. His adversaries were much impressed by this curious display of Ottoman splendour. An Italian count serving in the
Habsburg army has left a description written that summer: ‘It is impossible
for anyone to conceive how broad a stretch of land they covered. Centred in the middle of
the camp arose the Grand Vizier’s pavilion, looking like some splendid palace surrounded by several villas, the tents being of different colours, all of which made for a richly pictorial
diversity.’
³
More than three centuries after the siege, Vienna still possesses a Türkenschanz Park. But it is no longer an open space. A
wealth of fine trees surrounds the hillock at the centre of the old Turkish encampment. Felicitously, there is also an ‘adventure playground’ for the young.

For sixty days Kara Mustafa remained in his palatial camp, concentrating 200,000 men around the twelve bastions and defensive palisades of the city walls. The Austrian campaign confirmed not
only his personal reputation for cruelty, but the widespread belief in Western Europe that the Sultan’s troops were a barbarian horde. In reality, the Ottoman regular army was no better and
no worse than other campaigners. It was otherwise with their commander; Kara Mustafa, though casual in his religious observance, exhibited a fanatical hatred of Christians; he was ‘the
scourge of mankind’, a Venetian envoy wrote to the Doge.
⁴
He retained a row of severed heads to commemorate his seizure of Hainburg, a fortified
village some twenty miles down the Danube; and on 16 July his troops slaughtered four thousand villagers in outlying Perchtoldsdorf. During the first week of the siege he ordered the systematic
killing of prisoners, exhibiting their heads to demoralize the Austrian troops manning the defences. By late July marauding
akinji
horsemen, over whom Kara Mustafa had little control, were
sweeping up the Danube, carrying rapine and devastation as far west as Enns. Only a few fortified abbeys, like Melk, high on a cliff face above the river, survived as Christian islands cut off by
this raging floodtide of Islam.

Emperor Leopold I—by now in Passau—urgently sought aid. Subsidies from the Pope, a rush of volunteers from the young nobility in northern Italy and Franconian Germany, and the
mustering of armies by the Electors of Bavaria and Saxony, held hope of relief for Vienna. There remained, too, the prospect of substantial backing from the crack Polish troops of King John
Sobieski, once they could complete a long march southwards from beyond the Carpathians; Sobieski had old scores to settle with Kara Mustafa. Yet it could be argued that the chief hope for
Vienna lay in the weaknesses of the Grand Vizier’s character, in the greed which made him at heart no better than a bandit chieftain. A frontal assault on the city,
with walls breached and the attackers granted the traditional three days of looting, street by street, would prove less profitable for him personally than a capitulation on agreed terms; a formal
surrender would allow him to secure for his own coffers the rich booty of Vienna’s remaining palaces and churches. Only in the last days of August, as John Sobieski’s advance columns
reached the northern bank of the Danube, did Kara Mustafa finally give up hope of starving the city into surrender and order an all-out attack on its southern defences.

By 7 September Sobieski had made contact with the Germans under Charles, Duke of Lorraine, and a relief army of 80,000 troops was concentrated along the northern crest of the Wienerwald. On that
Tuesday evening, camp fires on the Kahlenberg heights let Count Starhemberg, the commander of the Vienna garrison, know help was at hand. Kara Mustafa, too, saw the fires and, from interrogated
prisoners, was well aware of the strength of the armies marching against him. Urgently he pressed the skilled Turkish
lagunçi
(sappers) into digging parallel trenches and tunnels to
undermine Vienna’s outer defences. An exploding mine at last breached the walls on the morning of 12 September. But it was too late. The Ottoman troops could not exploit their success; from
five o’clock on that Sunday morning, a fierce battle had been taking place along the wooded spur of the Kahlenberg and through the terraced vineyards of the lower slopes. As the light began
to fail, German infantry reached the outskirts of the great Turkish camp. With the setting sun behind them, Polish cavalry bore down upon the tented city to consolidate the victory and ensure the
relief of Vienna. The Grand Vizier abandoned many of his trophies, including a prize steed, richly caparisoned. As dusk fell he was seen speeding eastwards towards Györ on a lighter horse and
almost unrecognizable, with his right eye bandaged.
⁵

In 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent retired from Vienna of his own volition and in good order; in 1683 Kara Mustafa’s troops were forced to retreat, their commander fleeing defeated from the
field. No one can choose a precise date and say ‘On this day the Ottoman Empire passed into decline’, but there is no doubt that the scattering of the Turkish
camp outside Vienna on that September evening forms one of history’s greatest turning-points. No Ottoman army had been routed so dramatically in any earlier encounter. Yet,
rather strangely, the fierce combat along the slopes of the Kahlenberg never figures in any list of ‘decisive battles of history’. No doubt the events of that Sunday seemed of little
importance at first, except to Emperor Leopold; militarily they possessed no particular interest; and they did not lead to the immediate conclusion of a peace settlement. Only with the passage of
time has the true significance of the battle become clear. For although there were to be many more encounters in the Danubian plain, never again did an Islamic host pit its might against the walls
of Catholic Christendom.

No attempt was made by Sobieski or Duke Charles to pursue the demoralized enemy immediately after the relief of Vienna. They lingered on the outskirts of the city until Emperor Leopold returned,
on the following Tuesday. By then, Kara Mustafa had put the rivers Leitha and Raab between his army and the victorious Christians. Once he reached the Alföld, he was able to regroup his
shattered cavalry and fall back upon the citadel of Buda. At the same time he looked for scapegoats in order to convince the Sultan that he was not himself at fault. He could not take vengeance on
the insurgent Hungarians, for their canny leader slipped away to the north-east and was using Sobieski as an intermediary to save him from the Emperor’s wrath, with some success. But the
Ottoman regimental commanders remained in the Grand Vizier’s power. They suffered for the failure in front of Vienna. More than fifty pashas were strangled by Kara Mustafa’s personal
bodyguard in the week which followed the battle on the Kahlenberg.

These deaths of course made no difference to the outcome of the campaign. Momentarily, at the end of the first week in October, the Grand Vizier’s deputy inflicted a severe check on the
Poles at Parkan, a river crossing beneath Esztergom. But two days later a combined Christian army, commanded by Charles of Lorraine, reversed the decision at Parkan and finally broke Turkish
resistance along the middle Danube. On 24 October Esztergom surrendered after a brief bombardment. Although earlier in the century Austrian troops had captured towns and villages in which the Turks
had set up mosques, Esztergom
became the first Islamicized city in Catholic Europe to be recovered by a Christian army.

Even before the fall of Esztergom, Kara Mustafa had left Buda and set out for Belgrade. As the army retreated across the Pannonian Plain he ordered more executions, for he was determined to keep
news of the disasters in Austria and Hungary from reaching the Sultan’s court for as long as possible. Geographically, the middle Danube might constitute a remote north-west frontier for the
empire. But the Grand Vizier was under no illusions about the Sultan’s reaction to military failure. Mehmed IV was not a charismatic leader; like so many members of the Ottoman family, on the
most solemn occasions he looked ‘a wretched contrast to his splendid trappings’, as a Venetian diplomat had commented earlier in the year; but, however unimpressive his parade
horsemanship might be, Mehmed remained ‘the Grand Turk’.
⁶
A single military defeat, even as distant from his capital as the middle Danube,
signified an ominous diminution of imperial power. His Grand Vizier had failed Mehmed in the very lands where, for ten generations, the Sultans had been accustomed to expect victories from their
army.

When on 17 November Kara Mustafa reached Belgrade’s citadel, on its limestone cliff above the confluence of Danube and Sava, his expectancy of life was low. He could not execute every
witness of his lacklustre generalship without confirming suspicions already circulating at the Sultan’s court; and, though he sought to bribe many survivors of the campaign, there was no
certainty that money would ensure a lasting silence. His fate—and, a few years later, the fate of his sovereign—illustrates the inherent self-discipline which still shaped Ottoman
ruling institutions as the Empire embarked on a long delaying action against the resilient West.

At Belgrade Kara Mustafa was still, for the moment, Grand Vizier. In the Kalemegdan Fortress he retained the symbols of office with which Mehmed IV had invested him seven years before—the
Imperial Seal and the Key to the Kaaba—and also the Holy Banner (
sancaci
ş
erif
) which the Sultan had handed to him in May, here in Belgrade, on his appointment as Commander-in-Chief.
But although his office ensured that Kara Mustafa still possessed a terrifying authority over his battered army and
the towns and villages of Serbia, he knew that generals
who suffered defeat while carrying the
sancaci
ş
erif
into battle had no right to expect pardon. Old personal enemies surrounded Mehmed IV, who was holding court at Edirne, a favourite
residence where Kara Mustafa had often ridden beside him on hunting expeditions. When a Grand Vizier set out to lead a campaign for his sovereign the day-to-day business he would have undertaken as
chief minister was entrusted to a deputy, and as reports from the Danube seeped through to Edirne it was easy for the deputy and other members of the Divan to convince the Sultan that Kara Mustafa
had shown himself unworthy of the responsibilities assigned to him. Mehmed realized that if the Grand Vizier were allowed to live, the humiliating burden of a defeat by infidel armies would pass to
the Sultan-Caliph himself.

Such reasoning sealed Kara Mustafa’s fate. On the last Saturday in December he was at his midday prayers when two senior Court dignitaries reached the Kalemegdan citadel from Edirne. They
brought with them a double command from the Sultan to his son-in-law: he must surrender to the imperial emissaries his symbols of civil and military authority; and he should then ‘entrust his
soul to Allah, the ever Merciful’. Kara Mustafa completed his prayers, took off his turban and mantle of state, and allowed the executioner to throttle him speedily. There was about the
timing of his death a strange irony. As the bowstring tightened around Kara Mustafa’s neck in Belgrade, far away in Vienna and Esztergom and in towns and villages which had so long feared the
coming of ‘the Turk’, the church bells were ringing out to celebrate Christmas. It was on 25 December that his co-religionists executed the arch-persecutor of Christians.
⁷

The body was decapitated, the head skinned, stuffed, and sent to Mehmed IV as proof that the sovereign’s orders had been carried out. But Nemesis had not finished mocking the unfortunate
Kara Mustafa. In later campaigns the head fell into Austrian hands. Three hundred years after the siege the curious tourist could see it mounted in a glass case on the first floor of Vienna’s
Historisches Museum
, a grisly relic of a turbulent age. But the skull is no longer on display. A spirit of reconciliation now prevails in the Austrian capital. Old enmities dissolve in the
mystery of time past.

C
HAPTER
2

C
HALLENGE FROM THE
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