The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (39 page)

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Naturally on this memorable day the Christian leaders were men of the sword, not of the pen. Only Marco d’Aviano, while the battle still went on, wrote to the Emperor with news that the Turks were fighting at a disadvantage. Leopold’s craft had moved downstream, and was somewhere between Krems and Tulln when he replied in hopeful but anxious terms. By nightfall he knew better. As for John Sobieski, he did not write to his wife until the evening of Monday the 13th, from one of Kara Mustafa’s finest apartments in the ruined Turkish encampment.
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For him, all was momentarily triumph and glory; because the Poles on the right wing had faced the brunt of the Turk’s final attack, because they had arrived first in the great camp with its amazing impedimenta, he himself claimed the victory. And if the Grand Vezir’s ostrich was dead, he wrote, and his parrakeet flown away, the Queen of Poland still could not say to her consort—like a Tartar princess rebuking her man who came back from the wars empty-handed—‘you have brought me nothing home’, because here were jewels and treasure galore, rich furnishings and captured standards, left behind by the great defeated multitude of 150,000 (or was it 300,000?) Turks. Sobieski did not deny, at the same time, that the main treasury of the enemy had been withdrawn before the retreat began, nor that Polish looters were quickly reducing the value of the Turkish stores. They wantonly exploded kegs of powder, for instance. But great heat in a land of vineyards after bitter fighting, he thought, was bound to demoralise a gallant soldiery. The King himself was intoxicated by the immense success of his achievement.
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‘We came, we saw, and God conquered,’ he wrote to Innocent XI on the same day,
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but there was no doubt that Sobieski was His instrument and popular acclaim strengthened the conviction. Earlier on this 13 September the King, with a number of the German princes and commanders, had examined the Turkish siegeworks and then entered Vienna itself.
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They
went first to the Loretto chapel of the Augustinian church, before attending a banquet given by Starhemberg; and over the table the talk flowed proud and bombastic. Sobieski and the others present declared roundly that, with good fellowship between them, they would drive the Turk deep into Hungary that same autumn. Later, in St Stephen’s, the crowds pressed in upon the hero who returned his gratitude in his prayers. Had not the holy Marco seen a dove poised above the warriors on the field of battle?

The Habsburg authorities were perplexed by the assertiveness of their ally. Their own troops had reached the walls of Vienna first, but he made himself master of the Turkish camp and monopolised its spoils. Further, it was a right surely due to the Emperor Leopold, now approaching down the Danube, to take precedence and set foot in his own capital city before other princes presumed to do so. Sobieski, by showing himself in Vienna before Leopold, aggravated the sense of shame caused by the Habsburg court’s too rapid desertion of the city in July. He embarrassed its servants by this public entry which they dared not deny him, and by the citizens’ welcome which they apparently tried to curtail. From his own point of view, Sobieski was sensible enough in insisting on ceremonial successes of this kind. He had many enemies, above all in Poland, and could not afford to lose any opportunity of impressing on his fellow countrymen, both in the army and at home, the greatness of their elected ruler.
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The news of victory began to travel, slowly by latterday standards, from the battlefield out across western Europe.
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It seems probably that beacons on the hilltops flashed in triumph as far as Linz on the night of the 13th, but cautious diplomats at court preferred to keep the couriers waiting until a captain of the Souches regiment arrived with authentic intelligence for the Countess Souches at Linz from her husband in Vienna. There, already before the fighting ended, Sobieski sent off his French engineer Dupont hurrying towards Cracow, and Pallavicini tells us that the Queen was appropriately praying in the Cathedral when the messenger arrived at ten-thirty in the morning of 16th September to be followed some while later by the bearer of the King’s great dispatch from the Grand Vezir’s headquarters. Sobieski also sent to Italy his secretary Talenti, who carried with him what was believed to be the most precious of all the captured Turkish regalia, the veritable Flag of the Prophet Mahomet, as well as grandiloquent messages addressed to the Pope and the Doge. The Flag was displayed in city after city south of the Alps until it reached Rome. After a few weeks plain men were disappointed to learn from scholars that the King of Poland’s offering to the Pope was, after all, no more than an Ottoman standard of lesser importance. Talenti’s journey was universally the occasion for the closing of shops, for fireworks and demonstrations of delight
and thanksgiving. After leaving Venice the good news preceded him, so that the waiting crowds were ready with their welcome when he entered Rome on 25 September. Meanwhile, from Vienna the Prince of Neuburg sent the good tidings to his old father at Neuburg on the Danube. John George of Anhalt wrote to the Elector of Brandenburg (who was hunting in the country many miles from Berlin), and Francis Taafe to his brother in England, while one amazing horseman galloped so fast to give the news to Ernest Augustus at Hanover that he fell dead at his journey’s end, as his epitaph relates.
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The full tide of formal congratulations later flowed back to the Emperor, to Sobieski and other commanders in the battle. From the western lands they came preeminently to Lorraine, whose secretary copied them into a stout volume for his archives where they remain to this day, in the prose and verse of many languages.

That Monday, 13 September, was by no means all sunshine. Lorraine himself was not present at Starhemberg’s banquet, after a difference of opinion with Sobieski which grew wider as the hours passed.
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Lorraine had pressed for the speediest possible pursuit of the demoralised Turkish forces. The King, when they conferred in the morning, at first declared that this was out of the question. His own men were exhausted; they had marched or ridden much farther than their colleagues on the day before; a pause was essential. Lorraine persisted, and it was at last agreed that the army would move again in the course of the afternoon. Lorraine spent the next few hours in making preparations, while Sobieski made his entry into the city. He returned too late to his quarters, and once more refused to budge. But on Tuesday the 14th it was the Habsburg commander’s turn to be caught at a disadvantage. The Emperor had reached Vienna, and it was necessary to receive and escort him, to repeat the whole ceremonial of inspections, solemn entries, presentations, banquets and thanksgiving in Vienna, while Sobieski outside the walls loudly protested that his advance was now held up by the unwillingness of his allies to move. There were other grievances on both sides. Not only did the Germans believe that the Poles had seized most of the spoil in the enemy camp; they knew that the Poles were pillaging and damaging useful Turkish stores of munitions and foodstuffs. But some of the Poles were themselves in difficulties, and wanted bread from the town; the Habsburg officers stiffly refused to help them.
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On the same day a meeting between the Emperor and the King of Poland took place and caused further momentary unpleasantness, in spite of careful discussion by their subordinates about the procedure to be followed. Leopold wished to salute his ally, but could not dream of surrendering his claim to precedence in his own territory. John Sobieski, for his part, determined to insist on the most public testimony to his status which the world could afford: the Emperor’s punctilio towards him at a personal interview. Leopold and his staff rode up towards the Polish troops near Schwechat east of the city. Sobieski, surrounded with a body of guards who carried no standards, rode to meet him. The two men faced one another on horseback: there could
be no question of either claiming precedence by being on the other’s right, which was the crux of the ceremonial problem. The King remained uncovered for just as long as the Emperor, and no longer. They conversed in Latin for a few minutes. Leopold expressed gratitude, and Sobieski praised Lorraine and the Habsburg soldiers. So far the honours of a difficult occasion were even, although Sobieski’s nerves were very much on edge; he was thoroughly agitated when he tried to present his son Jacob to Leopold, and Leopold failed to acknowledge the introduction. Abashed, Sobieski did not accompany the Emperor during an inspection of the Polish troops immediately afterwards. Leopold, who described the day in a letter to Marco, sounds bland and satisfied. Jacob, in his childish but informative diary, simply suggests that the Emperor was preoccupied in controlling his horse.
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A good deal has been made of this contretemps by later German and Polish writers. We may doubt whether it affected the future course of events in the slightest.
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The alliance between the two men held firm, although the short period after its greatest triumph was the moment of maximum friction.

Of greater practical importance was the abrupt departure of Elector John George for Saxony.
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Neither then nor later did he disclose his reasoning very clearly, but he took a prompt and startling decision. On 15 September his troops began their long return journey to Saxony. The Elector simply informed Leopold, in a short letter from Klosterneuburg, that he had to go at once. The battered condition of one of his regiments, the unkind treatment of Protestants in the Austrian lands, the undefended state of his dominion while his army was absent—with Brandenburg troops not very far distant from Dresden—were the obvious explanations of the Saxon retreat from Vienna at this early date, to be offered by both contemporaries and later historians. As the Venetian envoy at Linz remarked, they were ‘feeble’. More probably, John George just felt himself being elbowed out of the credit due to him in the forty-eight hours after his regiments’ splendid performance in the battle; nor did they get a reasonable share of the spoils. Sobieski was the grand monopoliser, Lorraine could not be denied a leading influence in the councils of war, while the Elector of Bavaria stood on much more intimate terms with the Habsburg court and its members. John George, in this highly competitive company, was the most colourless and the least effective.

A more resolute leader also took his leave. Waldeck wanted to call a halt to any further campaigning against the Turks.
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In any case, he said, his Franconian troops could not advance beyond Vienna without the consent of the Franconian princes. Then he fell ill and retired to Klosterneuburg. When he recovered, he expressed himself still more strongly. For him the eastern crisis was over, but the defences of the Empire and the Netherlands were never in more desperate need of Leopold’s help. The Turks had vanished over the horizon, thoroughly beaten, while he now knew that Louis XIV’s regiments ravaged Hainault and threatened the Rhineland. William of Orange, in his letters to Waldeck, begged him to work for the transfer of German
military forces from the east to the west. Waldeck therefore went back to Linz in order to support Borgomanero; for the Spanish ambassador stuck to his old arguments on this matter of the priority between east and west with undiminished fire and emphasis.

Outside the walls of Vienna, other discords began to cut deeply.
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A number of conferences were held on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and Lorraine gradually realised that Max Emmanuel, encouraged by some of Leopold’s ministers, was asking for an independent command. He wanted to lead an expedition of his own against the vital Turkish citadel at Neuhäusel. Lorraine, furious and dismayed, threatened to resign and the plan was dropped. Max Emmanuel spoke of going back to Munich at once. He, too, fell ill and it was not to be clear for some time whether he would permit his troops to be used in Hungary. They moved over to the north side of the Danube. Indeed there seemed no end to the discontents of the princes and generals. Leopold promoted Starhemberg to the rank of Field-Marshal on 15 September, an obvious reward for the defender of the city during the long siege. The Duke of Sachsen-Lauenburg at once protested against what he thought was an affront to his own status, had his baggage assembled, and left the army. Caplirs, Leslie, Salm, Aeneas Caprara (who said that Starhemberg had been only a volunteer when he was a colonel)—they all grumbled. Meanwhile, enormous numbers of the troops were as sick with dysentery as Max Emmanuel, Waldeck and (less seriously) Lorraine; possibly half the fighting men were affected. The devastation of wide areas by the Turks who had stripped the country south of the Danube, lack of transport across the river at any point below Tulln, and the inevitable shortage of food in Vienna by the last day of the siege, made the feeding of men and horses a hopeless task for the Habsburg commissariat. One argument alone was strong enough, and was seen to be strong enough, to push a majority of the confederates forward again: the utter disarray of the Turks, as reported by deserters, prisoners, and the Habsburg commanders at Györ and Komárom. It was too obvious an opportunity to miss. On 17 September the Poles led the way, advancing down the right bank of the river. Two days later, Leopold left Vienna for Linz once more.

At times fearful of undoing the effects of victory by risking another encounter at the fag-end of a campaign, more often aggressive and enthusiastic, Sobieski at first wanted a direct pursuit of the enemy. The awful bareness of the countryside—‘it is like an Arabian desert’, he told his wife—soon led him to agree with Lorraine that this was an impossible strategy. The army must first find supplies by quartering on ground not held earlier by the Turks; which meant, at least past Pressburg, getting on to the Schütt across the river.
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It was once again a question of bridge-building. Lack of bridges over the Danube ruled out an alternative, which he also considered, the speedy withdrawal of his whole force back to Poland.