The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (9 page)

At this date, around 1680, a sense of acute crisis troubled not only the Emperor’s advisers but all the peoples of central Europe. There were the premonitory rumblings from Istanbul, added to news of a deadlock in Hungary. Louis XIV was at the height of his tremendous powers. Much worse, in the thought of ordinary men, was the fearful progress of a greater enemy, bubonic plague. It carried off thousands in the Danubian lands in 1679–80, especially in the whole area of the Wiener Wald, drove Leopold out of Vienna, ravaged Saxony, and provoked the authorities in Venice to the strictest enforcement of their meticulous quarantine regulations. Its effects, however serious, were exaggerated and popular fears redoubled. Widespread agrarian riots broke out
in Bohemia, followed by severe repression. A comet appeared in one year and then returned, shining even more brightly in the next. The preachers promptly took their cue, lashed out at every manifestation of human iniquity, and brought the divine wrath heavily home to the people.
¹¹

Father Marco d’Aviano, an Italian mission preacher calling to repentance, did not stint his zeal at this gloomy moment.
¹²
For some time previously his reputation had attracted attention north of the Alps. Charles of Lorraine’s court at Innsbruck wished to invite him, but Pope Innocent at first refused permission. Then the Wittelsbach court in Munich, Philip William at Neuburg, and finally Leopold, joined the chorus. In 1680, Innocent gave way. The long and consistently astonishing episode of Marco’s influence in Germany and Austria began. In September he reached Linz, where the panic-stricken Habsburg government had taken refuge. Leopold was deeply impressed by the personality of his visitor; then Marco set out for Neuburg, Bamberg and Würzburg, before returning to Italy. Everywhere he left behind him an extraordinary name for sanctity and miracle-working, both in the courts and among the crowds. Philip William, for one, linked bodily health with the health of the soul: he had been sick, he gave the credit for his convalescence to the Capuchin. At Innsbruck they were interested in Marco partly because of Lorraine’s frailty; the Habsburg family chose to regard a turn for the better in his condition as one of the saintly works of Marco. In 1681 the friar attempted a mission to France, but Louis had him unceremoniously expelled from the country, which simply added to his prestige east of the Rhine. In 1682 he came to Vienna and was blessed for Lorraine’s recovery from a second bout of illness. But more important, in the highest court circles the attitude of Pope Innocent XI towards Islam was then, and henceforward, to be strongly defended by this remarkable man, whose correspondence with the Emperor for a period of nearly twenty years (until 1699) is one of the most curious memorials of the age.
¹³
It testifies as much to the piety of the layman as of the priest; and the priest assured the Emperor, insistently, by letter or in the course of occasional confidential interviews, that the overcoming of the Turk was necessary, possible, and the vocation of God’s servant Leopold. Buonvisi had found an ally.

II

The scene of a Habsburg ruler’s daily life in Vienna had altered comparatively little in the last fifty years. His palace, the Hofburg, occupied a large area within the wall and ramparts of the southern side of the city. If Leopold stepped out of the main doorway he saw the courtyard so beautifully depicted by a Dutch painter in 1652.
*
Opposite was the ‘new’ Burg (which is almost
unchanged to this day), with a massive front and a steep roof, surmounted by a cupola with a broad clock-face. To his left ran a more modern range of apartments, the so-called Leopold Wing. On his right some of the principal government offices were housed, including the Imperial Chancery and the Treasury, and probably the Emperor’s library. These buildings had been extensively remodelled between 1560 and 1570; they were then barely touched until the eighteenth century. The Burg itself enclosed a more ancient quadrangle. Over three of the four corners, towers of an antiquated style still remained, but the other had fallen down without being replaced.
¹⁴
Near the south-east angle stood the medieval chapel, the Hofkapelle, recently redecorated by Leopold’s father Ferdinand III. Probably under the southwestern tower was the large hall where the Emperor, in his capacity of Archduke of Lower Austria, had received the allegiance of the Lower Austrian Estates at the beginning of his reign. The dowager Empress Eleanor lived for some time in rooms on the north front, and when she looked out of her windows she could see a formal garden of fair size which was flanked on the left by a bowling alley and a bath-house, and on the right by a ballroom. At the end of the garden ran the palace wall, and behind this stood (and stands) another building, of great importance to the court, the Stallburg or stables.

East of the Burg was an open space where horses and horsemen exercised, with a covered riding-school at one end which adjoined the main wall of the city. The view eastwards was closed by the church and library of an Augustinian foundation which the Habsburg family had patronised for many centuries. A gallery connected the convent and the palace, making it a simple matter for Leopold to go to listen to the famous preacher Abraham a Sancta Clara (a member of the order), who spared neither the humble nor the proud in hitting at the sins of the world with his redoubtable vernacular eloquence.

Such was the general aspect of the Emperor’s domain in Vienna. It looked unimpressive to Italian or French visitors because money, and perhaps also the desire, for spectacular architectural expansion had been lacking here in the earlier part of the century, although the court grew bigger and needed more room. The one major improvement of recent years was certainly the Leopold Wing,
¹⁵
(the Trakt), designed to join the older to the ‘new’ Burg by a building which ran immediately behind the ramparts along the line of the city wall. That part of the original palace which the Trakt now extended was also refaced, and as a result the whole south frontage of the Hofburg for the first time looked reasonably imposing.
*
This was the target offered to the Turkish gunners in 1683, long rows of windows and a vast expanse of high-pitched roof. Leopold also put up a new theatre, a timber structure, on the rampart behind the riding-school; in 1681 he began to build a new school, planning to house
his books in its upper story. This school, but no new library, was completed in the lifetime of Leopold—the greatest bibliophile among European rulers in the seventeenth century. In due course Charles VI’s glorious Hofbibliothek and Riding School together replaced it.

North-westwards from the Burg ran the Herrengasse, from which nobility and officials had almost entirely expelled the ordinary burghers of the city. The Landhaus
¹⁶
was on this street, the headquarters of the Estates of Lower Austria, with separate chambers for Lords, Knights and townsmen (the clergy assembled elsewhere), a great hall for common sessions, their chapel—once the focus of Protestantism in Vienna but Catholic again after 1620—and a magnificent ‘Deputies’ Room’ which had been decorated for the estates in the days of their glory a century earlier; the
Verordneten,
or deputies, forming a permanent committee which defended the estates’ interests in the interval between sessions, and supervised their administrative organisation. For if Leopold’s grandfather Ferdinand II had deprived the estates of political independence, he broke their fall by giving the members, as individuals, a chance to reacquire power in the service of the Habsburg dynasty. Some of them became councillors in the ‘government’ of Lower Austria, which was presided over by the Archduke’s Lieutenant (or
Statthalter).
At the same time the estates were able to keep their grip on many of the taxes, to assess and collect them. This meant that in 1680 there was no clear division between Leopold’s authority and that of the estates of the duchy. The two were interdependent.
¹⁷
They governed together but in uneasy partnership, even when the menace of a Turkish invasion threatened them both.

Appropriately, behind the Landhaus stood another house, soon to be transformed into the first great Viennese baroque palace.
¹⁸
It belonged to Conrad Balthazar Starhemberg, perhaps the richest of Lower Austrian noblemen, secure in Habsburg favour but by no means dependent on this for the accumulation of his gigantic assets. He was the
Statthalter
from 1663 until 1687; and his son Rüdiger, another soldier who distinguished himself in the campaigns against the French, was to be the strong-willed commander of the garrison which defended Vienna in 1683. Rüdiger took up residence here in 1680.

*
See
illustrations V and VI
.

*
The Leopold Wing is the prominent building placed between numbers 12 and 15 in
illustration VI
. The Herrengasse is number 25.

III

The court and government of Leopold I, concentrated in this small area of the city, embody the Habsburg dynastic interest which impinged on the entire political system of Europe. The municipality in the shadow of the Hofburg was much less important until Kara Mustafa thrust fame upon it.

Vienna had been partially prepared by the intermittent labours of a century and a half to stand a second siege.
¹⁹
After the first great Ottoman attempt to capture it in 1529 by Sultan Suleiman, even more after 1541 when he occupied Hungary, there was justifiable nervousness about the future. Ruler and citizens both realised that the older military works ought to be rebuilt and modernised;
and they knew well enough that Italian engineers had recently improved the whole science of fortification. But they were reluctant to find money for this, knowing that the Ottoman forces might be directed to many alternative targets. It looked more sensible to concentrate on strengthening the citadels in western Hungary. If there was no certainty of an attack, there was no absolute emergency. Only very gradually, therefore, were the defences of the city remodelled.

The military architecture of this period was designed to keep the besieger at a distance as long as possible. The ground in front of the main defences would be cleared of buildings, and even levelled—this was the ‘glacis’;
*
along the
outer
rim or ‘counterscarp’ of the moat a well-protected walk, the ‘covered way’, was constructed—usually of timber spars and palisades—from which detachments of the garrison could command with their fire the open ground in front of them; and the covered way had to be laid out so that they could command it from a number of angles. Next, and perhaps most important, the main wall overhanging the
inner
rim of the moat was reinforced at intervals by new bastions, which became increasingly elaborate in their design. Attackers on the glacis, those who reached the counterscarp, those even who got as far as the main wall, were all exposed to fire from artillery and marksmen on the bastions. Wherever possible, stone-work was buttressed by earth-work in order to lessen the impact of a hostile bombardment. In addition more fortifications were built in the moat itself: these, the ‘ravelins’, either masked the stretches of wall between the bastions, or the city-gates which pierced the wall. They also provided a second line of defence if the enemy seized the counterscarp. Finally, it was necessary to devise efficient communications, with ‘sallyports’ in the walls and bastions, and bridges or causeways across the moat to the covered way and ravelins, so that troops of the garrison could move easily from sector to sector.

The Viennese authorities had to adapt this theory of a sound defence to the special features of local topography, and it is not difficult to visualise these. The Danube valley narrows as it cuts between the hills of the Wiener Wald on the south and the other heights north of the river, and then widens again. Here the river divided into a number of channels, including the most southerly arm which is nowadays called the Canal. It was therefore easy to ford, and this had been the reason why Vienna came into existence in the remote past. A traveller coming south from Bohemia in the seventeenth century, crossed the Danube by various bridges, continued on his way through the wooded Prater island formed by two more arms of the river, entered the suburb of Leopoldstadt, and
finally crossed the Canal by another bridge.
†
He then found himself at the north-east corner of the city. From this point the old wall of Vienna practically skirted the Canal westwards, and then turned south-west and south as far as the Schotten-gate, adjoining the church of Our Lady of Schotten. Within this segment of ground the most important military feature was the Arsenal. Boats entered through a water-gate into a small inner dock here. They could bring in supplies and also, when necessary, take refuge or dart out to the attack. From the Schotten-gate the wall—with a moat in front of it turned south-east and east past the Hofburg (with its Burg-gate) as far as the Kärntner-gate.
*
From here it ran due north to reach the Canal again. At some distance from this last section of the defence-works a small river, the Wien, followed a parallel course before flowing into the Canal and provided an additional obstacle on that side—facing east, towards Hungary—from which the Turks under Suleiman had made their principal assault on the city.
†

In 1544, Italian engineers began to construct the Dominican (or Burghers’) bastion on an improved modern pattern, at the cost of the municipality. This model was copied in the work on at least six other bastions during Emperor Ferdinand I’s reign, and most of these were placed in front of the old wall; new stretches of wall were built to connect them. Apparently more attention was paid to the eastern defences, Suleiman’s target, than to the line from the Hofburg around to the Schotten-gate. But after 1561 there is little to report for a long time, and the costs of maintenance were judged a sufficient financial burden. All the ravelins probably date from the seventeenth century, and in fact the other important periods in the history of Vienna’s military architecture before 1683 were the years 1634–46, and 1656–72. In addition to the ravelins, some of the bastions neglected earlier were redesigned and rebuilt. If the surviving plans or views of different dates are compared, it can be seen that the old bastion guarding the Hofburg was, by 1670, simply an inner defence, in front of which projected a much larger bastion of a later design (VII). This was connected with the neighbouring Kärntner and Löbel bastions by new walls, and these were masked by ravelins in the moat. The moat itself was channelled farther out, and enlarged. Substantial changes are also visible along the Canal frontage. Two new bastions there were aptly named the Big and the Little Gonzaga, after Hannibal Gonzaga, President of the War Council at the time of construction (VII).