by Alan Palmer
The Caliphate ensured that Suleiman could bring an aura of Koranic respectability to vexatious exigencies of government. If he sought an interpretation of Islamic Holy Law (şeriat), he might turn to the collective wisdom of Muslim divines, as voiced by the religious establishment (ulema). More specifically, he would seek and receive authoritative advice from its hierarchical leaders, an inner circle known as the ilmiye, whose chief spokesman was the şeyhülislâm (Chief Mufti). The ulema were a favoured section of the community, exempt from taxation; they decided, not only strictly religious matters, but questions concerning the form of justice practised in the state, and the character and conduct of education as well. Important rulings would be issued in the form of a carefully considered legal opinion (fetva), generally in the name of the Chief Mufti. For Suleiman the şeriat was a sound support for government, a source of reference from which there could be no appeal.5
Almost imperceptibly, these religious institutions began to provide Ottoman government with a constitutional check, limiting a Sultan’s autocracy. So respected were the religious leaders that they could even deliberate on the worthiness of a Sultan to retain his throne. They never questioned Suleiman’s regnal rights nor, more surprisingly, those of his successor, the aptly named ‘Selim the Sot’. But by 1610 the influence of ulema and ilmiye in making or breaking sultans was considerable; and it remained so throughout the Empire. Of twenty-one Sultans whose reigns ended between 1612 and 1922, thirteen were deposed under the authority of a fetva given by the Chief Mufti in response to questions framed by political enemies on a sultan’s observance of Holy Law.6
After Suleiman’s death the qualities of kingship shown by the Sultans deteriorated rapidly. Although Selim was something of a scholar and his grandson Mehmed III led a successful campaign in Hungary, none were both fine warriors and wise rulers in the old tradition. No Sultan acceding later than 1595 had any experience of active military service before coming to the throne. Murad IV, the strong-willed sovereign on the throne between 1623 and 1640, showed ability as a military commander in the Caucasus and Mesopotamia, but he was forced to spend much of his reign reasserting his authority over rebellious soldiery in the provinces. And though Murad was an able Sultan even he died from heavy drinking at the early age of thirty-one. Most rulers contentedly left the shaping of policy to others at court—to a Grand Vizier or an aga. Of particular influence in several reigns during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were the intrigues of a Valide Sultana (Princess Mother); palace power games were played with such intensity in these years that they have been called ‘the Age of the Favoured Women’.
Modern academics frown austerely at so romantic and evocative a label. But even if they minimize the significance of harem politics, historians concede that by the mid-seventeenth century there is ample evidence of an empire slipping into decline.7 They can point to at least six signs of chronic weakness: inflation, exacerbated by cheap silver from Peru circulated by traders from Genoa and Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and causing a threefold increase in the cost of basic food; failings in the pyramidical structure of timar tax collection; the growth of banditry, following a population explosion in Anatolia; ruinous fires in several overcrowded cities; an inflexible adherence to old ways of waging war and governing conquered lands; and (from 1536 onwards) the grant of ‘Capitulations’—the treaties which, by giving special legal rights and tariff concessions to Europeans who resided within the Ottoman Empire, ensured that profitable trades should fall increasingly into foreign hands. Yet although modern historians may acknowledge that the Ottoman Empire had passed its zenith, these signs of crumbling power went unperceived by contemporaries, whether they were the Sultan’s subjects, or foreign observers. Even in decline the Ottomans clung to their cherished mission of thrusting the frontiers of Islam deeper into the marchlands of Christendom. Only when the seventeenth century was well into its final quarter did the truth begin to dawn on Western monarchs. It was then, in 1683, that, from news of a battle in the hills above Vienna, they recognized that the Sultan’s armies were as fallible as their own. The legendary ‘Grand Turk’ need no longer be feared.
That he possessed astonishing powers of resilience, they were equally slow to perceive.
CHAPTER 1
FLOODTIDE OF ISLAM
IT WAS 7 JULY 1683, AND THE PEOPLE OF VIENNA SWELTERED restlessly under the sultry heat of a midsummer evening. Since early that Wednesday morning, when Emperor Leopold I returned hurriedly from hunting stags in the Wienerwald, fearful rumours had swept through the city. A vast Turkish army was said to be advancing westwards from the Alföld, the cultivated Hungarian plain around Lake Balaton. For several days thousands of refugees had poured into the Habsburg capital, bringing tales of burning villages and of savage atrocities on men, women and children. Now, from high ground east of the city, onlookers could see a great dust storm; it was raised, they said, by the approach of warrior horsemen following the green banners of Islam in a frenzied assault on Catholic Christendom.
Ottoman Turks had fought Christians, Orthodox or Catholic, for many generations, and there is no doubt that by now the Sultan’s armies were less formidable than when the Janissaries stormed the walls of Constantinople. But even if the people of Vienna had been aware of signs of weakness in the approaching enemy, the knowledge would have brought them little comfort. In 1683, as in Shakespeare’s day, ‘the Turk’ was still regarded as ‘the terror of the world’. For a century and a half, the heartland of Hungary had been subject to the Sultan’s rule. As far west as Esztergom, where Hungary’s sainted king Stephen was born long before Habsburg or Ottoman entered history, a cluster of minarets crowned the fortress hill above the Danube. And, for the Viennese, it remained an unpleasant thought that Esztergom was within a hundred miles of the Wienerwald.
Yet, as an episode in folk legend, the peril was not unfamiliar to them. Three years after Hungary’s disastrous defeat at Mohács it had looked as if the Habsburg capital, too, might soon pass under Turkish rule. In September and October 1529 Sultan Suleiman I had encircled Vienna with a quarter of a million men and three hundred siege guns, only to pull back into Hungary when endless rain threatened to bog down his army in the mire. The danger had receded, but the nightmare fear of Turkish invasion remained throughout the years of the Counter-Reformation. After 1529 Austrian prelates, alarmed by Suleiman’s deep incursion into Catholic Christendom, insisted that the parochial clergy of central Europe should establish a warning system, the Türkenglocken, a peal of bells which would alert the soldiery to the coming of the Turks and summon the Catholic faithful to pray for deliverance from Islam.
A century passed with no need for the Türkenglocken to ring out across Austria. Once Suleiman’s long reign ended in 1566 the Sultanate, weakened by palace rivalry and intrigue, became militarily a less formidable institution. But the latent menace of Ottoman invasion was ever-present; and the church bells tolled their warning in July 1664, when a powerful army was thrown back at Szentgotthárd on Hungary’s historic western frontier. Now, in this stifling summer of 1683, Vienna was threatened yet again with Turkish occupation. After a winter and spring of negotiations between Austrian and Ottoman diplomats, the vanguard of a massive army had crossed the western edge of the Hungarian plain in late June. Fighting alongside the invaders were Hungarian insurgents led by an ambitious Magyar nobleman, Imre Tököly. But what most alarmed the Austrians were the irregular akinji outriders, undisciplined skirmishers plundering far ahead of the main, well-disciplined Ottoman army. When, on this first Wednesday in July, news reached Emperor Leopold that the crescent flag was flying over the citadel of Györ, he thought the threat imminent. Györ was only eighty-five miles away: the imperial family would leave Vienna at once before the dreaded akinji closed in upon the capital.
At eight o’clock that evening a cavalcade of heavy carriages set out from the Hofburg, lumbering across the moat bridge of the Schweizerhof Court to head for the road westward, towards Melk and Linz. The depa
rture of the imperial family confirmed the people of Vienna’s worst fears. Hundreds of refugees sought to accompany the Emperor and his escort, so impeding their progress that the nine-mile journey to Korneuburg took four hours. As Leopold stepped down from his carriage soon after midnight, he could look back over Vienna and see the spire of the Stephans-Dom silhouetted against a glowing eastern rim of hills fringed with fire.1
But as the invaders approached Vienna they checked their pace of advance. The best troops had already travelled more than halfway across Europe, covering almost a thousand miles since leaving their barracks beside the Bosphorus at the end of March. Now, with the wooded hills of the Wienerwald in sight, their commander anticipated a stiffening resistance. He was not to know there were serious gaps in the defences of the Antemurale Christianitatis, ‘the Front Line of Christendom’ (as a Dutch contemporary called Vienna); and he was sceptical of reports from deserters that the city was garrisoned by no more than 12,000 regular troops. Not until Tuesday, 16 July—six days after Emperor Leopold’s flight—did the Turkish vanguard reach the outer line of Vienna’s fortifications.
In 1529 Sultan Suleiman I had conducted the siege of Vienna in person, receiving on the plains beside the Danube the first check to Ottoman arms in seventeen years of war on three continents. Not that Suleiman had been defeated; he had merely failed to capture a city which seemed less naturally defensible than so many fortresses already taken along the middle Danube. But by 1683 the character of the Sultanate was different. Mehmed IV, who had been on the throne for the preceding thirty-five years, was a spendthrift hedonist, a vigorous horseman but no soldier; in Ottoman history he is labelled ‘Mehmed Avçi’ (Mehmed the Hunter) and he is remembered, in epic verse as well as in prose, for mobilizing thousands of peasants as beaters in the woods around Edirne. Eight years after his accession he had the good fortune to find a gifted family who provided him with two first-rate Grand Viziers, Mehmed Köprülü and his son, Fezil Ahmed. Their reforms and administrative efficiency brought him the full treasury into which he dipped for his hunting campaigns, but they also enabled him to raise the powerful force which set out on this second march on Vienna. Sultan Mehmed was prepared to ride as far as Belgrade with his troops. He would not, however, risk a personal rebuff. Far better to entrust so ambitious an enterprise to his close companion Kara Mustafa, who on Fazil Ahmed’s death in November 1676 had become Grand Vizier.2
No Ottoman commander possessed greater military experience. In 1672 on the river Dniester Kara Mustafa had outwitted the great Polish soldier, John Sobieski, to secure the fortress of Kamenets Podolsky for the Turks and their Tatar vassals. Two years later he had taken the town of Uman, having his Christian captives flayed and sending their stuffed hides as a gift to the Sultan. His origins remain decently obscure; he was not a Köprülü by birth, but had been educated and personally advanced as if he were Fazil Ahmed’s foster-brother; and in June 1675 he strengthened his power at court by marrying Princess Küçük, daughter of the recipient of those grisly trophies from Uman. It was rumoured that the Grand Vizier brought with him a full complement of camp followers, including 1,500 concubines and 700 black eunuchs to guard them. Many grotesque tales of his way of life rest on a basis of fact, but this legend is almost certainly apocryphal. Nevertheless, he seems to have possessed a sexual appetite difficult to satisfy and matched only by the scale of his ambition. To succeed where Suleiman failed would make him as famous a commander on land as Hayruddin ‘Barbarossa’ at sea, more than a century before.
He began by showing great efficiency. Within two days of inspecting Vienna’s outer defences he completed the investment of the city. On 14 July a bad fire wrecked many town palaces of the magnates, the smoke drifting over the Ottoman lines causing Kara Mustafa to fear that Vienna might be in ruins by the time the prize fell into his hands. Accordingly he gave orders for the construction of a huge camp beyond the fortifications and siege works, a military headquarters which would make a worthy home for the Sultan’s paladin. Within little more than a week a tented city sprang up between Vienna itself and the north-western hills of the Wienerwald. His adversaries were much impressed by this curious display of Ottoman splendour. An Italian count serving in the Habsburg army has left a description written that summer: ‘It is impossible for anyone to conceive how broad a stretch of land they covered. Centred in the middle of the camp arose the Grand Vizier’s pavilion, looking like some splendid palace surrounded by several villas, the tents being of different colours, all of which made for a richly pictorial diversity.’3 More than three centuries after the siege, Vienna still possesses a Türkenschanz Park. But it is no longer an open space. A wealth of fine trees surrounds the hillock at the centre of the old Turkish encampment. Felicitously, there is also an ‘adventure playground’ for the young.
For sixty days Kara Mustafa remained in his palatial camp, concentrating 200,000 men around the twelve bastions and defensive palisades of the city walls. The Austrian campaign confirmed not only his personal reputation for cruelty, but the widespread belief in Western Europe that the Sultan’s troops were a barbarian horde. In reality, the Ottoman regular army was no better and no worse than other campaigners. It was otherwise with their commander; Kara Mustafa, though casual in his religious observance, exhibited a fanatical hatred of Christians; he was ‘the scourge of mankind’, a Venetian envoy wrote to the Doge.4 He retained a row of severed heads to commemorate his seizure of Hainburg, a fortified village some twenty miles down the Danube; and on 16 July his troops slaughtered four thousand villagers in outlying Perchtoldsdorf. During the first week of the siege he ordered the systematic killing of prisoners, exhibiting their heads to demoralize the Austrian troops manning the defences. By late July marauding akinji horsemen, over whom Kara Mustafa had little control, were sweeping up the Danube, carrying rapine and devastation as far west as Enns. Only a few fortified abbeys, like Melk, high on a cliff face above the river, survived as Christian islands cut off by this raging floodtide of Islam.
Emperor Leopold I—by now in Passau—urgently sought aid. Subsidies from the Pope, a rush of volunteers from the young nobility in northern Italy and Franconian Germany, and the mustering of armies by the Electors of Bavaria and Saxony, held hope of relief for Vienna. There remained, too, the prospect of substantial backing from the crack Polish troops of King John Sobieski, once they could complete a long march southwards from beyond the Carpathians; Sobieski had old scores to settle with Kara Mustafa. Yet it could be argued that the chief hope for Vienna lay in the weaknesses of the Grand Vizier’s character, in the greed which made him at heart no better than a bandit chieftain. A frontal assault on the city, with walls breached and the attackers granted the traditional three days of looting, street by street, would prove less profitable for him personally than a capitulation on agreed terms; a formal surrender would allow him to secure for his own coffers the rich booty of Vienna’s remaining palaces and churches. Only in the last days of August, as John Sobieski’s advance columns reached the northern bank of the Danube, did Kara Mustafa finally give up hope of starving the city into surrender and order an all-out attack on its southern defences.
By 7 September Sobieski had made contact with the Germans under Charles, Duke of Lorraine, and a relief army of 80,000 troops was concentrated along the northern crest of the Wienerwald. On that Tuesday evening, camp fires on the Kahlenberg heights let Count Starhemberg, the commander of the Vienna garrison, know help was at hand. Kara Mustafa, too, saw the fires and, from interrogated prisoners, was well aware of the strength of the armies marching against him. Urgently he pressed the skilled Turkish lagunçi (sappers) into digging parallel trenches and tunnels to undermine Vienna’s outer defences. An exploding mine at last breached the walls on the morning of 12 September. But it was too late. The Ottoman troops could not exploit their success; from five o’clock on that Sunday morning, a fierce battle had been taking place along the wooded spur of the Kahlenberg and through the terraced vineyards of the lower s
lopes. As the light began to fail, German infantry reached the outskirts of the great Turkish camp. With the setting sun behind them, Polish cavalry bore down upon the tented city to consolidate the victory and ensure the relief of Vienna. The Grand Vizier abandoned many of his trophies, including a prize steed, richly caparisoned. As dusk fell he was seen speeding eastwards towards Györ on a lighter horse and almost unrecognizable, with his right eye bandaged.5
In 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent retired from Vienna of his own volition and in good order; in 1683 Kara Mustafa’s troops were forced to retreat, their commander fleeing defeated from the field. No one can choose a precise date and say ‘On this day the Ottoman Empire passed into decline’, but there is no doubt that the scattering of the Turkish camp outside Vienna on that September evening forms one of history’s greatest turning-points. No Ottoman army had been routed so dramatically in any earlier encounter. Yet, rather strangely, the fierce combat along the slopes of the Kahlenberg never figures in any list of ‘decisive battles of history’. No doubt the events of that Sunday seemed of little importance at first, except to Emperor Leopold; militarily they possessed no particular interest; and they did not lead to the immediate conclusion of a peace settlement. Only with the passage of time has the true significance of the battle become clear. For although there were to be many more encounters in the Danubian plain, never again did an Islamic host pit its might against the walls of Catholic Christendom.