Download PDF | Vienna 1683: Christian Europe Repels the Ottomans, By Simon Millar (Author), Peter Dennis (Illustrator), Osprey , 2008.
51 Pages
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR
SIMON MILLAR is a serving army officer with a keen interest in military history. He has a particular interest in the British Army in India and the Napoleonic Wars. He is married and lives in Wiltshire.
PETER DENNIS was born in 1950. Inspired by contemporary magazines such as Look and Learn he studied illustration at Liverpool Art College. Peter has since contributed to hundreds of books, predominantly on historical subjects. He is a keen wargamer and modeimaker. He is based in Nottinghamshire, UK.
INTRODUCTION
In the late summer of 1682, the Ottoman sultan Mehmed IV decided to undertake a direct assault on Vienna, the capital of his great rival for European power, the Holy Roman Empire. The city had witnessed the army of the Ottoman host before: 154 years previously, the great sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, with a host of 120,000 Janissaries, sipahi, Arab auxiliaries and camp followers, had marched through the mountains of Macedonia and Serbia on their way to besiege the city. In the spring of 1683, the magnificently coloured host returned to the city’s gates, intent on forcing Islam on Christian Europe.
THE CRESCENT RISING
From the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the accession of Sultan Mehmed Il, the Ottomans had been in continuous conflict with the Christian powers of Europe, for the most part with stunningly successful results. They had continued to spread the influence of Islam into the Balkans and around the Mediterranean Sea; Serbia (1459), Bosnia (1463), Moldavia (1504), Syria (1546), Egypt (1517), Cyrenaica (1521), Rhodes (1522), Hungary (1541), Transylvania (1541), Tripoli (1551), Cyprus (1571) and Tunisia (1574) had all succumbed to the might of Ottoman foreign policy. Successes had been few and far between for the Christian states of Europe; Malta (1565), Lepanto (1571) and the first Siege of Vienna (1529) were the few notable moments when Ottoman aggrandizement had been stopped in its tracks.
The first 50 years of the 17th century in Europe were dominated by the Thirty Years War (1618-48) and the western European powers were fortunate that at this time the quality of Ottoman leadership started to decline. In 1603, Sultan Mehmed I! died and his 14-year-old son Ahmed succeeded him, Ahmed I proved to be a less than inspiring leader, and, if it had not been for the election of the pro-Ottoman Stefan Bocksai as the prince of Transylvania in 1601, it is doubtful if the Ottomans would have had their final fanfare of successes in 1605 when the fortresses of Veszprém, Visegrad and Gran were retaken.
The Austrians and the Ottomans were exhausted after 13 years of war, and in 1606 the Peace of Zsitva-Torok was signed. Ahmed died in 1617 aged only 28, and, as his son Osman was a minoz, his brother Mustafa succeeded him. Mustafa showed himself to be completely inept as a ruler, and in 1618 Osman followed in his father’s footsteps and ascended to the throne aged only 14. The young sultan became Osman II, and within two years was at war with Poland. As so often in Ottoman wars with the European powers, it was a Christian vassal of the Sultan who was the catalyst for the conflict. On this occasion in 1620 it was the Protestant Prince of Transylvania, Bethlen Gabor.
In 1618, Gabor had sided with the cause of the rebellion in Bohemia that was to escalate into the Thirty Years War. Part of his campaign was to besiege Vienna, which obligated Sigismund III of Poland to come to the aid of his brother-in-law, the emperor. The Polish king was thwarted by the Polish diet (parliament), who refused to allow the use of Polish troops. In order to honour an agreement with the emperor signed in 1613, Sigismund was forced to hire, out of his own purse, mercenaries, who went on to defeat Gabor in 1619.
An opportunity for revenge came in 1620, when Osman II, with the desire to emulate Suleiman the Magnificent, went to war with Poland. Gabor, smarting from his defeat at Vienna in 1619, had been conspiring with the sultan for revenge, and their gaze rested on Gratiani, the ruler of Moldavia, who was friendly towards Poland. Osman wore his ancestor’s magnificent armour and at the head of the Ottoman army invaded Moldavia, who appealed to Poland for help. With Gratiani promising 25,000 troops, a Polish army of 8,000 under Hetman (commander) Zolkiewski marched into Moldavia; a mere 600 Moldavians rallied to the Polish banners. The Poles were heavily outnumbered, and, having withstood 11 days of attacks at his camp at Cecora on the Prut river from the Ottoman army under Iskander Pasha, Zolkiewski ordered a retreat. The Poles carried out one of the most difficult military operations, a withdrawal in contact. After eight days of continuous attacks, discipline in the Polish army broke down and disaster ensued. The Ottomans decisively defeated Zolkiewski, whose head was sent to Sultan Osman If as a trophy.
It took a military disaster for the Polish politicians to do what they should have done in the first place. With the people of Poland wanting revenge, the Diet agreed to the provision of an army of 40,000 to avenge the defeat. In 1621 the army of Cossacks and Poles was concentrated near Lvov and under the command of the Hetman Chodkiewicz marched into the Ukraine. On hearing from his spies that a huge Ottoman army was on its way to intercept him, Chodkiewicz ordered his army to fortify their
encampment and await the Ottoman host. The Ottoman arnny, three times the size of the Poles and under the personal command of Sultan Osman II, surrounded the Polish camp at Chocim on the River Dniester. The siege of the Polish camp lasted for five weeks, and with no progress made a negotiated settlement was reached, with the Poles promising to contain Cossack raids and the Ottomans those of the Tatars. Whilst the Poles were satisfied with the victory and returned to Poland, the return of Osman to Istanbul was ignominious. The Janissaries — the power behind the Ottoman throne — deposed Osman as sultan in May 1622 and had him strangled shortly afterwards. The weak and inept ex-sultan Mustafa was returned to the throne. It did not take long for the Janissaries to regret this move, and once again he was replaced, this time by the 12-year-old Murad. The first years of Murad IV’s reign saw conflict with Persia, which lasted until 1639 and hindered any Ottoman attempt to take advantage of the unrest in Europe resulting from the Thirty Years War. In 1640, whilst firmly in control of his empire and with a victorious war with Persia behind him, Murad died. His successor was his brother Ibrahim, who once again, let Ottoman eyes rest on Europe.
The raiding activities of the Knights of Malta proved to be the catalyst. Whilst the sea-power Venice did not approve of such behaviour by the Knights, it could not close its ports to them, parucularly those on Crete. In 1644 a squadron of the Knights of Malta encountered an Ottoman convoy, captured it and headed to Crete. Over the winter of 1644/45 the Ottomans prepared for war and in 1645 invaded Crete, taking the town of Canea. The war was to last 24 years, with the Ottomans at first in the ascendancy. In 1647, however, Ibrahim was deposed in favour of his seven-year-old son Mehmed IV. The administration of the empire during his minority was inefficient and constant struggles for power at court led to an ineffective prosecution of the war with Venice, but it was not abandoned.
The Grand Vizier Mehmed Koprulu came to prominence as a result of the Venetian campaign of 1654-56, which culminated in a sea battle in the Dardanelles, hailed as a second Lepanto by Venice. The young sultan had political power removed from him and placed in the hands of the highly capable Grand Vizier. From this time and until his death in 1661, Mehmed Koprulu took firm control and steadied the ship of state. He led successful campaigns against Venice and defeated the attempt of Prince Gyorgy Rakoczi to liberate Transylvania from Ottoman rule. He was succeeded as Grand Vizier by his son Ahmed, who promptly launched a war against Hungary in 1663. The initial campaign was a success, but when the Ottoman army returned the following year they found a much-improved Imperial army under the command of the brilliant Italian general Raimondo Montecuccoli.
The Ottoman army was before Komarom and, whilst negotiations took place for a treaty, Ahmed decided to force the issue and advanced up the left bank of the River Raba and encountered the Imperial army at St Gotthard. Ahmed made the mistake of attacking before he had brought all his force across the river, and received a crushing defeat at the Battle of St Gotthard (1 August). The resulting peace treaty of Vasvar was to last for 20 years, until 1683. After the reverse, Ottoman attention was focused on acquiring Crete and helping the Cossacks in the Ukraine achieve independence from Poland and Russia. Crete was captured in 1669 when, after the surrender of Candia, the Venetians abandoned the island. The campaigns to help the Ukrainian Cossacks in 1672-73 were to be Mehmed Koprulu’s final successes. After initial successes in capturing the fortress of Kamanice Podolski and advancing as far as Lvov, the Ottoman army was defeated at the second battle of Chocim in 1673, by an army led by John III Sobieski. The subsequent Treaty of Zuravno in 1676, saw most of the Ukraine pass into Ottoman hands; two weeks later, Koprulu died. His successor, Kara Mustafa, had Imperial Austria in his sights
THE THREAT FROM THE WEST
Throughout the 17th century Imperial Austria had to deal with political and military threats on her western and eastern borders. While the Ottoman Empire troubled the east, in the west it was the fleur-de-lis of France that cast a shadow. In 1556, following the abdication of Charles V, the Habsburg lands had been divided into two distinct branches. As a result the Spanish Habsburgs became the greatest threat to France; with their lands now including the Netherlands, Franche-Comté and Lombardy, France felt restricted. The entry of France into the Thirty Years War in 1635 was the start of its rise to hegemony. Imperial Austria was the first to suffer. The semiindependent Imperial fiefdom of Lorraine was occupied, as were numerous strategically important gateways, including the fortress of Breisach, which gave access into the Reich.
The Austrian withdrawal from the Thirty Years War and the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 did not make Austrian diplomacy any easier in the west. The borders of France had moved 100 miles farther east, and she had gained the Lorraine bishoprics, Metz, Toul and Verdun. The French push towards the Rhine, under some rather dubious legal claim, continued with the acquisition of Alsace and the fortress of Breisach, and was a scrious threat to the Imperial position in southern Germany. The Franco-Spanish conflicts continued until the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, by which France gained Roussillon, Cerdagne and large chunks of the Spanish Netherlands.
In 1661, on the death of the powerful Cardinal Mazarin, Louis XIV came of age and began to direct French foreign policy. The War of Devolution (1667-68), with Louis at the head of the French army and aided by Condé, was an outstanding success. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle rewarded France with portions of the Spanish Netherlands, including the fortress cities of Charleroi, Tournai, Courtrai, Ath, Douai and, most important of all, Lille.
The Dutch War (1672-78) was born out of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, where Louis felt he had fallen short of dictating the settlement in the Spanish Netherlands. Louis wanted to punish the Dutch for not giving him a free hand against the Spanish, and, after declaring war, the French armies led by Condé and Turenne marched north through Ligge mto the United Provinces, whilst an army under Luxembourg was on the Rhine. French successes on land and sea ended with the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1679. The French gained Franche-Comté, Freiburg and most importantly they continued to occupy Lorraine, The Sun King was rising over the Imperial lands in the west.
A TIME OF JIHAD
On 6 August 1682, in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, Sultan Mchmed IV called a meeting with the highest officers of his government. Among those summoned to his presence was the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa; this was to be his moment of triumph, for at long last the sultan and his ministers had agreed to his proposal to disregard the existing peace treaty (not due to expire until 1684) with Leopold I, the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, and mount 4 military campaign the following year with the full military might of the Ottoman empire.
Meanwhile, on 11 August in his royal hunting lodge at Laxenburg near Vienna, Leopold I met with his counsellors to discuss the proposal to either continue the peace or go to war with the Ottomans. Leopold’s task was complicated by the threat posed by France and the long-standing westward orientation of Austrian policy. The peace treaties signed in Nijmegen in 1678 and 1679 may have brought the Dutch Wars to a close, but Louis XIV’s vigorous foreign and military policies meant that Austria had far more to fear from her western borders than from her southern ones with the Ottoman Empire. Leopold’s counsellors were of the opinion that further concessions to France would damage Habsburg power and reputation, which would necd to be upheld if they were to thwart Louis’s claim to succeed the childless Charles I of Spain when he died and claim the crown for Austria.
There was also the growing threat from Imre Thékdly’s rebellion in Austrian-controlled Christian Hungary; in 1681 it had received a boost when the Pasha of Buda sent some of the sultan’s troops to support the rebellion, and their assistance helped bring about the fall of numerous Habsburg fortresses in Slovakia. In early 1682 further troops were sent to reinforce the rebellion, this time drawn from Ottoman garrisons in Serbia and Bosnia. Although Leopold and his counsellors were not aware of this at the time, at the meeting in the Topkapi Palace on 6 August 1682, Mehmed, urged on by Kara Mustafa, went a stage further and recognized Thokdly as ‘king’ — but only of a united Hungary under Ottoman domination. .
To compound the Austrian dilemma, Leopold’s counsellors had ignored the dispatches of the Austrian envoys to the Ottoman court, George Kuniz and Albert Caprara, which were particularly startling in their pessimistic assessment of the chances of renewing the peace treaty. With the Ottomans determined on war at the earliest date possible, the stage was set for the Ottoman host to invest Vienna within 12 months.
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