The Battle of Vienna: The Ride of Jan Sobieski

Part 2

Early on the morning of September 12, 1683 Polish, Hapsburg, Saxon, Bavarian and Franconian infantry and cavalry, accompanied by Jan Sobieski on horseback, advanced downhill through the slopes and ravines to confront the Turkish army on the plains of Vienna.  The attackers were outnumbered by the Ottoman army but that army had lost the qualitative edge it had held over the Europeans in the 1400s and early 1500s.(Sobieski)

A century before, the series of very capable Ottoman sultans ended with the death of Suleiman the Magnificent (his immediate successor was known as Selim the Sot) and a stalemate ensued in the Balkans.  From the Hapsburg perspective their greatest foes and threats were the French, not the Turks, and in the early 17th century the dynasty became preoccupied with the Thirty Years War (1618-48), the intra-Christian religious war that convulsed much of western and central Europe. With one brief exception the Hapsburgs and Turks co-existed in peace from 1606 to 1680, the main point of contention being Transylvania and the remnant of Hungary (now governed by the Hapsburgs), ruled by Protestant princes, who were often allied with the Turks in opposition to the Catholic Hapsburgs.  While the Balkan front remained stable the Turks gained territory around the Black Sea where they occupied much of what is now southern Russia, The Ukraine and the Polish province of Podolia.(Ottoman Empire at its peak)

The result was that while there was growing internal stagnation and decay, the Ottoman Empire appeared still strong to many European observers in the mid-17th century.  Its geographic expanse was enormous, it was prosperous, for the most part internally peaceful and Constantinople with nearly a million inhabitants was the largest city in the world outside China.  For a clear eyed, entertainingly written and sometimes affectionate account of the rise, decay and fall of the empire THC highly recommends Lords of the Horizons by Jason Goodwin (1998) who writes:

"The city's position was the soldered joint which bound the bell of Ottoman Asia to the balloon of Ottoman Europe.  Its barracks housed the only standing army in Europe, the notorious janissaries, whose lives were dedicated to war . . . Just as the army, passing through the countryside, was able to feed and supply itself without reference to the surrounding lands [due to the logistical excellence of the Ottomans], so Constantinople seemed to float free of its immediate environment. . .  Two thousand ships sailed in with foodstuffs each year.  Nothing in Instanbul was left to chance, and so great was the city's appetite that while it was the Venetians, famously, who discerned and pursued the pattern of trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, it was really the Turks who willed that pattern into being, controlling it by fiat and regulation."

And the prosperity extended beyond the great city and Goodwin goes on to point out:

"Trade was conducted on an imperial scale.  Bertrand de la Brocquiere was in Damascus when a caravan came in from the desert, and it took two nights and three days to settle in.  In Belgrade's shops in the mid-sixteenth century a German visitor found 'everything as in the most advanced cities of Italy and Germany.'"

And while it was a Moslem state and the emperor was considered the Caliph of Islam, it was also, by the standards of the time, relatively tolerant.  Those standards were certainly different from today's and from the more modern view expressed by George Washington in his famous letter to the Tauro Synagogue (see All Possess Alike Liberty of Conscience) but they did allow for a degree of religious freedom for Christians and Jews though in a clearly subservient position to Moslems.  I stress the word "relatively" here so as not to be misunderstood.  Justice in the Empire could be arbitrary, swift and violent, particularly if you were not a Moslem, and the janissaries mentioned in the quote above were obtained by seizing young Christian boys from the Balkans and bringing them to Constantinople to be raised and trained in the art of war.  Each non-Moslem community was organized as a millet and, as Goodwin writes:

"as long as the millet did not come into conflict with Islamic organisation and society, provided it stumped up its taxes and kept the peace, its leaders were left to run their own affairs . . . Shielded from the bullies of the Counter-Reformation, Protestant doctrine spread through Ottoman Hungary: the boy levy, in fact, was never extended to Hungary, and in the Balkans, beyond this single impostion, no efforts were made to convert Christians to Islam."

Compared to Christian Europe racked by the religious wars of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and the expulsion of Jews from many communities as well as Moslems from Spain and Portugal, sometimes the Turks did not look so bad and, as one example, many of the Jews expelled from Spain were welcomed as immigrants by the Ottomans.

To understand the origins of the Ottoman campaign of 1683 we need to look at Hungary.  While most of Hungary had been governed by the Ottomans for more than a century a small sliver remained in Hapsburg hands.  However, the Magyar nobles were mostly Protestant and other Magyars were Orthodox Christians in contrast to the Hapsburgs who were fervent Catholics, leading the Magyars to prefer the Turks who they viewed as more tolerant.  A Magyar revolt against the Hapsburgs was supported by the Turks and triggered a train of events leading to the Ottoman (Lighter green is Ottoman Hungary; Light blue Hapsburg Hungary)

decision to campaign against the Hapsburgs.  Leopold I was seen as weak by the Ottoman Grand Vizier, Kara Mustafa, and there was an(Leopold, 'nuff said)  opportunity for territorial gain and plunder, though it remains uncertain whether Vienna itself was the original target (the Ottomans kept few written records and most of those that still exist are in inaccessible archives in Turkey).

Leopold remained focused on the French threat and left only a small garrison of 11,000 soldiers in Vienna.  He called for support from the German principalities and the kings of Europe.  And one key factor was about to change in the balance of forces.  Poland was an ally of France and had not aided the Hapsburg before against the Turks.  In fact, Poland was supporting the Hungarian rebels against Leopold.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 16th and 17th centuries was unique.  Run by a feudal nobility it had an elective monarchy, resulting in a King with much less power than those with the same title in England, France and Spain and not as strong as the Hapsburg monarch.  At its peak in 1648, it extended beyond modern Poland and Lithuania to included most of what is today Belarus, The Ukraine and Slovakia.  However, that same year saw a massive uprising by the Cossacks in the Ukraine, triggering a chain of events leading to a broader war and attacks from the growing power of Russia.  Poland lost its eastern territories and the Turks saw an opportunity to attack the weakened commonwealth, seizing the province of Podolia in 1672.  Jan Sobieski, who had already achieved some military victories against the Turks, was elected the Polish King in 1674 and continued to try to regain the lost province.  Meanwhile, Leopold I was happy to have the Turks occupied attacking the Poles allowing him to continue his war with the French.

With the start of the Ottoman campaign in 1683, the French lobbied to keep Poland from helping the Hapsburgs, including making large payments to some of the Polish nobility.  Even though Sobieski's wife was French-born he saw the Ottoman threat as a larger one, and in fact, the mystery over the destination of the Ottoman army contributed to the decision as well as the opportunity to recover the lost lands of Poland and eventually the Polish Parliament voted to enter into an alliance with the Hapsburgs which was signed in May 1683.

In July, Sobieski led his army (with one of his most trusted contingents consisting of Muslim Tartars from the Russian steppes) towards Vienna and after uniting with Hapsburg and German troops, crossed the Danube northwest of the city on September 6.

The actions of the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa remain a puzzle to military historians.  In his rush to reach Vienna, he left behind the heavy artillery which could have pulverized the city walls.  Once the siege was laid, he resisted launching a general assault which, in the judgement of many, would have likely succeeded.   There's been speculation that he didn't order the assault because the Ottoman custom was that if a city or town was taken by assault the(Kara Mustafa) victorious troops had three days to plunder and loot but it the city surrendered all its wealth would go to the Sultan (with a nice cut for the Grand Vizier).  It is also baffling to figure out why the Turkish camp was not fortified once Mustafa learned the relief army was approaching and why he failed to order outposts set up in the hills surrounding Vienna through which the Poles and others would have to approach.
(From raremaps.com)

Even with these mistakes the siege was a close run thing.  Goodwin describes its climax:

"The outer walls were breached; the inner walls were crumbling  . . . always the eerie, slow, methodical trenching and mining . . . On 4 September, a mine blew a big hole in the inner wall of the city; whole lengths began crumbling.  Belated assaults were launched with increasing ferocity upon these breaches; but overnight the citizens did their best to repair the holes, and fought back with equal ferocity, although the effects of the siege were beginning to tell.  Butcher's meat had run out; vegetables were scare; families sat down to donkey and cat.  The elderly and weak began dying, and disease stalked the unpaved streets."

The attack on September 12 began with an assault by German infantry on the Turkish camp.  After a midday halt, the Polish cavalry and infantry under Sobieski joined the action and the Turks collapsed.  Kara Mustafa fled, collecting as much of the army as he could but it was a rout and much wealth was left in the camp.  It was the worst defeat suffered by the Ottomans since they'd entered Europe in 1354.  On his way back to Constantinople, Mustafa was met by the Sultan's representatives and told he must pay the price for failure as a vizier.  He was strangled with a bowstring and his head sent to the Sultan in a velvet bag.

For the Poles and Jan Sobieski it was the last moment of glory.  Without the Polish army it is doubtful the relief would have succeeded, but soon thereafter Poland was plunged once again into war on many fronts and less than a century after Sobieski's death in 1696 the kingdom no longer existed, partitioned among Prussia, Austria and Russia and erased from the map until 1919.


The defeat of the Turks in 1683 was a turning point.  The Ottomans were never again a threat to attack Europe and it signaled the start of a 230 year retreat.  The Hapsburgs, quickly following up their victory, captured Budapest in 1686 recovering most of the Kingdom of Hungary soon thereafter and their armies reached as far as Belgrade by the end of the century.  Though much of the Balkans did not see the Turks definitively ousted until the 19th and early 20th centuries (see First Balkan War), the rest of Europe began to look west after 1683 and by the 1800s the Empire known as "the sick man of Europe" was kept alive only by the support of Britain and France who saw it as a bulwark against the growing Russian empire and its ambitions in the Balkans and Middle East.  Even the reformist revolt of the "Young Turks" in 1908 could not save the empire and when it sided with the Germans and Austrians in World War One it sealed its fate (a fate shared by its Hapsburg rivals) and the new nation-state of Turkey emerged from the ashes of the Empire after the war.

So, goodnight Vienna and sleep well, Jan Sobieski.

Goodnight Vienna: The Song of Jan Sobieski

Part 1

On the evening of September 11, 1683, Jan Sobieski, the King of Poland, stood among the woods on one of the western hills overlooking Vienna, the capital of the Hapsburg Empire.  In front of him was the city, surrounded by its massive walls and defended by a small garrison which was, in turn, surrounded by the army of the Ottoman Empire which had besieged the city since July 14 and was now on the verge of taking it.   As the evening wore on was he thinking about Goodnight Vienna, the title song of Ringo Starr's 1975 album, composed by John Lennon, perhaps as part of a collective unconscious memory of a future event (as suggested by THC in Fat Bass)?  Perhaps not.  Now, where was I?  Oh, yes, what was the King of Poland doing lurking about in the hills outside Vienna that night?  What train of events brought him there onto the territory of the Hapsburg Emperor, Leopold I?  And why are the events of the following day so important?

Those events started a thousand years earlier.  Although not exclusively a religious tale (on that, see more below) it began with the assaults of Moslem armies on Europe, starting in the east with the first (and unsuccessful) siege of Constantinople (674-77), the Byzantine capital,(Wikipedia Commons) and in the west, with the landing of the Berber/Arab forces of Tariq ibn Ziyad at Gibraltar in 711.  On the Iberian peninsula the Moslem invaders quickly destroyed the Visigoth kingdom, sweeping through all but the mountainous northwest corner and surging into France, raiding as far north of the Loire River until turned back by Charles Martel near Tours in 732.  For the next 300 years, Christian rulers maintained a tenuous hold on the northern area of Iberia before launching the reconquista which was completed in 1492, followed immediately by the expulsion of the Jews and, in 1609, by a final expulsion of Moslems, and the decision to support the Genoese sailor Christoforo Colombo in his crazy scheme to sail west to India.

In the Central Mediterranean, the attacks, launched from North Africa by Arabs and Berbers, began with a landing in Sicily in 828 and the conquest of the entire island by the end of the century.  The tangled relationships between Arabs and Christians can be seen in what happened during the 9th and 10th centuries in Southern Italy, a region fragmented among duchies, principalities and empires.  On one hand, Arab raiders plundered the island of Ischia (near Naples) in 812 and, in 846, sacked those parts of Rome outside the ancient Aurelian walls, including looting relics from the original St Peters Basilica.  It was this period that saw the construction of the Saracen towers on the Amalfi Coast to provide warning against Moorish slave raiders.  On land, Arab emirates were established on the heel of Italy at Bari (846-71) and Taranto (until 879) from

                                                   (Saracen Tower on Amalfi Coast near Praiano)
which raids were conducted deep into interior Italy the main booty from which were slaves and leading to widespread devastation, including (location of Bari and Taranto) the destruction of the abbey at Monte Cassino.  Even after the emirates were destroyed land and sea raids continued well into the next century.(From Wikipedia; includes some inaccuracies, such as missing Duchy of Naples, between Amalfi and Capua, but close enough)

On the other hand, Neapolitan merchants sold slaves to the Arabs and imported Arab mercenaries to protect the Duchy from the neighboring Christian Lombard (Benevento, Capua and Salerno) principalities.  The relationship of the Duchy of Naples with the Arab states and the number of Arabs residing in the city led the Carolingian Emperor Louis II, while campaigning in the area, to complain that Naples was a "second Palermo [the Arab capital of Sicily] or Africa".  When a civil war broke out between the Lombard principalities each hired large bands of Arab mercenaries who were allowed to plunder the area during their "down time" between fighting and when Gaeta, a coastal principality between Naples and Rome, felt threatened by its neighbors it imported an Arab band which carved out a territory from which it launched raids for three decades.  The Duchy of Amalfi grew rich on its trade with North Africa and Egypt and when the Pope and the Byzantines attempted to form a Christian alliance to drive the Moslems from the region it failed because Salerno, Naples and Amalfi entered into a peace treaty with the Arabs. All this finally ended when in the late 11th century, Norman adventurers reached Italy and began establishing a kingdom on both the Italian mainland and in Sicily, completing the conquest of the island in the 12th century, though slave raids from North Africa and later, the Ottoman Empire, were to continue for hundreds of years (it is estimated that over a million Europeans were taken as slaves in these raids, which extended as far north as Ireland, between the 9th and 19th centuries). Of course the slave trade went both ways and not just in Naples.  During the 9th-11th centuries the Scandinavians who established raiding and trading colonies in what is now Russia, sold Slav slaves to the Abbasid Caliphate based in Baghdad and during the 10th century heyday of the Cordoba Caliphate in Spain it purchased Slav slaves captured by Christian Crusades against still-pagan Slavs in the Baltics.  Later, as the Christian reconquest of Spain progressed, Muslims in the recovered territories were routinely enslaved; for instance, in the 13th century after the conquest of the island of Minorca by the Kingdom of Aragon almost the entire population was sold into slavery.

The East saw several surges back and forth between Christians and Moslems.  Between the 7th and 9th centuries, the Islamic Caliphate kept the pressure on the Byzantine Empire.  Though they failed to capture Constantinople the Byzantine empire remained weak and all of its remaining Asian possessions, in what is now Turkey, were constantly raided and plundered.  Beginning in 863, the Byzantines regained the initiative, eventually recapturing Antioch in Syria and reaching the modern day borders of Iraq and Iran but after a disastrous defeat in 1071 at the hands of the Seljuk Turks (who had recently arrived from central Asia) at the Battle of Manzikert, the Byzantines lost most of their Asian lands over the next 20 years and issued an appeal to Christian Europe for help, triggering the Crusades.

The sequence of Crusades went through two phases.  In the first (1098-1187), the Christians were broadly successful, recapturing Jerusalem (first occupied by the Moslems in 634) and establishing kingdoms in Lebanon and Syria.  The second phase (1187-1291) saw a resurgent Arab coalition, initially led by Saladin, and the fall of Jerusalem and the extinguishing of the Christian kingdoms.  In the midst of this the Byzantines suffered another massive defeat in 1181 and lost most of their Asia possessions.  The mixture of motives underlying the Crusades is illustrated when, in response to another Byzantine call for help against the Moslems a Western European, Catholic led crusade in 1204 ended up directed not against its supposed target but resulted instead in the sacking of the Orthodox Christian city of Constantinople and setting the Byzantine Empire on the last phase of its slow decline.

It was out of the wreckage of the former Byzantine provinces located near the Sea of Mamara, in what is now western Turkey, that the Ottomans first arose in the late 13th century.  The origins of the Ottoman state remain murky and there is still controversy over the extent to which it was Islamic inspired in its early years or arose as a confederacy of raiders open to anyone whether Moslem or Christian, though predominantly led by Moslems (see, for instance, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State by Heath Lowry, 2003).

Regardless of its specific origin, the Ottoman state was fortunate in that its first eleven rulers, from the accession of Osman in 1299 to the death of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566 were very capable and the state expanded to become an empire.  After seizing much of the Aegean coast of Turkey, the Ottomans crossed into Europe, seizing Gallipoli in 1354.(Suleiman)  Over the next few decades their armies overran much of the Balkans, including defeating the King of Serbia on the fields of Kosovo in 1389, the lingering Serbian memory of which led to the war in Kosovo during the 1990s.  The great Aegean port of Salonica fell in 1402 and by 1420 Turkish territory completely surrounded the shrunken remnants of the Byzantine empire which was reduced to Constantinople and a few outposts in Greece.

The Christian Kingdoms of Europe launched two crusades against the Turks but these were crushingly defeated at Nikopolis in 1396 and Varna in 1444 (both in Bulgaria) and so the area consisting of present day Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia and Albania became subject to the Ottomans for most of the next four centuries.  In 1453 Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans and the last morsels of the Byzantine Empire were gone by 1461.  In 1480 an Ottoman force briefly landed in Southern Italy and their momentum seemed unstoppable but their gaze was to turn away from Europe.

For the next few decades the Ottoman rulers looked eastward and their armies overran the Middle East and Egypt bringing them to the borders of the Persian Empire and taking control of the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

When Suleiman the Magnificent began his rule in 1521 Ottoman ambitions returned to Europe.  As recounted in The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, the Grand Turk seized the island of Rhodes from the Knights Hospitallers.  In the Balkans, the Hungarian king was killed at the Battle of Mohacs in 1526 and within a few years a Turkish Pasha was sitting in Budapest, Wallachia and Moldavia (current day Romania) became Ottoman vassals and in 1529 the Turks made their first attempt to capture the Hapsburg capital of Vienna.

This period also saw the growth of the Ottoman Navy.  The shipyards at Constantinople produced scores of well-equipped galleons and the new vassal corsair states of North Africa (Algiers, Tunis, Oran) supplied brilliant admirals (and pirates) like Hayreddin Barbarossa. During the mid-16th century its fleet controlled the Mediterranean.  And it had a Christian ally in its contest with the House of Hapsburg, ruler of much of central Europe and Spain.  The greatest European enemy of the Hapsburgs was the King of France and the King was willing to make common cause with the Turks despite religious differences.  This cooperation reached its peak in the 1540s when the Turkish navy was allowed to winter at Toulon in the south of France.  In the spring, on their cruise back to Constantinople, the Turks seized 6,000 captives from Italian coastal villages.

Throughout this period economic, geopolitical and religious matters led to alliances and conflicts that were not just along Christian/Moslem lines.  France's primary enemies were the Habsburgs in Germany, Austria and Spain, making the Ottomans a natural ally.  Poland saw the Habsburgs and Russia as their biggest threats and were often willing to make accommodations with the Ottomans who viewed the same two entities as enemies and recognized the value of Poland as a counterweight.  Once Protestantism told hold in northern and central Europe there were occasional alliances of convenience between the Christians reformers and the Ottomans against the Catholic Habsburgs (this aspect would play a role in the events leading to the Ottoman attack on Vienna in 1683 - see Part II for more).  Once England rejected the Catholic church and came into conflict with Spain it sought out the Ottomans as a potential ally.  In 1590-1 Sultan Murad, Henry IV of France and Elizabeth I of England attempted to negotiate a common strategic plan for attacking Spain, including an Ottoman attack on Portugal (then under Spanish rule) in order to install an English backed claimant to its throne.  Though the plan did not come to fruition, it demonstrates the complex motives that drove European alliances and conflicts.

The end of Suleiman's regime saw the contest between the European kingdoms and the Ottomans become more even.  In 1565 the Turkish siege of Malta ended with a humiliating defeat and, in 1571, a combined Hapsburg, Venetian, Genoese, Papal and Maltese fleet wrecked the Ottoman navy in the Gulf of Lepanto on the Greek coast, though the corsair raids continued and the coastal fishing villages on the north side of the sea remained in fear for centuries. 

With stalemate at sea the Ottomans were beginning to be drawn into a more settled relationship with the other European powers as ambassadors began to be regularly exchanged and more Europeans visited Constantinople but the fight for dominance was not over and further alliances across religions would be forged in this struggle.

Part 2  . . . Tomorrow