The Fracture Zone (5 page)

Each nodded assuredly when I asked if there was a connection to be made between what was happening in Kosovo today and what had happened in Vienna three hundred years before. “Of course, of course,” one old lady said. “There can be no doubt.

“Not for nothing had Metternich—oh, my, was it Mr. Metternich?” she asked the waitress, who shook her head “—said that the Balkans began at the Ringstrasse. Or was it
Asia
that begins at the Ring? Or the Orient? I can’t quite remember.”

She was a venerable and genteel lady, and she looked briefly stymied. “But anyway, it is so true what they say—that we are on the edge of things just here. Poised between East and West. Just look at our eagle—the head that points both ways, indeed! And then, we were very nearly over the edge, you know, in 1683. We all know that from school. Like the story of the
Kipferl.
We all know that. We remember the Turks every day. The posters in the stores, and the bus stops. And then again things were bad for us in 1908, when we annexed Bosnia. Remember that? And once more in 1914, of course, when that Serb shot our archduke, in Sarajevo. And now here we are again today. All of it, everything going on down there, has something to do with the Viennese and the Ottomans. Or rather the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans. That’s why this is, for us, so very interesting.” And she smiled proudly at her eloquence, and puffed out her chest and looked most importantly Viennese as she asked the waitress for her bill.

So the Ottomans very nearly won the city in 1683—but they didn’t, and that is what brings a satisfied smile to the lips of most Viennese. One grisly and rarely seen trophy symbolizes the fact that they didn’t, and that the Viennese triumphed during that long hot summer three centuries ago. I had come to Vienna to try and see it. It was the severed head of the grand vizier of the court of the Sultan Mehmet IV, a greedy, violent, and xenophobic Turk with a fire-damaged face named Kara Mustafa Pasha.

His was the siege—a siege that had all taken place so very close to here. It had begun in the middle of July, in a 1683 when elsewhere William Penn was innocently settling Pennsylvania and Newton was gently explaining his new theory that linked the running of tides to the phases of the moon. Kara Mustafa’s first
cannonades—one of which hit the spires of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the ball remaining there to this day—came on either the fourteenth or the fifteenth, and to the terrified Viennese within the fortifications, it looked as though all was lost.

The Ottoman armies were camped all around the city, below the great walls and the moat that, two centuries later, were torn down and filled in, respectively, to make today’s magnificently noble beltway, the Ringstrasse. The invading force was said by some to comprise about one hundred thousand men, most of them massed just outside the southern gates of the city, immediately beneath the towers of the Hofburg. So impressive was their encampment, and so huge, that Viennese remarked that it looked like another city, well able to rival Vienna itself—the Vienna that had taken a millennium to mature was almost eclipsed by a tent city that had sprung up in two days. (The remainder of the two hundred thousand Turks who had marched up from the Balkans were in reserve or engaged, with Tartars who had come up to join them from Crimea, in other actions in nearby towns.)

The greater part of the force were massed just a few hundred feet from where we sat that April lunchtime: A siege gun’s shell could easily reach the Kohlmarkt, and doubtless many did. By chance the city was on one level well-defended, surrounded by a newly built stone girdle of embrasures, barbicans, ravelins, and bulwarks; but on another it was frighteningly vulnerable, since there were only two thousand soldiers in the garrison. Emperor Leopold I, fearing “that the whole might of Turkey is pressing upon me and this good city,” decided two weeks beforehand to run away with his family, for what he assured his citizens would be only “a few hours.” He was to sneak away undetected between the Tatar campfires, and would not return for another sixty-nine days.

The eight weeks of the siege itself caused privation and misery for thousands of the Viennese who remained. Shellfire, sniping, exploding mines, and fires caused untold damage. There was an epidemic of dysentery. Food ran out—with the result that the
Viennese, normally fastidious diners, had to fall upon horses, mules, and occasionally the local cats: These they called “roof rabbits,” claiming that when larded with smoked bacon and taken with a glass or two of muscatel, they tasted quite acceptable.

The siege did, however, come to a satisfactory end. It was raised in mid-September, when, quite unexpectedly, two armies of friendly foreign troops—Germans under Charles V, duke of Lorraine, and Poles under the man who was to become a Viennese folk hero, King John III Sobieski—stormed down from the north and routed the Turks in what was to be called the Battle of Kahlenberg on the twelfth of the month. The Turks had a mighty force—their encampment, wrote Sobieski to his wife back home, was every bit as big as Warsaw. But their soldiery had no stomach for the kind of battle that the Germans and Poles could wage, and Kahlenberg was quickly over.

From the Turks’ perspective the action, both battle and siege, was a humiliating failure. The first failure, some would say, of many. The Ottoman equivalent of the Battle of Midway. The first stage of the long and unyielding Ottoman decline, a decline that would only end two and a half centuries years later when the final sultan, demoted now to caliph, stood homeless and humiliated on the arrival platform of the Gare de Lyon.

There are many reasons for the Turks’ defeat at Vienna—the principal one, from a strictly military perspective, being the combined strength of the force that was eventually sent against them. But there was more to it than that: Underlying the Turks’ inability to fight back as properly as their huge numbers suggested they should was their studied indolence, their posturing and misbehavior, and the decadent luxury of their army’s leadership, most especially that of the drunken and demented Kara Mustafa himself.

The grand vizier’s force was prodigious—a hundred thousand infantrymen who were lodged in twenty-five thousand tents, with a tremendous array of camp followers, who included, besides a sizable army of prostitutes, any number of jugglers, clowns, and
singers to keep the soldiers more politely amused. There were flocks of sheep, buffaloes, mules, camels, and cattle. Food caravans swept in from Hungary at regular intervals, bringing honey and corn, sugar and fat—and coffee. The Armenian cooks kept up the army’s grand traditions of corruption, however, by baking bread and selling it to the besieged Viennese, or swapping it for favors.

In the middle of the great crescent-shaped arrangement of his troops—the shape owing more to practical coincidence rather artful arrangement, students of war believe—stood the tent of Kara Mustafa himself. It was a structure of almost impossible beauty with, as one Austrian observer noted, “the appearance of a magnificent palace, surrounded by several country houses, the tents being of different colors, all of which made for a very agreeable diversity.”

Parts of the camp are still on display in the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna, and they look fine enough for the sultan’s prime minister,
^*
with delicate embroidery and a patchwork of gaily colored fabrics. The Ottomans were prodigious users and makers of tents—the influence, no doubt, of their past as nomads. Topkapi Serai, the palace on the Bosporus from which all orders came and all demands emanated, and from which all imperial Turks drew power and sustenance, was regarded by all within and without as no more or less than a tent fashioned from stone—and down the subtle gradations of the Ottoman bureaucracy, everyone else in the empire was due a tent appropriate to his station. The grand vizier’s was by custom purple, the interiors tricked out in gold-embroidered silk.

What cannot be seen today, but is only known from contemporary accounts, are the Turkish encampments, with their
enclosed gardens, mechanical fountains, the streams of perfumed water, the priceless carpets, the chandeliers, and the menageries with their exotic animals and birds (the soon-to-be decapitated ostrich among them) from which the old vizier was to take pleasure and relief.

Both of these last were provided also by the vast personal traveling harem that Kara Mustafa brought to Vienna with him. Fifteen hundred compliant Turkish women, guarded by the usual elite corps of black eunuchs, were there to serve him day and night—their numbers topped up frequently with fresh supplies of captured Christian girls (who, according to the siege historian Thomas Barker, much preferred to stay with their captor than be returned to the miseries of the besieged city). When it was apparent that he had been defeated, and had to flee south and west back to friendlier lands, the vizier was said to be troubled by the possible fate of the woman he regarded as the harem’s most beautiful. To prevent her falling into the hands of the infidels he meted out the same fate as for his beloved ostrich, and had her head cut off as well.

When the Germans and then the Poles bore down on his troops at Kahlenberg, Kara Mustafa took off, heading fast down the Danube Valley for Belgrade, which had been more or less safely in Ottoman hands for a century and a half. He hoped to be able to see his sultan, to explain the reasons for the debacle—not that too many of them were explicable. But Mehmet had himself moved on, and was in Edirne, en route back to the Porte, when the message came that his vizier had wanted to see him.

What comes next has all the dignified inevitability of classical Turkish kismet. Kara Mustafa Pasha, more widely loathed than any grand vizier in memory, was to die by the bowstring—that was a certainty for any military leader who had allowed the defeat of the sultan’s armies. A series of pleading messages were sent from Belgrade to Constantinople throughout the rest of
that Balkan autumn, but to no purpose. The sultanate had no option but to bring the affair to its proper conclusion.

It was while the infidels were celebrating Christmas Day that the high chamberlain and the court-martial arrived from Topkapi at Belgrade’s imperial palace, and demanded the return of the three most important signs of Kara Mustafa’s tokens of office—the imperial seal, the holy banner, and the key to the Kaaba, the building containing the black stone at the Great Mosque in Mecca. The emissaries then delivered their sentence to the vizier, who was beginning midday prayers. The formula is archaic, and rather charming: “Whereas for the Defeat of Our Armies at the City of Vienna Thou deservest to Die, it is Our Pleasure that Thou entrust Thy Soul to the Ever Merciful Lord, and that Thou allow to be Delivered Thy Head to these our Messengers.”

“Then I must die?” asked the ghastly old man. “So be it.” He lifted his beard and allowed the court strangler to fasten the bowstring around his neck. Such throttling had been practiced many times, and was all over in three minutes. The executioner then sliced the head from the body, skinned it, and stuffed it, and then—well, then the trail runs a little cold. Some say the head was placed in a velvet bag and sent down to the Porte for the sultan to see. Others say it was buried in the grounds of the Belgrade palace. Still others say the sultan saw it and then ordered it to be reunited with the body—presumably back in Belgrade. Yet others claim that by then the body had been buried in Kara Mustafa’s home village in Anatolia. It is an unsatisfactory puzzlement with which to end the vizier’s otherwise well-chronicled if decidedly unlovely life.

Whatever did happen to the head in the immediate aftermath of his execution, it is long supposed to have been eventually brought back to Vienna. This happened because the Austrians, who were suddenly energized by having lifted the siege of their capital, raced down the Danube in pursuit of the fleeing Ottoman armies. They fought them several times, winning each
time: they took Buda (which was to merge with its sister city across the river to become Pest-Buda, and only later Budapest) in 1686, kicking the Turks out of the
hammam
they had created from the local hot springs, and they were in Belgrade by 1688.

And it was there that the local Society of Jesus dug up the grand vizier’s head, placed it in a vitrine, and presented it to the Government of the City of Vienna. It was brought back to the city in triumph, given first into the custody of the Catholic cardinal-archbishop of Vienna, and then placed on permanent display for the delight of the people, at the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien. Or at least that’s what was supposed to happen. In fact, sometime in the 1970s, during a fit of self-examination and political correctness—a symptom of what one writer called “our lily-livered age”—the museum curators ordered the head to be removed and locked away in a basement.

The Turks seemed to have had a global sense-of-humor failure: they had just complained to the Japanese about a certain type of brothel being named
Toruku
—for “Turkish bath”—and demanded that it be renamed, as it is today, “soapland,”
Soperanda
. Having scored that small victory in the East, the Turkish government then turned its attention to the gruesome relic held in Vienna. Diplomats asked either that it be returned to Turkey or given a decent burial. To have it on public display, they said, was undignified and, moreover, potentially damaging to relations between two sovereign states that were now otherwise filled with mutual amity.

That final veiled threat was enough. The Austrian government sent out a warning to the Vienna city fathers, and the head of Kara Mustafa promptly vanished from public view. Disappointed visitors were told it had been removed to a warehouse. It was still very much in Austrian custody—that would not change under any circumstances—but where it had stood in the museum, there was a picture of the vizier, and that would have to do. It now hasn’t been
seen for a quarter of a century. Even at the great exhibition staged in 1983 to mark the three-hundredth anniversary of the siege, Kara Mustafa remained locked away, invisible.

But I was curious. The vizier’s head was not only powerfully symbolic of the long and troubled relationship between Hapsburg and Ottoman, which had for so long dominated the Balkans; it was also, it seemed to me without unduly stretching the point, symbolic of the whole process of violence and separation that lay at the heart of the Balkans’ eternal problem. And actual decapitation is still a feature of Balkan violence: Scores of severed heads seemed always to stand at the gateways of palaces and on the buttresses of bridges; and in reports from Bosnia and Croatia, and now from Kosovo too, the act of taking a sword to a man’s neck seemed almost a casual matter. Besides, keeping so important a relic out of public view but yet hanging on to it seemed rather absurd. I thought I might try to see it.