The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (13 page)

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Ten miles south of Vienna. The Habsburgs enjoyed extensive hunting rights over much of the plain immediately east of the Wiener Wald.

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The county of East Friesland lay between the Dutch province of Groningen and the duchy of Oldenburg, but the King of Denmark was the Duke of Oldenburg.

II

After the close of the long wars between the Sultan and the Czar of Muscovy in 1681, no one expected the Ottoman government to refrain indefinitely from military enterprises on the grand scale; and, at the best, no one could be positive that the treaty of peace between Sultan and Emperor would be renewed on reasonable terms unless the Habsburg defences were strong and impressive enough to deter Kara Mustafa. In addition, if it was a delicate problem to settle the size of the forces to be allocated to the two potential theatres of war, in the Rhineland and in Hungary (with Croatia), it was easier to agree that a larger total force was needed by the Habsburg government as soon as possible for use in either theatre of war. Leopold’s diplomats, in spite of their untiring activity in a number of courts, had no solid victories to report to him between 1679 and the summer of 1682. His administrators, whose main business was with money, men, and the repair of fortresses, were more effective.

To Christopher Abele, President of the Treasury from 1681 to 1683, must apparently go most of the credit for the increase in ‘extraordinary’ taxation laid on the provincial estates of all the Habsburg dominions in the years 1681, 1682 and 1683.
²⁶
In 1677, during the war with France, they had agreed to vote 1,800,000 florins.
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Six years later they voted 3,700,000 florins. It was an epoch in the history of Habsburg taxation.

The ‘extraordinaries’ in the financial system were the complicated product of much past history. The
Hofkammer
or Treasury, after consultation with the
War Council, estimated what was needed each year, and divided the amount into those fractions of the total which each duchy or kingdom was supposed to pay in accordance with a schedule more than a century old:
²⁷
two-thirds from the lands of the Bohemian crown (Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia), one-sixth from the duchies of Inner Austria (mainly Styria, Carinthia, Carniola) and one-sixth from Upper and Lower Austria.
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The various chanceries then brought the ‘postulates’, or demands, before the different assemblies of estates during the winter.
²⁸
The estates, usually (but not in all provinces) constituted by the bishops and other privileged ecclesiastical foundations, the magnates, the lesser nobility, and certain municipalities, preserved the right to discuss the sovereign’s demands for extraordinary taxes, to negotiate before consenting, and to collect them. They actually spent many of the taxes on the sovereign’s behalf. The whole process of discussion before the final vote or ‘conclusum’ customarily dragged on for months, often until the following autumn. It was all very solemn, and a fantastic waste of energy and time. In any case the peasants paid by far the largest share of the tax, partly because in most areas the units of assessment were calculated from the number of peasant-holdings in each lordship. To a considerable extent the estates had therefore simply agreed to increase the charges which they themselves laid on their tenants and subjects. After the tax was collected, their officials made deductions for expenses, and for interest on previous loans or advances from the estates to the ruler, before surrendering the balance to the government. Months passed before the various Habsburg exchequers gathered in a major part of the sums voted; the minor part never came in at all.

George Sinzendorf, President of the Treasury in Vienna from 1656 to 1680, personally adroit but scandalously corrupt, a politician whom Leopold should never have tolerated for so long in high office, accepted all these anomalies with remarkable complacency. In particular, the estates were tending more and more to include part of the taxes which they had voted in one year, but not paid, in the amounts which they voted for the following year, so that the Emperor lost accordingly. In 1680 Sinzendorf was at last dismissed, and there is a distinct change in the tone of all these transactions not long after Abele took charge of them.

During the winter of 1680–1 Leopold decided to add 20,000 men to his standing army, bringing the total up to over 50,000 Abele reckoned the extra cost at 2,000,000 florins
²⁹
a year, of which the major part could only come from taxes raised by the estates. In consequence, the ‘postulates’ which Abele moved the chanceries to lay before the various assemblies were enormously increased, and he proposed a whole range of new taxes. We have detailed evidence about the discussions which then took place in Vienna, where the
Lower Austrian Estates met in the Landhaus. These Estates paid 200,000 florins in 1677. Abele now asked for 1,100,000 florins, and insisted on payment before the end of 1681. A tremendous wrangle followed. The Estates were well aware that the opening demand of the central government, in accordance with its usual tactics, was far higher than they need accept. They also realised that a sharp increase would now hit the privileged orders most, because the maximum burden on the peasantry was limited by their poverty—if it was exceeded, the peasants simply could not pay the tax, nor could they pay rents and dues to their lords. The upshot of the debate may be guessed. It was a three-fold rise, a vote of 600,000 florins, which was increased slightly in the next two years to 650,000. The negotiations, and the results, seem to have followed a parallel course at Linz, Innsbruck, Klagenfurt, Graz, Ljubljana, Prague, Breslau and Olomouc. They account for the estimated total grant of 4,200,000 florins from this source of revenue in 1683.

The real difficulty continued to be the long interval between votes of supply and the actual transfer of funds to the government. In the autumn of 1682, when Abele argued that a Turkish war in the following year was absolutely certain,
³⁰
and expenditure was running at a high rate, these delays became dangerous. He had already hinted that he might be compelled to ask for a direct tax on the privileged classes, enforced in a time of emergency by the ruler’s authority without the consent of the Estates. He now arranged for the issue of Leopold’s decree to this effect in December; the Estates were summoned in January.
³¹
Negotiations during the first few months of 1683 were as unfriendly as they had ever been in the past. The government pleaded the great crisis of the hour. The Estates pleaded, not only their privileges, but a real inability to pay. The result seems to have been that the flow of revenue was kept up to the level of the preceding year, but not substantially increased. The regime of privilege in the system of taxation, together with the losses in wealth and population caused by epidemic in 1679–80, were as responsible as anything else for the weakness of the defence in 1683.

Even so, the new revenues had one important consequence. The administration was able to raise new regiments. In 1679, ten out or twenty-one foot-regiments, ten out of twenty-one cavalry, two out of four dragoon-regiments, and most of the Croat mounted troops, were dismissed after the treaty with Louis XIV.
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By April 1681, Leopold had made his decision to maintain an additional 20,000 men under arms, and gradually the recruits were found. During 1682, commissions were given to a number of officers and noblemen empowering them to raise these new regiments, nine of foot-soldiers, five cavalry, and three of dragoons. On paper the full quota of an infantry regiment was reckoned at 2,050 men, while cavalry and dragoon units contained 800 apiece; in theory, therefore, another 25,000 had been mobilised. There were many reasons, even at the time, for discounting so high a figure. In 1679 a deliberate attempt had been made to economise and still to retain as many soldiers as possible, by attaching certain men and officers, taken from the
regiments which were dissolved, to the regiments which were kept in being. Between 1679 and 1682, for example, a whole category of so-called ‘aggregierte Reiter’ were loosely joined to the units still on full pay. When the moment for expansion came, a very large number of companies or troops from the standing regiments became the nucleus of the new formations; while a number of the new colonels had been colonels or lieutenant-colonels before 1679. In any case, desertion and sickness and ‘dead pays’ of one type or another diminished the complement in every company, so that the total increase in 1682 must have been under 20,000. Then, while the Ottoman power was being assembled in Adrianople further additions were agreed at the court of Vienna.
³³
In January 1683 Leslie, Daun, Württemberg, Croy and Rosen—conspicuous military leaders in the next twelve months—received their patents to raise infantry regiments. The young Louis Jules de Carignan-Soissons, cousin to the Duke of Savoy,
³⁴
was given a new regiment of dragoons; although in this case it is noticeable that no less than five out of eight of the companies were taken from older regiments.
³⁵
Dupigny, an officer of many years standing, became colonel of another regiment of cavalry; in March, the d’Herbeville dragoons were commissioned. If the funds were still short, the size of Leopold’s army was almost doubled within two years, just before the crisis broke. The repulse of the Turks in 1683 would have been unthinkable without this increase.

In discussions with the Estates of Lower Austria, in 1681 and 1682, the Habsburg government emphasised that their properties were particularly vulnerable to the Turks. Only the Danubian fortresses and a narrow strip of Hungary lay between them and the Turks. This was the argument which most obviously justified a demand for copious taxes in this part of Leopold’s dominion, and in any case there seems no doubt that both Abele and Jörger (his admirable colleague in the Treasury) were well aware of the real danger threatening from the east. The diplomatic labyrinth of the Holy Roman Empire was not their business. In March 1681 the new President of the War Council, Herman of Baden, took over the title and duties of commanding officer at Györ. During the summer he brought into Leopold’s employ one of the most celebrated military engineers of the age, George Rimpler, a Saxon who had seen service against the Turks at Candia and against the French in the Rhineland. Baden proposed to use Rimpler’s skill to modernise the Habsburg citadels along the Danube.
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Likewise the appointment in February 1680 of the Statthalter of Lower Austria’s son Rüdiger Starhemberg, as commandant in Vienna and colonel of the City Guard there, had already given authority to an energetic soldier with enough influence to make his weight felt; he was soon getting a little more money spent on the fortifications of Vienna, and recruiting more men for the garrison. Yet most Habsburg officials continued to think first of Louis XIV and his aggressions in the Empire. Some of the new regiments were placed in the western Habsburg lands, while the large forces in Bohemia were ready to move into Germany through the western tip of the country at Cheb. It was still hoped to pacify Hungary by means of
the Diet summoned to Sopron in 1681, and the rearmament in that area was entirely unhurried and inadequate. Herman of Baden himself was a thorough exponent of the case for concentrating the maximum force against France. The course of events, therefore, gradually began to reorientate opinion at court and in the army, but the government was very slow to modify its general strategy.

After Caprara had reported the total failure of his discussions at Istanbul in August 1682, it at last reacted more promptly. Whatever the lingering hope that Thököly might be bought off during the customary truce of the winter season, the immediate stiffening of the defences in the cast was now essential from a military point of view; and any future bargain with either Thököly or Kara Mustafa clearly depended on their opinion of these defences.

As usual, therefore, appointments were made and special committees set up. On 11 January 1683 a committee of high ranking officers was instructed to take charge of the problem of the defence of Hungary. It included experienced commanders like Aeneas Caprara, Starhemberg (temporarily withdrawn from his post in Vienna), and Lewis of Baden,
*
and also experts on supply like Caplirs (who was vice-president of the War Council), and Breuner, chief of the commissariat. Their prime preoccupation was with the fortresses along the Danube—Komárom, Györ, Pressburg—and also with Leopoldstadt, which stood about 30 miles north of the main stream. A good deal of money had been now allocated to the works in these places, above all at Györ, regarded by the Ottoman and Habsburg commands alike as the point on which the defence of the Danubian gateway into Christian Europe most obviously depended.
³⁷
When Herman of Baden came on a tour of inspection in this area during the early spring of 1683,
³⁸
it was to the works here that he and his advisers gave their closest attention. Naturally among those present was George Rimpler. Orders were also given which aimed to secure a sufficient number of armed boats for use on the waterways between Györ and Komárom.

Indeed, much turned on the efficient use of the river system. At Pressburg the Danube itself divided, and the principal channels below the city enclosed a large tract of country called the Schütt. The southern arm received a number of tributaries, particularly the Leitha and the Rába (with the Rabnitz); Györ itself, an island site, stood where the Rába and Rabnitz together joined the Danube. Any enemy coming up from the east and south would have to capture or seal off the fortress, and get across these smaller rivers before he could advance westwards. He would have to cross the Danube itself in order to attack Habsburg forces camped in the Schütt. But the Schütt ended where the principal arms of the river met again at Komárom, another Habsburg stronghold; and at this point the Danube met two more important tributaries flowing down from the north, the Váh, and the Neutra. An enemy coming up
the left bank of the river from the east had to get across this second network of streams before he could approach Pressburg or threaten Moravia.
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But the Turks possessed one forward base in this area, Neuhäusel on the Neutra; not very far north-west of it was the Habsburg garrison at Leopoldstadt.