The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (27 page)

At this point news arrived from Hungary. On 11 July, Thököly had broken
up his quarters near Miskolcz, about 200 miles from Vienna, and begun to ride with his followers through the Slovakian hills.
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Ahead of them, his agents summoned the larger towns to promise obedience to the new Magyar ‘king’. The citizens of Trnava took an oath of loyalty on 19 July and Géczy, the most active of these envoys, negotiated with the burgomaster of Pressburg. The Habsburg garrison in the citadel there was completely isolated by then; and the townsmen had to reckon not merely with the menaces and blandishments of Thököly who appeared on the scene in person on the 27th, but with the Turks. While the main body of the Ottoman army advanced on Vienna, and other troops blockaded Györ, a third force of possibly 7,000 men under Abaza Kör Hussein—the ‘One-eyed’—wheeled from Györ to Esztergom and crossed the Danube.
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The Turkish commander and Thököly soon quarrelled, but jointly they threatened Pressburg. There were signs that the Turks intended to build a pontoon bridge from a point opposite the town in order to get additional troops over the Danube, and by this means give further assistance to Thököly in driving forward right up to Lorraine’s encampment opposite Vienna. Their adversary would then be compelled to withdraw once again to the west. It would become exceedingly difficult for the Poles to enter Austria by the direct route through Moravia. The area from which the Habsburg army continued to gather food and taxes would be diminished, and the garrisons at Györ and Komárom totally cut off from their comrades. But at the end of July Lorraine reacted violently to the danger, and won his first positive victory since the beginning of the campaign.
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A small force, under Major Ogilvie of the Baden regiment, went ahead to try to stiffen the Pressburg garrison. It was unfortunately cut to pieces by Thököly’s men and Ogilvie had to return. So Lorraine, leaving only a few companies of dragoons behind him, moved east to Marchegg on the Morava, ten miles from the point where this river meets the Danube and twenty miles from Pressburg. There he learnt that the burghers had allowed a small troop of Thököly’s supporters to enter the town, that Thököly himself was now coming up fast with very large numbers—possibly 25,000 Magyars and Turks. The enemy had begun to build his bridge. In spite of the appalling consequences of a defeat at this stage, Lorraine forded the Morava in the late afternoon of 28 July. His forces, first his dragoons, then the Poles, and finally the main body of cavalry, rode through the night up the narrow valley leading to the crest—and to the vineyards—which overlook the citadel and city of Pressburg. Almost at the beginning of this march his van frightened off a few enemy outriders; and Lorraine could not know that these gave the alarm to Thököly who determined to withdraw at once, with many of his followers. Thököly, like Lorraine, greatly over-estimated the size of the force opposed to him.

In the last hours of darkness, the dragoons under Lewis of Baden were posted in the vineyards close to one of the suburbs and the citadel. Lorraine himself came forward to inspect, and saw below him the town, and beyond it two of the enemy’s principal camps, apparently some miles apart. Then, easily,
Ogilvie and 200 foot got inside the walls of the castle and strengthened the garrison. At dawn Baden occupied a part of the suburb and summoned the town to surrender. The townsmen speedily gave way to him; but first giving 300 of Thököly’s soldiers sufficient time to escape.

The accounts of the battle which followed are very confusing.
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It seems probable that Lorraine doubted whether he was strong enough to attack the main body of Magyars and Turks outside the town. Luckily Baden and other officers argued boldly for an assault, and he finally agreed. The dragoons were spread out on a broad front between the hill-slopes and the Danube, while the heavier cavalry was being ranged into battle-order; then the dragoons were concentrated on the wings. The Poles under Lubomirski’s command were nearest the river. Other Poles under Tetwin, with the Veterani and Pálffy regiments, stood on the far left. The attack commenced and it soon became clear that most of the Magyars present felt unable to resist. The Turkish units alone were not strong enough to do so, and the reason for this weakness was almost certainly that Thököly and many other Magyars had already withdawn. The Habsburg victory of 30 July was a chase rather than a battle. Even Lorraine lost control of the situation for several hours whilst Lubomirski and Tetwin, their men and those of the Veterani and Pálffy regiments drove across the plain and then slowly returned, loaded with spoil of various kinds, tents, baggage, horses and cattle. They were all—or nearly all—back by dusk; and in the camp that night there was drinking and congratulation, spiced with the envy of those troops who had gained less or too little in the way of plunder. But the Habsburg commanders had not wasted time: the materials for building a bridge over the Danube were either removed or destroyed; supplies were taken into the castle; and the municipality of Pressburg was roughly admonished for truckling to the rebels. It once again promised loyalty to Leopold.

The threat from Thököly had been promptly and successfully met. It was high time to hurry back to the scene of the siege which agonisingly continued its course. On 31 July Lorraine and his men were once more in Marchegg, across the Morava. He himself believed that it was essential to lighten the weight of Turkish pressure on Vienna at once. Conceivably he could have crossed the Danube at Pressburg and threatened Kara Mustafa from the east. The testimony of various prisoners in his hands suggested that the tension between Magyars and Turks had risen high. Messages from Györ and Komárom spoke of extremely effective raids made by Habsburg skirmishers in that area. Intercepted correspondence between the besiegers at Vienna and the authorities at Buda disclosed the tightness of supply in Kara Mustafa’s army and grumbling in its ranks. But Lorraine had a diminutive force by comparison with his enemy’s, whose cavalry enjoyed every chance of emphasising its superiority in the gentle plainland on that side of Vienna. A bridgehead so far to the east was both remote and vulnerable. Indeed the arguments in favour of a speedy crossing at Krems or Tulln, and the
construction of a fortified camp in the Wiener Wald from which to try and regain contact with the beleaguered garrison, still sounded convincing to the members of Lorraine’s staff. They were shocked when Taafe reached Marchegg with the gloomiest account of the mood of ministers in Passau. Leopold’s government appeared to view the situation calmly, almost passively, and to insist that any move on Vienna depended on the prior arrival of reinforcements from Germany and Poland; while clearly such reinforcements were coming up at a slow pace. Lorraine was not prepared to accept this programme without protest.
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He passionately wanted to anticipate what he considered the obvious perils of the immediate future. Pálffy was sent off to Passau to press his case once again.
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Other messengers set out on longer journeys, to the King of Poland and the Elector of Saxony.

Fresh intelligence soon showed that the Habsburg cavalry still had work to do on the eastern front; the regiments could not yet be taken back to the Vienna bridgehead. Thököly’s supporters, it seemed, were about to break across the Morava into Moravia, possibly into Silesia. Lorraine was on the point of moving up the river towards them, when he also learnt that the Turks had got over from the south bank of the Danube on to the islands opposite Gross Enzersdorf some miles below Vienna, a village where Habsburg magazines were stored. At the same time, they were adding to their strength on the islands which faced Lorraine’s original encampment opposite the city. So he turned about, spent the night of 3 August at Enzersdorf, and pushed forward to the bridgehead.
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The Turks were successfully dislodged from the islands lower down the river, and their chance of crossing the Danube was cut to a minimum. The troops then turned up the Morava to deal with the Magyar raiders.

The condition of the whole area round Pressburg had become anarchic; typically, on 8 August, an accidental but devastating fire reduced to ashes most of the town of Trnava. While Thököly himself kept close to the shelter of the Little Carpathians, and resided mainly in the castles of Czeklesz (about ten miles east of Pressburg) and of Vereskö farther north, some of his men moved forward again.
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To oppose them the Habsburg headquarters were set at Angern from 6 to 20 August, from which troops would go at intervals to winkle out or mow down those wild incendiaries who were burning the villages of that unpretentious countryside. It was a merciless, sporadic form of warfare in which civilian losses of life and property were extremely high. The Poles once again, mobile and relentless, distinguished themselves; and Lorraine took care to inform Sobieski, while pleading in a sequence of dispatches for the King’s speedy arrival, of the prowess of his countrymen. Privately he would have preferred the inhabitants to withdraw completely with their goods and livestock, rather than that he should be burdened with the impossible task of protecting them. This, in fact, he was not able to do; but he did manage to stop Thököly entering Moravia with a compact force which could threaten the main routes from Poland to Austria.

Meanwhile, his attempts to gather reliable information about the state of Vienna after four weeks of siege always continued. Le Bègue laments on 2 August: ‘However hard we try to get news from Vienna and the Grand Vezir’s camp, we can learn nothing at all.’
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Peasants who had worked for the Turks were questioned, as well as a captured Turkish Aga, a burgher from Bruck-on-the-Leitha, a so-called ‘Catholic Cossack’, and a man who described himself as a German deserter from the Ottoman army and turned out to be an Italian Jew. Their testimonies were weighed, and the balance of probabilities estimated. They had to be compared with reports coming in from the commander at the bridgehead, Magny. How much could be inferred from the noise of successive bombardments and explosions? Or from the intermittent silences which followed them? The arguments, now becoming familiar to us, went round and round in a confusing circle. Kara Mustafa was well and truly pinned down, and undoubtedly expending his resources on the grandest scale. His convoys bringing up supplies from Buda were liable to attacks by the undefeated forces at Györ and Komárom; while farther south Wiener-Neustadt still held out. The enemy was apparently not strong enough to take Klosterneuburg, or to raid farther west than Tulln (after the first fortnight of the siege), or to get over the Danube at any point west of the Morava provided that Thököly could be prevented from helping him. Nor were there any reports that he had fortified his camps round Vienna or placed a guard on the heights of the Wiener Wald. Unfortunately, any optimism based on these facts was tempered by consideration of the one premise of supreme importance: they all depended on the continued resistance of Vienna. The Turks understandably bent all their efforts to this end, the capture of the city. If they succeeded, they could then strike at lesser objectives with every hope of victory in each case. So Lorraine and his staff were back again at the starting-point of their inquiry, their ignorance about the progress of the siege. After a fortnight at Marchegg and Angern they could still only conclude that the siege
was
making progress, but slowly. After listening to Taafe, and studying the dispatches which followed Taafe from Passau, they decided that powerful reinforcements were indeed coming up, but very slowly indeed. Nine thousand Bavarians and 8,000 Franconians would be within striking distance of Vienna by mid-August. A Saxon army of 10,000 was unlikely to approach before the end of the month, or a Polish army of perhaps 20,000 before the beginning of September; possibly the Polish vanguard under Sienawski would reach Austria earlier than the main body under Sobieski himself. The dilemma was obvious, but insoluble: the longer Lorraine waited, the larger and stronger the relieving force would grow, but the more likely a successful Turkish assault on Vienna. The maximum period of weeks or days was needed to give the Christian armament a chance of confronting the Turks on almost equal terms. To exceed that maximum by an hour was to invite a crushing disaster.

On 2 August he had sent Pálffy to Passau. The days passed, he received no reply, and was compelled to go on waiting at Angern anxious and frustrated.

*
For Jedlesse and other points north of the Danube, see the maps (
pp. xiv–xvii
).

III

Just then, the city re-established contact with the outside world;
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for it is one of the more puzzling features of the siege that no arrangements were made, before Lorraine drew back from Leopoldstadt and the islands, for signalling of even a rudimentary kind across the river by the use of rockets. The soldiers camped at Jedlesee simply attempted to guess at the course of events from what they could see and hear of the rival artilleries. With the help of Prince Serban Cantacuzene of Wallachia and his Christian subjects, who always served the Turks half-heartedly, Kuniz from the besiegers’ camp was able to send messages into Vienna during the first week of the siege—but this did not help the Habsburg commander on the other side of the river.

On the night of 21 July a bold cavalryman swam across the Danube from near Enzersdorf, bearing a letter from Lorraine which promised the speedy relief of the city. He (or possibly some other volunteer) left Vienna the same day, and the Turks caught him, but luckily they could make nothing of his dispatch which was in cipher. Brought before the Grand Vezir, he said that the losses of the garrison had already been so great that the city was likely to surrender in the very near future. Also on that day, the 22nd, Kuniz managed to get a warning through that the enemy had cut a large amount of timber from the woods round Schönbrunn, in preparation for the advance of their trenches and galleries—for which it was needed—as far as the counterscarp; from here they intended to mine a way through the remaining defences. Starhemberg replied at once, promising to resist to the utmost, and this messenger got safely back to Kuniz. Simultaneously another crossed the Danube to Lorraine, who had heard nothing from the city for eight days. He learnt that the Turks were approaching the counterscarp fast, and that it looked as if they next wanted to extend their trenches laterally from a point facing the Burg-ravelin in order to bring them opposite the Burg and Löbel bastions. Starhemberg repeated that he was determined to hold on.
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