The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (16 page)

In Poland matters turned out differently. The very uncertainties of the position in northern Hungary were important here, and Vienna played its hand more skilfully, but Kara Mustafa was really the prime architect of the treaty between Poles and Habsburgs. Obviously aggressive, he preferred not to publish his plans; therefore both powers were equally alarmed, and were forced into partnership. Even so, the negotiations proved very difficult, taxing the ingenuity of politicians who had to reckon with the peculiar structure of an unstable Polish constitution.

Events in Hungary, during the summer and autumn of 1682, had focused the attention of the Poles on their Carpathian border, from the Stryy pass in the south-east to the Jablunka pass in the south-west. Thököly captured Kassa with Turkish support, he entered the towns of the Polish-held region of Zips (Spiz) farther west, and his lieutenant Petrozzi raided as far as Silesia.
As Sobieski realised, Cracow and the whole surrounding country were now vulnerable.
⁶¹
If a large Ottoman army appeared in the following year, 1683, to support or supervise Thököly in Hungary, it might be directed by its commander towards Györ and Vienna, or fanned out into Moravia, or moved up the Váh valley towards the Jablunka pass. It was possible that he would attempt to combine these plans. In any case an attack northwards from Kassa, or a fresh Turkish advance from Podolia towards Lvov, were two other Polish nightmares advancing swiftly from the background to the middle distance. This accumulation of threats to Poland helps to account for the personal agreement secretly negotiated during the autumn of 1682 between Leopold and John Sobieski. The King had gone to his estate at Jawarów, in Ruthenia. Some of his most important statesmen were joined there by the Austrian envoy Zierowski.
⁶²

Caprara’s reports from Istanbul had at last forced Leopold to modify his old policy towards Poland. He gave up his objection to the plan of an offensive alliance, once judged likely to provoke the Turks unnecessarily, and he prepared to buy the promise of a Polish military diversion in 1683 directed against the Turkish positions around Kamenets, which was to be supplemented by a promise of help if Vienna were attacked. John Sobieski secured financial help to ease the task of putting a Polish army in the field; and he gave up, at least for the time being, his old demands for the marriage of a Habsburg princess to his son Jacob. Having made these calculations, the two rulers and their advisers came to terms.
⁶³
Neither made any difficulty over a promise to put his troops in the field against the Turks in 1683, or over a further promise not to make peace without the other’s consent. The Poles wished to recover their previous losses in Podolia; and, for this, a combat in Hungary was needed in order to pin down the Turks west and south of the Carpathians. Vienna still hoped to strengthen its defences in the Danube valley, and to conciliate Thököly, but it was necessary to increase the chances of success by a Polish diversion pinning down as many Turkish forces as possible north and east of the Carpathians. Vienna, therefore, agreed to put 60,000 into Hungary and to subsidise Sobieski, who agreed to raise a Polish army of 40,000. This arrangement squared with the most favourable view possible of the immediate future: a danger of great but not intolerable magnitude compelled the two powers to act simultaneously, but in widely separated theatres of war. On the other hand they also arranged, if the worst imaginable possibility occurred and the Turks laid siege to either Vienna or Cracow, that the threatened government could call on the direct aid of its ally. This was an emergency stipulation, mutually acceptable.

It remained for the two courts to coax and coerce the Polish Diet; no treaty pledging the Republic was valid without the Diet’s confirmation.

The deputies duly assembled at Warsaw early in the new year, and appointed a committee of thirty-eight members to bargain with Leopold’s ambassador extraordinary, Waldstein, who laid his master’s proposals before them.
⁶⁴
Their
basis was to be a common undertaking to make war on the Turks, for the glory of God and the recovery of lost territory; the details were those previously agreed between Leopold and the King of Poland. The Poles accepted readily the general project of an alliance, but prepared to question all the practical measures which embodied it. Members of the unwieldy committee indulged to the full the national vice of interminable oratory, which barely concealed the venom of current opposition to Sobieski, or the importance of bribery as distinct from argument. Zierowski, the resident Habsburg envoy, and Waldstein, both tried to limit Leopold’s financial commitments, because he was too poor to pay for what they knew he had to buy. Their ally, the nuncio Pallavicini, shuttled backwards and forwards between the protagonists. He had orders from Innocent XI to use the revenues of the Church, and the privilege of the Church exempting it from ordinary taxation, for the purpose of making agreement possible. All three were engaged in battle against the French ambassador, de Vitry, and his principal Polish confederate, the Treasurer Morsztyn. The opposition in the Diet began to ventilate their objections, some merely obstructive, some points of genuine difficulty. There was the query, prompted by an envoy’s arrival from Moscow, whether other powers should be included in the treaty. This pretext for delay was met by drafting a clause inviting them to join the alliance, but with the consent of the original signatories. There was the problem of drafting the pledge by which Leopold should accept the agreement, complicated by his dual status as Holy Roman Emperor and hereditary ruler of the Habsburg duchies. The Poles demanded a form of oath which the Austrians judged dishonourable, and this required careful handling and an ingenious compromise. Above all, the whole treaty might be worked out in detail and accepted by the Poles; but then, if a single deputy ‘disrupted’ the Diet by imposing his veto on any of the proceedings, there was a risk that the entire legislation of the session (with the treaty) would be rendered null and void. The negotiations in fact ended in agreement on 31 March, and the Diet closed quietly on 18 April, but the period between these two dates was one long agony for friends of the Habsburg alliance.

Undoubtedly, they had to rely mainly on a patriotic and commonsense Polish estimate of the Ottoman peril but the King also behaved with great skill.
⁶⁵
Prompted by the nuncio, he stopped angling for a bargain with the Swedes to molest Brandenburg, and this moderated the energy with which Frederick William’s ambassador usually interfered in the proceedings of a Polish Diet. The deputies from western Poland, often susceptible to Brandenburg’s influence, were a fraction less obstreperous than they might have been. Sobieski also put the whole force of his personality into the struggle against Morsztyn.
⁶⁶
Intercepted letters were used to confound and discredit this polished, wily intriguer. After a thundering denunciation by the King himself, he was robbed of the power to do major damage at a critical moment; and instead, he crept away into a comfortable French exile.

This in-fighting serves to show how important, and how difficult to settle, were the financial transactions connected with the treaty. At the end of 1682 Leopold, disregarding the objections of his Treasury, had clearly made up his mind to buy from Poland what this obvious ally could be induced to sell. Quite apart from the military alliance under discussion he wished to hire Polish soldiers for his own army in Hungary. Having received Sobieski’s consent, he authorised a separate negotiation with Jerome Lubomirski, one member of this great clan which dominated a broad area and a numerous population in south-western Poland. He undertook to finance Lubomirski for the hire of 2,800 men, at an estimated initial cost of 150,000 florins. Secondly, in order to have the treaty accepted by the Diet it became essential to subsidise the Polish politicians. Zierowski had been given 20,000 florins for this sort of expense in 1682,
⁶⁷
but he and Waldstein had to spend nearly 70,000 florins during the first half of 1683 in order to outbid the French by a narrow margin. Thirdly, the treaty itself contained some awkward clauses when the Poles had finished with them. Leopold surrendered his claim for the repayment of earlier grants made by the Habsburgs to Poland. He surrendered a mortgage on the great salt mine of Wielicza, south of Cracow, which had been exploited by his own revenue-officers in Tarnowskie (Silesia) for a number of years. Above all, the principal subsidy promised to Poland amounted to 360,000 florins. This, with the 70,000 florins for the ambassadors’ political expenses and 150,000 florins owed to Lubomirski, brought the total commitments of the Habsburg government in Poland to 580,000 florins. Additional items soon cropped up. In the winter of 1682–3, for example, dealers had been instructed to buy Polish corn to build up the magazines for use in Hungary. Zierowski’s secretary, Jacob Wenzel, found himself appointed a commissary responsible for funds needed to maintain the Polish troops raised for Leopold’s army as long as they were still in Poland.
⁶⁸
However the figures were juggled, there could be no doubt that the Habsburg government needed large sums of ready money, for transfer to Poland with the least possible delay.

The obvious intermediary for business of this kind was the Silesian provincial administration. The most progressive part of the whole economy under Habsburg rule had its centre at Breslau, where the Silesian assembly of princes and nobles voted substantial taxes, the merchants handled large capital sums, and the Silesian treasury of the Habsburgs functioned; while Breslau was relatively close to Cracow. For these reasons, Leopold’s cumbrous efforts to supply Poland can best be understood from the correspondence between Vienna and Breslau, eked out by hints from Zierowski’s reports.

The effect of the earliest instructions from the Treasury had been modest. The Silesians were paying the salary, and an authorised supplement to the salary, of Leopold’s resident envoy in Warsaw. Then they began to contribute to his, and Waldstein’s, ever-increasing budget for extraordinary secret expenditure. Then an order reached the senior Habsburg official at Breslau, asking him to collect funds for Lubomirski’s recruitment of troops. Then, most important of
all, arrived general instructions concerning the principal subsidy.
⁶⁹
It showed that the government hoped to divide the cost between Bohemia and Silesia, with Silesia finding the larger share: it reckoned to take 200,000 florins from the Silesian taxes, and 120,000 from Bohemia. On the other hand the Pope had authorised the sale of valuable properties attached to the Archbishopric of Prague, worth about 40,000 florins, for the government’s benefit.
⁷⁰
The total therefore came to the required 360,000 florins, one part to be transmitted from Prague to Breslau, and the whole from Breslau to Warsaw.

These were instructions. The Poles needed money. After a few days the Treasury in Vienna discovered that it had overestimated the amounts readily available in Prague, but promised to make good the deficit there by a transfer of its own to Breslau, hoping to balance the item against later remittances from other sources of revenue in Bohemia. Nor could the Archbishop’s estates be sold overnight, although a little later a member of the Kolowrat family paid 48,000 florins for them. On 21 May Breslau held sufficient funds to pay one quarter of the Polish subsidy; the merchant house of Schmettau undertook to transmit them to Warsaw immediately, and to advance a further 50,000 florins within fourteen days. Pallavicini, the nuncio, reported that the first 100,000 florins reached Warsaw on 27 May.
⁷¹

This was too slow. The Poles protested to Zierowski, Zierowski to Vienna, Vienna to Breslau. Breslau replied with a polite account of the difficulties. Zierowski began taking up copper money in Warsaw at ruinous rates of interest, borrowing from merchants with whom Schmettau refused to do business. Then Vienna itself, and the papal nuncios at both courts, and Breslau, all made further contributions. Money arrived from Prague. The greater part of the subsidy appears to have reached Sobieski during June. Officials in Vienna assumed, already on the 9th, that the complete sum had been paid over.
⁷²
Their own records show that they were mistaken, and they were also evading the disagreeable fact that funds allocated to cover other urgent items of expenditure were being robbed; but their somewhat creaky organisation did finally honour the main financial clause in Leopold’s treaty with Poland.

If the provincial authority at Breslau played its part in these transactions, so did the Church. A few years earlier Innocent XI had begun to raise money in support of his policy of urging the Christian states to take the initiative against the Sultan. Substantial amounts were held by the nuncio at Warsaw. Innocent was disappointed by Poland’s failure to follow this policy in the period after 1679; by the end of 1682 he naturally concluded that Leopold, not Sobieski, would need all the assistance he could give in the coming year. He therefore ordered Pallavicini to transfer money to Buonvisi in Vienna, not very long before the completion of the agreement between the two rulers, although Pallavicini warned the Papal Secretary of State that funds would soon be required in Poland. After the treaty was signed, the money began to flow back. Buonvisi transmitted it from Vienna, and other consignments came from Rome to Warsaw by way of Amsterdam and Danzig.
⁷³

On paper, the kingdom of Poland maintained an army of 12,000 after the pacification of 1676, and the duchy of Lithuania 6,000. Again on paper it was now decided to raise a further 24,000 in Poland, and to double the Lithuanian contingent. The new treaty obligation to put 40,000 men into the attack on the Turks was comfortably met by this grand total of 48,000. The plan placed before the Diet also sketched in points of detail.
⁷⁴
Troops were to be mustered by 1 July. Pay was guaranteed for twenty-one months, although it was hoped to dismiss most of the troops after the campaign ended. The soldiers must give cash for what they wanted, apart from accommodation and forage; they must keep to the authorised routes on their marches. The cost of winter-quarters would fall on the clergy and the Crown-lands, not on the nobility. In accepting such a scheme, and in recommending it to the provincial assemblies, the Diet had done its constitutional duty and honoured the agreement with Leopold. The government, too, was optimistic. Sobieski, recovering from a bout of illness, hoped that his forces would be ready by the end of June. A council of war even allowed the Emperor’s request for 4,000 men, to be sent to reinforce General Schultz in northern Hungary, while the main Polish army prepared to fight in Podolia and the Ukraine.