The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (26 page)

XI. The Danube and the Wienerwald:
above
, the ascent to the Wienerwald from St. Andrä;
below,
upstream from Vienna

XII. Passau

XIII. Ernest Rüdiger von Starhemberg

The contemporary idea of a triumphant commander

XIV. John III Sobieski, King of Poland

Another contemporary version of the hero in action

6

Outside the City

I

In the broad landscapes outside the city there was warfare of a more savage, less organised kind but it is extraordinarily difficult to give an account of the movement of the Tartars, Magyars, and other irregular forces which accompanied the Ottoman army. Kara Mustafa had no control of them, and they appear to have advanced at their own pace, and in whatever direction seemed open to them. Their devastations were probably the greatest single handicap suffered by the Ottoman high command, once it had been decided to attempt the siege of Vienna; it became much harder to feed the standing troops outside the city walls. The most obscure period of all is the week before the siege began, partly because neither the Estates nor Leopold’s government had bothered to put into working order the ancient defence-system, which flashed warnings of an enemy attack from beacon to beacon across the hills. The beacons were not laid, so that no one knew and no one could record the routes followed by the Tartars. After 7 July the foremost raiders certainly pressed on unopposed over the Wiener Wald, almost keeping level with Leopold and his court on their journey up the Danube. When the main Ottoman army reached Vienna, on 14 July, a cluster of Tartar bands was near Melk fifty miles ahead, and during the next few days they moved still farther west until they came to the River Ybbs. They went upstream, and a few of them got across the river, but were at last roughly handled by the peasants and forced back. They proceeded to ravage the extensive lordship of the Auersperg family round Purgstall. If a later account can be trusted, they tried to advance from this area up a road which led through the hills to the industrial and mining district of Steyr, but were again stopped by peasants whom they had themselves pushed out of the villages on to higher ground.
¹
We cannot say when this section of the enemy finally withdrew eastwards again.

After 7 July, on the border of Hungary other Tartars and Turks turned south from the Leitha valley. Breitenbrunn by the Neusiedler See was burnt, and they continued on their way to the towns of Rust, Eisenstadt and Sopron. The citizens of Sopron, as their worthy chronicler Hans Tschány records, had been troubled by every kind of rumour for weeks past.
²
From the beginning of the month their workers in the fields gave up reaping. Turks and Magyars were already across the Rába east of them when these new bands approached, and they felt compelled to seek a negotiation which would stave off the worst horrors of invasion. At this moment, Thököly was popular in Habsburg Hungary because he alone appeared able to act as a shield against the Moslems, while the Moslems used him to gain sufficient control of new territory as quickly as possible. The townsmen of Sopron soon admitted the ‘king’s’ commissioners. They took an oath of obedience on 16 July in return for an assurance of good treatment, and their neighbours in Eisenstadt and Rust followed suit. A Turkish commander quartered in the Esterházy palace which overlooks Eisenstadt. By then Paul Esterházy himself, who had earlier withdrawn from an untenable position on the frontier to the strongest of his private fortresses, was safely in Austria. But his men remained in Forchtenau.
*
Together with the Habsburg garrison at Wiener-Neustadt, and another handful
of supporters in Eberfurth, they now confronted the Turks and Tartars camped along the shore of the Neusiedler See.
³
The stage was set for a long series of bitter raids and counter-attacks, of burnings and sackings, in this otherwise smiling countryside.

Meanwhile the main Ottoman force was advancing on Vienna. On its way, some troops turned aside to storm and destroy Hainburg on the Danube (12 July). Bruck-on-the-Leitha had repulsed the Tartars five days earlier; the castle near-by, belonging to the Harrachs and garrisoned by Croats, also resisted them. But the Bruck townsmen could see little point in trying to defy a more formidable attack, and were soon aware that Eisenstadt and Sopron had come to terms. They decided to accept Turkish (not Thököly’s) jurisdiction,
⁴
and gained a measure of security at the price of heavy requisitioning; by the time the negotiation was complete they were more or less quit of the menace of depredations by Turkish irregulars, who had moved farther forward. Apart from the marauders already across the Wiener Wald, there were now many others in the region immediately south of Vienna, where they seem to have killed more, captured more, and burnt more than anywhere else in Austria. Between 12 and 16 July they took Mödling, Baden and Perchtoldsdorf.
⁵
If a majority of the inhabitants had fled, just in time, sufficient remained to be the victims of undoubted savagery. Almost more frightening were the endurance and persistence of the raiders, who pushed up into the hills unhesitatingly. On 13th and 14th places twenty miles west of Mödling had been stormed; Hainfeld, another fourteen miles farther, was destroyed on 18 July. The countryside seemed utterly defenceless for the moment. But beyond Hainfeld the monks of Lilienfeld were preparing successfully to meet enemy attacks, and a little later and somewhat farther north—along the direct road from Vienna to St Pölten—the Countess Pálffy held out in her castle. On the Sinzendorf estates not far away, while barns and cottages were destroyed and livestock disappeared, the manor-houses survived intact.
⁶
Nonetheless, all contemporaries wrote and spoke in paralysed terms of a great tract of land rapidly filling up with hostile bands of Tartars and Magyars—who were more feared than any—while the immensely large Ottoman army battered away at Vienna. A relieving force, it seemed, faced the impossible task of first getting through an area ruined and dominated by the irregulars. Only a few cool-headed individuals realised that the success of the Tartars depended on the total lack of any system of defence organised to link the villages and valleys together, and that this had led to a panic which emptied the country of the more able-bodied, leaving it defenceless.
⁷

*
Forchtenau (Forchtenstein) is on high ground midway between Sopron and Wiener-Neustadt.

II

Multiple disasters had pushed the remnant of the Habsburg field-army to the other side of the Danube. Its hold on that part of the country was in
consequence all the stronger. On 15 July most of Lorraine’s cavalry regiments withdrew from the islands which gave access to Vienna. On 16 July, after a sharp encounter with the Turks in front of the last of the bridges leading from one island to the next, his rearguard also retired to the north bank of the river. It was a major defeat, and resulted from a major miscalculation. Lorraine at first undoubtedly hoped to keep in touch with Starhemberg, holding a position from which he could threaten the besiegers. But Le Bègue (his secretary) is emphatic that lack of forage made it impossible to leave cavalry on the islands; and he says also that such a position could not be maintained without the help of infantry.
⁸
Conceivably Lorraine gave up (as he had given up behind Györ) too easily, and certainly Herman of Baden thought so. But on this occasion he had at least avoided a division of his forces. His new camp at Jedlesee contained about 10,000 men, mostly cavalry, in the third week of July.
*

For the next nine days he was stationary, almost powerless. His measures were modest but useful. He threw a few troops back across the Danube to stiffen the defences of Klosterneuburg, where fortunately the clergy and townsmen of this great monastic stronghold only six miles upstream from Vienna, and close to the high ground of the Wiener Wald, had in any case determined to resist the Turks. Colonel Dunewald and a majority of the dragoons were sent to Krems, another forty miles up the Danube; from here they too crossed to the south bank, and checked further raiding by enemy irregulars in the wide plain which stretched away eastwards towards Tulln—about half-way between Krems and Klosterneuburg. Dunewald soon reported a successful encounter, and the repulse of perhaps 800 Tartars.
⁹
Moreover Lorraine was still in touch with the garrisons at Györ and Komárom, and ventured to bring back from Györ two more infantry regiments, those of Baden and Grana; they arrived safely at the camp on 24 July. Prince Lubomirski had by then reached Olomouc with six companies of Polish horse. Lorraine summoned them at once, apparently intending to send their commander on an urgent mission to Sobieski, in order to beg the King to march south at top speed. Lubomirski duly came—but despatched a deputy to Sobieski. He himself wished to stay in the theatre of active warfare.
¹⁰

Lorraine also sent off Taafe, followed by other officers, to Passau; and the Duke of Sachsen-Lauenburg to the Saxon court at Dresden. All were to plead for the instant departure of more troops, so that the relief of Vienna could be attempted with the least possible delay.
¹¹
In particular, the messengers to Passau were instructed to raise the fundamental strategic problem of the day by firmly stating Lorraine’s opinion that a relieving army could only approach the city by a route through the Wiener Wald. Members of his staff also considered that it might be necessary to build a fortified camp somewhere in that steep and wooded country, from which to try to strike at the Turks.