CHAPTER XVIII.

Though the main interest of the drama ceases with the liberation of the city, the fate of a principal actor, Kara Mustapha, remains to be noticed; and some further events of the campaign will be found neither deficient in historical importance nor destitute of instruction to the soldier.

The situation of the Polish army, and the general prospect of affairs some days after the battle, can hardly be better indicated than by the following extract from Sobieski’s letter to the Queen of the 17th September. After giving a long list of the grievances and sufferings of his people, whose condition on the banks of the Danube he compares to that of the Israelites by the waters of Babylon, he proceeds:—“You will extract from this letter a gazette article, with the understanding, however, that all my topics of grievance are to be kept out of sight. We must not forget the old adage of Kochanouski, ‘the man who knows not how to conceal his disgust makes his enemy to laugh.’ Say only that the commissaries of the Emperor have deceived our army with respect to the provisions and forage which they promised us, and for which the Pope has destined considerable sums; that the bridge is not finished; that the army suffers much; that the Imperial troops are still under the walls of Vienna; that the Saxons have retired; that the King is in advance; that his light cavalry is pressing the enemy; that if it were not for the horrible devastation of the country not a Turk would have escaped; that the King is constantly sending to the Emperor to press him to enter the enemy’s territory and to invest at the least two fortresses; that Tekeli has sent emissaries to me submitting everything to my decision; and so on.”

Of the Hungarian fortresses at this time in the hands of the Turks, Neuhaüsel and Gran were the two which the Imperial commanders were most desirous to reduce. Neuhaüsel derived importance from its proximity to Presburg and Vienna, and from its situation in face of that vast Schütt island of the Danube of which the fortress of Komorn fortunately gave the Imperialists the command. Gran, often mentioned by authors by its Latin name Strigonium, was situated lower down the river on the right bank of the Danube. Its bridge, protected on the northern shore by the fortress of Barkan, gave the Turks the power of operating on both sides of the river; and a strong body of Turkish cavalry had thrown itself into the tête-du-pont, under the command of Kara Mehemet, a young Pacha, worthy, by his courage, of the charge of a post of so much military importance. Some difference of opinion seems to have arisen in the first instance between the King and the Imperial generals, the former inclining to postpone operations against Neuhaüsel and to move at once upon Gran, with the view of ulterior operations against the still more important city of Pesth, to which the Vizier had transferred his head quarters. The King, however, acquiesced in the views of the Imperialists, which were influenced by the proximity of Neuhaüsel to the capital; but the decision of both was overruled by events. In any case it became necessary to throw a bridge over the river in the neighbourhood of Komorn, and the King complains in his letters of the delay in this operation. He was anxious to cross the river, both for the purpose of further encounter with the enemy and from the exhausted state of the country on the left bank. The passage of the river was effected on the 4th or 5th October. The troops, during their occupation of the rich island of the Schütt, had been better supplied with forage and provisions, but had suffered dreadfully from the various forms of contagious and deadly disease for which the autumnal climate of Hungary is notorious. Sobieski remarks that the Germans, generally more delicate than the Poles, suffered less by the prevalent fever which decimated officers and men in his own army. He describes his own people as dissatisfied with the rich wines of Hungary, and pining for their beer and smoky cottages. Drunkenness, it would appear, was a preservative against the prevalent fever, and possibly the Poles were less addicted than the Germans to this prophylactic. Many Polish officers of distinction were swept off.

The Turks, meanwhile, were little in condition to take advantage of Austrian delays, or Polish sickness, for the purpose of stemming the tide of victory and pursuit. Detractors from the reputation of Sobieski have not been wanting to censure the laxity of the pursuit, and to ascribe it to the attractions of the Vizier’s tents. That he was fond of money his admirers have not denied. His apologists have alleged in his defence, on this head, the temptation to which the holder of a life interest in a crown is exposed to accumulate wealth for those descendants who on his decease may sink into a private station. Perhaps a law of celibacy would be no unreasonable condition of elective sovereignty. No female reader of his letters will, however, blame the complacency with which he describes the treasures destined for the boudoir of the wife whom he styles “his incomparable,” but who appears, by her taste for dress and intrigue, to have been very comparable indeed to many of her countrywomen. It is unnecessary to detail the many circumstances which must have made an active and immediate pursuit of the flying foe a military impossibility. It is sufficient to point to the forest defiles through which the allied force had toiled for three weary days from the Danube to the heights of the Kahlenberg, during which time the horses had fed on nothing but the leaves of the trees which impeded their progress. The Vizier’s first halt was under the walls of Raab; his first reassertion of his authority, which, in the confusion of defeat and flight, had been in abeyance, was to select a man he hated as an expiatory victim. The veteran Pacha of Pesth, whose original counsels, if followed, would have probably led to less fatal results, was ready to his hand. This old and distinguished man, with two other Pachas and the Aga of the Janissaries, were beheaded on a charge of cowardice, and some fifty other officers of less note strangled. After a halt of three days, employed in such proceedings as these, and in rallying and collecting the troops, he pursued his march towards Pesth, not unmolested by the garrison of Raab, but throwing reinforcements into Neuhaüsel and Gran as he passed.

The Polish army had, as has been stated, crossed the Danube near Komorn on the 4th and 5th, and the Imperial cavalry had followed; but the mass of the infantry was still behind. The King took the advance with a small body of his own cavalry, in the hopes of an easy conquest of the Turks, whom he knew to have hastily occupied the _tête-du-pont_ of Barkan. Forgetting, in his contempt for a beaten enemy, and in his anxiety to seize the Turkish bridge of boats near Barkan, the first rules of military science, and pressing forward without support or reserve, and without due security for co-operation from the more cautious Lorraine, he sacrificed some of his best troops, and narrowly escaped, in his own person and that of his son, the last penalty a soldier can pay for imprudence. The affair began with the advanced guard, which, according to the King’s rather exculpatory but graphic report to his wife, committed itself prematurely, and contrary to his orders, in a skirmish with the Turks near Barkan. Some accounts state that the latter were crafty enough to lure them on, by causing a herd of oxen to retire slowly before them. The Palatine of Russia, proceeding to the front, found it necessary to send in all haste for assistance, and the King in person brought up to the rescue his whole disposable force, making his numbers in the field some 5000 men, without infantry or artillery. He would have done more wisely to have left his advanced guard to their fate. He found it routed and disorganized, and himself with his small force, not yet deployed, within some hundred paces of an enemy flushed with success, and immensely superior in numbers. The Palatine of Russia, who saw the danger, implored him to leave the field. He replied to this invitation by charging at the head of his best available squadron. The charge succeeded, but at the same moment the centre and left wing, though not yet engaged with the enemy, gave way, and the conflict degenerated into a race for life and death. The young Prince, who in this affair, as in the battle of Vienna, had followed his father like his shadow, received from him a positive command to fly. The King himself lingered till every effort he could make to rally his people had utterly failed, and he was left with six companions. To two of these, Czerkass, a Lithuanian gentleman, and a nameless soldier of heavy cavalry, he himself mainly attributed his salvation. The latter, who shot down with his carbine one of two horsemen who had come up with the King, and wounded the other, perished; the former lived to enjoy a pension of 500 crowns paid to him by the Queen on every anniversary of this disastrous skirmish. For some two miles and more the furious race continued: the Palatine of Pomerelia fell, horse and man, and was cut to pieces. The ground was heavy, and intersected with deep furrows: the King, though not so inactive as the French ambassador had described him, was both tall and corpulent; and when at length he pulled up and rallied his people on the cavalry and guns of the German troops, which at the instance of the Austrian General Dunnewald, attached in this affair to the staff of the King, were coming up to his support, breathless, and covered with bruises from rough contact with the companions of his flight, he lay for a while exhausted on a heap of straw. The Abbé Coyer has a story of the King’s witnessing the escape of his son, as he left his cloak in the hand of a Turkish horseman. The King expressly states that Fanfan, as he always calls his son, was _bien en avant_ with the grand _écuyer_ Mateinski, to whom the Abbé and others also have attributed the preservation of the King. Most of the King’s personal attendants, pages, &c., perished; he mentions a negro boy, a young Hungarian, master of several languages, but dwells with most interest on the fate of a little Calmuck, a famous rider in the King’s hare-coursing pastimes.[20] In spite of his horsemanship he was captured, but by some strange accident spared by the Turks. After their subsequent defeat he was found in their camp and recognised by the Poles, but an unlucky German cut him down. There are many instances in which the greatest commanders have had to ride for their lives. In our own times the list would comprise names no less than those of Napoleon, Murat, and Blücher; but the Cossack hourra of Brenne, and the skirmish near Leipzick, were accidents of warfare which no prudence could avert, and the gallant charge of Ligny few would be found to censure. The race of Barkan is historically valuable for the lesson it conveys of caution in the hour of success. An adherence to the simplest rules of military science would have saved two thousand lives. Sobieski’s character shines out conspicuously in the manner in which he took this severe check. Like the old Prussian of 1815, though bruised and stiffened, and scarcely able to sit his horse, he was up and ready on the following day, pressing the Duke of Lorraine to move against the Turks. In his religious convictions he was earnest, perhaps to the verge of bigotry, and in his letters to his wife in tracing the disaster to the judgment of Providence on the licence and crimes of the army, he passes over rather lightly the share which his own incaution had in producing it.

It required all the magic of Sobieski’s influence to repair the moral consequences of this discomfiture in his own ranks, in which at first an ominous inclination displayed itself to concede the post of honour, the right of the line, to the German troops. We can hardly believe, on the sole authority of Rycaut, that the King himself was disposed to yield to this suggestion. His letter, written on the field, breathes nothing but an impatience for the arrival of the imperial infantry. Lorraine, on his part, seems to have needed no pressing, and it was determined to attack the enemy on the 9th. The young Pacha, who had struck so serious a blow at the veteran conqueror of Choczim and Vienna, now himself fell into the error of abiding the chances of unequal battle; for though he had been strongly reinforced from Gran, he had but 25,000 men to oppose to some 50,000. Tekeli, too wise to believe the Vizier’s message announcing the total destruction of the Christian army, and engaged in tortuous negotiations with Sobieski, was hovering almost within sight, but kept aloof from action. The Pacha fell into the still graver error of meeting the enemy with a chain of hills on his right, the river of Gran in his rear, and no retreat but by the bridge over the Danube. The consequence of this arrangement was a defeat, rendered bloody and complete by the failure of the bridge, which gave way under the fugitives. Barkan itself was carried by storm. Kara Mohammed himself escaped, but the Pacha of Karamania was killed, and the Pacha of Silistria taken. The amount of the Turkish loss is variously stated. The Poles, eager for vengeance, and excited by the sight of the heads of their countrymen stuck on the palisades of the fort, gave little quarter, and artillery was brought to bear upon the crowds who attempted to swim the river. This success was purchased at the loss of 400 Poles and 70 of the imperial troops. Sobieski, in the moment of victory, writes of it as a victory greater than that of Vienna—an exaggeration only to be excused by the excitement of the moment. Its importance, however, was manifested by the speedy fall of Gran, the seat of the Hungarian primacy, containing the tomb of Stephen, the first Christian King of Hungary, but which from the year 1605 had been desecrated by Turkish occupation. The Turkish bridge having been demolished during the battle, the Imperialists brought down their own bridge of boats from Komorn, which was ready for the passage of the troops a league above the city on the 13th. The town was carried by storm. The garrison, some 4000 strong, which had retired into the citadel, surrendered on the 27th, on condition of their safe conveyance to Buda, with their women and children, and retaining their small arms. The Vizier, on receiving at Buda intelligence of the fall of Gran, departed in haste for Belgrade, but left with Kara Mehemet an order for the execution of the officers who had signed the surrender. His own bloody rule was meanwhile drawing to a close. His first reports and excuses for his failure before Vienna had been received at the court of Adrianople with simulated favour, and his messenger had returned with the usual tokens of royal approbation, a sword and a pelisse. Influence, however, both male and female, was busy for his destruction; the friends of the murdered Pacha of Pesth, and all those who had originally opposed the expedition, were powerful and zealous. Tekeli, and the dying Sultana mother, Validè, threw their influence into the scale. At length the vacillation of the Sultan was overcome, and a chamberlain of the court rode out from Adrianople with the simple order to return as soon as might be with the head of Kara Mustapha. The officer, on approaching Belgrade, communicated his mission to the Aga of the Janissaries, who gave his prompt acquiescence and ready assistance to the objects of the mission. The transaction was conducted, on the part of the servants of the crown, with that decent privacy and convenient expedition which usually attend the execution of Turkish justice, and submitted to by the patient with the quiet dignity with which the predestinarian doctrine of Islam arms its votaries against all accidents. The insignia of authority were politely demanded and quietly resigned. The carpet was spread, the short prayer uttered, the bowstring adjusted. In a few moments the late dispenser of life and death, the uncontrolled commander of 200,000 men, was a corpse, and his head on the road to Adrianople. It met with some subsequent adventures; for, having been returned to Belgrade by the Sultan, and deposited in a mosque, it was discovered after the surrender of that city to the Christians, and forwarded by them to the Bishop Kollonitsch. The prelate made over the grisly memorial of the man, who had threatened to send his own head on a lance’s point to the Sultan, to the arsenal of Vienna, where it still keeps its place among the other trophies of a long struggle of race and religion.

With the catastrophe of so leading a personage this work may properly reach the termination which its limits now demand. For the winter march by which Sobieski withdrew his forces to his own frontier, and the fortresses which he picked up by the way, his negotiations with Tekeli, and his passing successes over the Turks, the reader who wishes to pursue the subject will do well to consult his correspondence so often quoted, and the ample work of M. de Salvandy. From the above pages, concerned as they have been with a principal passage in the public career of one of the greatest characters in modern history, some faint idea may be derived of his qualities as a soldier. As a king, a statesman, an orator, and a man of letters, he must be estimated from other and fuller sources. After learning what he was in all these respects, we shall be prone to conjecture what he might have been. As a husband and a father, if he had not married a bad and mischievous woman, _daturam progeniem vitiosiorem_—as a commander, if, instead of leading ill-disciplined levies to transient victories by the example and personal exposure of a partisan, he had brandished the staff of a Marlborough or an Eugene at the head of a permanent and organized force—as a king and a statesman, if his better fortune had placed him at the head, not of a horde of turbulent, intriguing, and ungovernable slave-owners, but of a civilized, free, and united people—it is scarcely too much to suppose that he might have realized the greater projects which it is known entered into his large conception, that the Turk would have been rolled back upon Asia, and that Greece might have dated her emancipation from the seventeenth century.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] In the intervals of war and business the King had always been devoted to the chase. One of his objects of pursuit was the aurochs, now confined to a single forest of Lithuania, where alone it continues its species under imperial protection. One of the most eminent of living geologists, Sir R. I. Murchison, has broached a theory, founded at least on a profound investigation of the features of the district, that the species is a sole survivor of one of those great geological changes which have obliterated other forms of animal life. Sobieski’s Queen wore a girdle of the skin of this animal. Down to a recent period it was an object of royal chase in Poland. Sir C. Hanbury Williams, in a letter from Brodi, describes a royal battue in which many of them were surrounded and driven over a steep bank into the river.

APPENDIX.

No. 1.

The number of pieces of artillery furnished from the imperial arsenal of Vienna for the defence in 1683 was 262. The thirty years’ war had led to many improvements in the construction and use of artillery. Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein had both effected important alterations, and in 1650 a Jesuit of Warsaw had invented the elevating screw as a substitute for the quoin. Whatever improvement, however, had taken place in the system as applied to field movements, it would appear that for purposes of stationary defence it was still one of much complexity and confusion. The 262 pieces used at Vienna were of no less than 26 denominations and calibres, the capacity of the latter ranging from 1 lb. to 48, and in the case of some large pieces called böller or pöller, used as mortars for vertical fire and discharging stone shot, from 60 to 200 lbs. There were of these four of 200, two of 150, five of 100, and ten of 60. Fifty other pieces furnished from the city arsenal were planted, not on the defences, but at various points in the city, and worked by 100 men of the burgher force. Of these hundred volunteer artillerists 16 were killed and 5 of the pieces ruined: 72 pieces in all had been rendered unserviceable at the close of the siege.

Thirty-seven officers were killed, which, considering the frequency of assaults and sallies, operations which require great personal exposure on the part of the leaders, would appear rather a small proportion to that of 5000 rank and file among the regular troops. The loss in action among the citizens is scarcely possible to arrive at. The only two officers of much distinction who fell were the Col. Count Dupigny and the engineer, Rimpler.

The Turkish loss is stated at 48,544. It appears to have fallen heaviest on the miners, of whom 16,000 perished, and 6000 of their artillerists. The formidable corps of the Janissaries was reduced by a loss of 10,000: 544 officers, including 3 pachas, were also killed. As this list is taken from a return found in the tent of the Vizier, it does not include the loss of the Turks in the battle. These statements are naturally liable to much allowance for inaccuracy from many causes. A comparison of the various sources of information leads to a rough conclusion that the Vizier sat down before the place with about 220,000 men. Of these it is supposed not more than 50,000 regained the Turkish frontier.

No. 2.—_Order of battle of the Christian army before Vienna on the 13th September._

The left wing was commanded by the Duke of Lorraine; the centre by the Elector of Saxony and the Prince Christian Louis von Waldeck (it is idle to adjoin to these the Bavarian Elector, who was present, but had the good sense to consign the direction of his troops to Waldeck); the right wing by the Polish Field-Marshal Jablonowski; the whole by the King of Poland. The army was drawn up in three lines.

FIRST LINE.

_Right wing._—19 divisions and 4 battalions of Poles; 8560 cavalry, 3120 infantry.

_Centre._—9 divisions, Austrians; 7 divisions, Bavarians; 4 divisions, troops of the Circles; 5 battalions, Bavarians; 3 battalions, Circles; 5 battalions, Saxons; 5768 cavalry, 8600 infantry: commanders, the Elector of Saxony and the Prince of Waldeck.

_Left wing._—10 divisions, Austrians; 5 divisions, Saxons; 6 battalions, Austrians; 5660 cavalry, 4242 infantry; commanded by the Duke of Baden.

Total of first line, 19,788 cavalry, 15,962 infantry.

SECOND LINE.

_Right wing._—6 divisions, Poles; 8 divisions, Austrians; 4 battalions, Poles; 5568 cavalry, 3120 infantry: commanders, Generals Siniousky and Rabatta.

_Centre._—5 divisions, Bavarians; 3 divisions, Circles; 4 battalions, Bavarians; 5 battalions, Circles; 3 battalions, Saxons; 6 battalions, Austrians; 1725 cavalry, 11,442 infantry: commanders, Field-Marshal Golz and Field-Marshal the Prince of Baireuth.

_Left wing._—4 divisions, Saxons; 8 divisions, Austrians; 4528 cavalry: commanders, Field-Marshal Leslie and Prince Lubomirski.

Total of second line, 11,819 cavalry, 12,562 infantry.

THIRD LINE OR RESERVE.

_Right wing._—9 divisions, Poles; 6 divisions, Austrians; 3 divisions, Bavarians; 3 battalions, Poles; 1 battalion, Bavarians; 6855 cavalry, 2940 infantry: commanders, great standard-bearer Lesno Lescynski and Field-Marshal Dunnewald.

_Centre._—3 battalions, Bavarians; 2 battalions, Saxons; 2 battalions, Austrians; 4014 infantry: commander, Field-Marshal Leika.

_Left wing._—3 divisions, Saxons; 7 divisions, Austrians; 3762 cavalry: commander, Field-Marshal Margrave Louis of Baden.

Total of third line, 10,617 cavalry, 6954 infantry.

Total force in the battle—

Cavalry 42,224 Infantry 35,478 —————— 77,702

Total of the army, including detachments—

Cavalry, 127 divisions 46,100 Infantry, 57 battalions 38,700 —————— 84,800

Artillery, 168 pieces, of all calibres, of which the Austrians counted 70, the Saxons 30, the Bavarians 26, the Franconians 12, and the Poles, 30. It is impossible, considering the difficulties of the march from Tuln, that all these pieces should have been brought into action: they were distributed along all parts of the line of battle.

To the above may be added Croats and other irregulars, and volunteers about 10,000. This detail of the force is extracted from the Military Conversations Lexicon, art. ‘Wien.’

No. 3.—_Anecdotes of the Siege, from a Tract by the Advocate Christian W. Huhn, an eye-witness._

In the night of August 2nd some troopers of Dupigny’s regiment with divers foot soldiers of the garrison, made a sally by the covered way at the Scottish gate, and returned with forty-seven head of oxen and a captured Turk. The cattle were allotted partly to the wounded and sick soldiers, and partly to the captors, who made their gain from them, inasmuch as meat, which when the siege began had fetched one grosch the lb., rose afterwards to nine and more, and a fresh egg did not wait for a customer at half a dollar. Whosoever also fancied Italian cookery might purchase of one of the women who sat in the high market a roof hare (cat), roast and larded, for one florin, to be washed down with a cup of muscat wine at the Italian vintners; and truth to say, this animal, when the sweetness of the flesh was tempered with the salted lard, was an unusual, indeed, but not an unacceptable morsel. The 9th August was a fine clear day, on which a young and spirited Turk chose to disport himself for bravado on a caparisoned horse, performing strange antics with a lance in his right hand. While he was caracoling at a distance of full 300 paces from the counterscarp, Henry Count von Kielmansegge, who happened to be with his foresters on the Kärnthner bastion, took such good aim at him with a fowling-piece that he jumped up with a spring from the saddle and fell dead amid shouts and laughter from the besieged. A lucky shot of the same kind was executed by a student of the university, who sent a bullet through the head of a Turk near the counterscarp palisade, and dragged the body to him with a halberd. Having learned from experience of others that the Turks, _either to strengthen the stomach_, or when mortally wounded, to rob the Christians of their booty, were accustomed to roll up their ducats together and swallow them, without further ceremony he ripped up the corpse and found six ducats so rolled up within it. The head he cut off and bore it round the city upon a lance-point as a spectacle of his ovation. In the assault of the 17th August a common soldier, having mastered and beheaded a Turk, and finding 100 ducats upon him sewed up in a dirty cloth, as one who had never seen so much money together before, went about the city like one distracted, clapping his hands and showing his booty to all he met, encouraging them by his example to win the like, as though it rained money from Heaven.

On the 13th September, the day following the relief of the city, the Poles being masters of the Turkish camp, many soldiers, citizens, and inhabitants, while as yet no gate was opened, clambered down over the breaches and by the secret sallyports to pick up what they might of provisions, ammunition, or other articles of small value. The King of Poland and his people having fallen on the military chest and the Vizier’s tent, had carried off many millions in money, and the Vizier’s war-horse, his quivers, bows, and arrows, all of countless value, together with the great standard of their Prophet, inscribed with Turkish characters, and two horsetail standards. I, with many others who had been enrolled in a volunteer body during the siege, thought to pick up our share of the spoil. I, therefore, gained the counterscarp by the Stuben gate, passing between the ruined palisades on horseback to the Turkish camp. I did not, however, dare to dismount, by reason of the innumerable quantity of flies and vermin, which, although at so advanced a time of the month of September, swarmed up from the bodies of more than 20,000 dead horses and mules, so as to darken the air, and so covering my horse, that not the space of a needle point remained free from them, the which was so insufferable to him, that he began to plunge and kick in front and rear, so that I was fain to get me clear of the press and make my way back to the city, but not till I had persuaded a passer-by to reach to me the bow and arrows of one who lay there, and also the cap of a Janissary, and some books which lay about, and which had been plundered in the country, and secured them in my saddle-bags. After the which I re-entered the city, not as one _ovans_ on foot, but _triumphans_ on horseback with my _spolia_. I had no want of predecessors before or followers behind, for every one who had legs to carry him had betaken himself to the camp to plunder it. Although I had gained the counterscarp and the inner defences, I passed a good hour making my way through the pass, and my unruly horse was compelled to move step by step for such time before I could extricate him and regain my quarters.

No. 4.—_Specification of the Christians carried off into Turkish slavery out of Hungary, Austria, and the adjacent districts in 1683. From a contemporary MS._

Old men 6,000 Women 11,215 Unmarried women, 26 years of age at the oldest, of whom 204 were noble 14,922 Children, boys and girls, the oldest between 4 and 5 years of age 26,093 —————— Total 57,220

Villages and hamlets burnt in the Viennese territory 4,092 In that of Presburg 871 ————- 4,963

THE END.

London: Printed by WILLIAM CLOWES and SONS, Stamford-street.

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Transcriber's Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.

March field and Marchfield has been standardised on March field.

Komorn and Comorn has been standardised on Komorn.

The following changes have been made: