Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The Siege of Vienna About this episode In the summer of 1683, Vienna was under siege. A vast Ottoman army surrounded the city, poised to breach the walls and clear the way for Ottoman expansion into Central Europe. Inside the city, famine and fear took hold. But as the city teetered on the brink of collapse, a thunderous cavalry charge broke the Ottoman lines and shattered the siege.
To tell us all about this mighty clash, we're joined by Martyn Rady, Professor Emeritus of Central European History at University College London and author of 'The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe'. He explains why this event marked a turning point in European history.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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Transcript 7,839 words · 11 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:43 Dan Snow? Hi, body. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It was the noise that helped to break the enemy. As much as the razor-sharp steel wielded by the riders, it was the sound, it was the crash of tens of thousands of hooves, the roar of thousands of voices, the keening shriek of the feathers attached to the saddles. The winged hazars of Poland had arrived before the walls of Vienna.
3:28 Dan Snow? It is without doubt one of the most dramatic moments of European history. One of Europe's great cities was within a whisker of capture by its ancestral Islamic enemies.
3:43 Dan Snow? This was a climax of the generational struggle between these two empires, which both claimed to be heirs of Rome. And at that moment of decision, when it could have gone either way, suddenly, a relieving army appears, and there is one of the great cavalry charges of history. Vienna, the city, is saved. The Turkish retreat, never to return.
4:10 Dan Snow? People at the time believed that Christian Europe itself had been saved, and it has influenced artists, writers, politicians ever since. I always think that Tolkien's just-in-time ride of the Rohirrim is surely stolen from this moment in history. In the 1680s, Europe was divided. The German lands particularly divided, certainly, by religion and politics. There was a notional leader of this German Reich, the first Reich, if you like, the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, but he was merely a figurehead to many of the little states that made up the German world. The Ottoman Turks, by contrast, were animated by a new spirit of religious zealotry. They were led by an activist sultan.
4:56 Dan Snow? They expanded, they consolidated their existing lands in Europe. Those were in the Balkans and Ukraine, but they wanted more. They wanted to finish the job. They wanted to realise the dream that had eluded even the mighty 16th-century Suleiman the Magnificent. They wanted to capture Vienna. And that was hugely ambitious. Vienna sits halfway, basically halfway, from Istanbul, from Constantinople, to the English Channel. It is right in the heart of Europe, and it's a hugely important bastion of Christian Europe at the time. It's the imperial capital of the Holy Roman Emperor, a man whose title itself, whose existence really was an insult to the Ottoman emperors, because they insisted that there could only be one.
5:40 Dan Snow? The siege of Vienna fought through the summer of 1683. It was fought in mud-clogged trenches and in shafts dug deep into the ground, in the rubble-strewn breeches. And then the climax, it was fought in the wide-open fields around the Turkish camp.
5:57 Dan Snow? This is one of those rare things nowadays. This is a battle that I think really mattered. It broke Turkish military power and ambition in the Balkans. It allowed the Habsburgs straight away to press deep into the Balkans, to conquer Hungary and other territory. It brought about great change in the Turkish capital politically, and the Turkish would never again be able to threaten central Europe.
6:22 Dan Snow? On the podcast day, Tell Me All About It, it's Martin Reedy. He's a professor emeritus of Central European history at University College London. He has just written his book a year or two ago, The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe. And he said, "Give me some exquisite detail on how it all went down." So, folks, this is the siege and battle of Vienna, 1683. Enjoy.
6:43 Speaker 04 T minus ten.
6:44 Speaker 05 Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.
6:54 Speaker 04 And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.
7:02 Dan Snow? Martin, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
7:04 Speaker 06 My pleasure.
7:06 Dan Snow? What is going on with Ottoman power in this period? They've taken Constantinople in 1453. Is the plan just to keep going?
7:15 Speaker 06 No, the plan has changed. And it's really quite exceptional. The normal account given in the textbooks is that there's this new dynasty that comes through called the Kirkprolus. And the Kirkprolus become the Visiers in about the 1630s, and they contribute to an upsurge in Ottoman power. But actually, we need to go back to the period before that, and to what I think is best thought of as being the Ottoman Reformation. And that is the religious upsurge that begins in the early 17th century, which is Koranic-based,
7:55 Speaker 06 intent on a strict reading of Islamic law and of the principal text. And it's applied, in particular, this reading, it's applied to the big struggle that's been going on, really, for almost a thousand years, a millennia with Islam, is the relationship between doctrine and mysticism, in particular, the Sufi orders, the dervish orders.
8:25 Speaker 06 And the new wave of, if you like, Islamic zealotry, that is directed principally at the Sufis. It's directed also against Shiites and against Alawites and other syncretic forms of religious observants. And these are known after their leader as the Qadi Zardalis. And the Qadi Zardali movement also spins into personal conduct. So Mehmed IV, who is the Sultan we're going to be dealing with today, Mehmed IV moves
9:06 Speaker 06 against coffee houses and he moves against smokers. Two thousand smokers are executed in Istanbul because the consumption of tobacco is not permitted in the Quran. And at the same time, the Qadi Zardalis are very conscious that they need to revive the old Ottoman dream of expansion to create a single, what is called a bode of peace, i.e. when all Christians have been subjugated, there's no more warfare, so we live in the house or a bode of peace. And so they push for a vigorous Ottoman expansion to revive what had been going on really in
9:50 Speaker 06 the 16th century. They look back to an idealized image of Suleiman the Magnificent, and they're also influenced by this massive decline literature, which has been going on really throughout the late 16th, 17th centuries, lamenting the decline of Ottoman power. And the Qadi Zardalis are very anxious, therefore, to take up the mantle. And Mehmed IV is a quite different type of Sultan. The Sultans by the end of the 16th century, beginning of the 17th century, are remote figures. They stay in the palace in complete silence.
10:34 Speaker 06 Nobody is allowed to speak and communication in the palace is by sign language. So they live in this silent world in effectively the middle of Istanbul in the Topkapi Palace.
10:49 Speaker 06 And they are immobile, necessarily immobile because their turbans are three foot high, so they have to stay where they are. Mehmed the Fourth is different. He goes about the place, he reviews troops, he goes hunting, and when he goes hunting, he doesn't go to the closed off sultanic areas, he goes into, if you like, more public parkland. He is a very visible Moloch, and he's an expanding Moloch. The one that is normally mentioned is he completes the conquest of Crete, but more particularly, he pushes into what is known as Podolia. It's like all of Ukraine. Ukraine consists of slabs of territory that
11:34 Speaker 06 don't appear to be demarcated geographically, and Podolia is one of them. It is, if you like, north of present day Moldova, or another way, draw a line from Lviv to Kiev, and it's in the middle of that line, just to the south of it. So, in other words, we're talking about an area that's very far north. And in sixteen seventy-two, his armies take Podolia. They are in the heart of Ukraine. I mean, this is a tremendous advance. And this isn't a temporary thing. They compile these massive defters, tax registers, and the tax register
12:18 Speaker 06 of Podolia has been printed for one year, and it's about two or three inches thick in the printed text. It's a thousand pages. This is a massive bureaucratic exercise.
12:30 Dan Snow? So, Martin, you mentioned decline literature. It sounds to me like the Ottomans are still on the move, still capable of expansion. But the sixteenth century to fifteen hundreds has been quite notable for these pescudal Western Europeans. They've suddenly exploded onto the world stage, and the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the English, the Spanish have carved out world empires. Is that part of the conversation when you talk about decline? Is there nervousness around the sudden, oh, I don't know, the sudden emergence of these Europeans into all sorts of parts of the world that the Ottomans were not expecting?
13:01 Speaker 06 They are worried. They are worried about.
13:06 Speaker 06 What is happening to their Ottoman territories and Ottoman tributaries, particularly in the east and the far east? Because, I mean, places like Java, Friday prayers for the Sultan in Java. So in other words, the Ottoman Empire has a very considerable soft power reach as well as a hard power reach that goes really all the way to the Indian frontier. And they are aware that the Portuguese and the Spanish are moving into their territories. They would like to go, certainly back in the 16th century, they've been looking to expand westwards. They've been thinking, they've been getting maps of the New World.
13:51 Speaker 06 One of Columbus's maps is only known about because it's been copied in Istanbul. They're building up, if you like, a library ready to go to the New World. They've got two problems. Firstly, they don't have the shipbuilding technology. Secondly, they haven't got access to the Atlantic seaboard because Morocco stands in the way. And Morocco is, yes, it's a Muslim power, but at the other side, it's quite closely tied to the Habsburgs. So in other words, they're blocked when it comes to getting a seaborne launching pad for conquest.
14:32 Speaker 06 That's why they turn towards what they call the Northern Segment, which is that area to the north of the Black Sea, and why they expand into Ukraine, and also why they are thinking, the Northern Segment is very broad, why they're thinking again of recapturing or trying again to get hold of Vienna. Vienna is large in their imagination. It's one of the golden apples which must fall to Islam. They also think there may be a real golden apple in the spire of St Stephen's. So they want to get the loot.
15:12 Dan Snow? Why do we care about Vienna? What's going on with, why has it loomed large in the Ottoman imagination?
15:16 Speaker 06 It's always been there. It's always been a target. Suleiman the Magnificent attempts to take it in 1529, he fails. And that provides, if you like, a goal for his successors to better Suleiman by capturing Vienna and going one stage further. They attempt to get Vienna again in, I think, the 1570s, 1580s via Otranto. They land in Otranto, massacre the population, all of whom are made saints subsequently. And then they attempt to march north to get to Rome, and then they plan to get to Vienna. They
16:00 Speaker 06 are keen to overthrow the empire because it calls itself an empire which is an affront to the Ottomans as well.
16:10 Dan Snow? Because there can be only one empire.
16:14 Speaker 06 There's only one empire, yeah. Remember, one of the titles of the Ottoman ruler is the Sultan, is Khayziri, Rome, Emperor of the Romans, precisely the same title as the Habsburg emperors have in Central Europe.
16:31 Dan Snow? Who is the heir to the Caesars? That's millennia-old question in European history. Right, okay, so also 17th century, not a great time in European politics if you're looking to project strength and unity. What is the European context for this invasion?
16:47 Speaker 06 The European context is the very considerable fear and damage done by Louis XIV. Louis XIV is aiming for the Rhine frontier, and he manages in 1681 to get hold of Strasbourg. Strasbourg is this great linchpin strategically, and it is the home of one of Germany's greatest cathedrals. And its loss will remain a sore to Germans right through till 1870 when they get it back.
17:26 Speaker 06 So you've got this advance, but at the same time, the Ottoman advance and the French advance are interlinked. The two are historic allies. They have been ever since the reign of Francis the First. They are historic allies. And even more than that, Ottoman occupied Hungary is an absolute sort of nightmare zone of bandits and guerrilla fighters and renegetees from the Habsburgs. And the Ottomans are organising these renegetees through French officers, what we might now call military advisers, who are on the ground advising
18:11 Speaker 06 the Ottomans and advising the Hungarian rebels, who are themselves negotiating with Louis XIV. So there's a complication there.
18:23 Dan Snow? Yes, people talk about this through the lens of a great clash of civilizations, a clash of faiths. But fascinatingly, as you say, France and the Ottomans have had a long relationship. An Ottoman fleet, I think, once spent the whole winter in in the south of France, isn't it? In Toulon, in the 16th century, I think it was. So they've got an active alliance. King Louis presumably thinks it's rather a good thing if his adversary, this Habsburg emperor of the sort of the German lands, if he's, well, he would lose his capital. I mean, Louis, he must have been slightly nervous about the Ottomans advancing all the way through Europe, wasn't he?
18:57 Speaker 06 I don't there's any evidence of that. He appears to be quite ready to stir them up. He's quite ready to sort of give them funds if needed and to engage in creating huge local difficulties. The Ottomans aren't the only ones aiming at Vienna. Back in the 1620s, a Protestant Bohemian army is in the Vienna suburbs, ready to take on Ferdinand II. And there's no defenders in Vienna at the time. And since then, the Hungarians have
19:34 Speaker 06 been sending raiding parties into lower Austria, creating difficulties for the Austrians, and threatening the outskirts of Vienna as well. And when it comes actually to the battle, there'll be a Hungarian army present aiding the Turks, led by a man called Turkeli.
19:56 Speaker 06 And Turkle is a noble, he is sent a crown by the Ottoman Sultan, who calls him King of Hungary. I don't think Turkle actually ever uses that title himself. He certainly doesn't ever wear the crown, but nevertheless, that just shows the linkage there and the threat which comes to Vienna, not just from the Ottomans, but also from the Hungarians in the Ottoman occupied Hungary.
20:24 Dan Snow? So Martin, without your head falling off, can you try and give me a sense of how power worked in the Austrian Habsburg German lands? The Ottoman Empire is not marching against another kind of unitary imperial state, is it? This is the Holy Roman Empire. The Habsburgs in Vienna are nominally in charge of this Reich, but really, when the Ottomans start marching on the road, what can an Austrian ruler, who can he summon to defend him? Well, how can he mobilise the resources of this empire?
20:54 Speaker 06 He has to do deals. I mean, he does have prestige, and that counts for something. And he does have magnificent ceremonies that occasionally are invoked. And Leopold's father, Ferdinand III, had been very active indeed in the Imperial Parliament, in the Diet, chairing sessions, forcing through policy. And with Louis XIV on the scene, the smaller principalities look towards Leopold increasingly to be some type of protection against Louis and against the bigger states. But with the bigger states,
21:37 Speaker 06 he's got two main allies. The first is Saxony. Saxony, despite being Protestant, has been for a long time a Habsburg ally. And Saxony, for instance, only enters the Thirty Years' War quite late on, in 1630. It stays aloof until then, until Ferdinand II starts confiscating Protestant property.
22:01 Speaker 06 So the Saxons are there and George of Saxony will be at the great rendezvous in sixteen eighty three at Toul, ready to march to relieve the siege. And the other ally is Bavaria. Bavaria is intensely Catholic, or its rulers are intensely Catholic. They are in much the same sort of part of the Holy Roman Empire as the Habsburgs. So there is an animosity there, but there have been marriages between the two houses and their relations are much better in the seventeenth century than they were in the sixteenth. So he's got two key allies there. Baden is always frightened of France.
22:44 Speaker 06 Baden will support Leopold and the Habsburgs. At the same time, of course, there are the resources of Spain and there will be some financial support, less than the Habsburgs wanted, to put together the Holy League, which is formed in sixteen eighty two, end of eighty two, early eighty three. Holy because the Pope is a part of it. And this is because the League has plenty of notice that the Ottomans are on the move.
23:18 Dan Snow? So the Habsburgs have gone to their Spanish cousins for some cash and some help. The Pope's involved. They've got these German sort of principalities because just very basically, the Holy Roman Emperor is a Habsburg. He has direct control over territory in places, what is now parts of the Czech Republic and Austria and various other bits. But beyond that, he only has a nominal, as you say, he's a figurehead for the rest of the German lands and they individually decide, like Brandenburg or Baden, all these Bavaria, they individually decide exactly how much allegiance, how much sort of fealty they wish to show to this Holy Roman Emperor.
23:52 Speaker 06 Absolutely right. And when it comes to the diet, the diet votes money and it certainly votes less money for the operation of the Holy League than the Habsburgs would have liked. Firstly, because the German princes are notoriously tight, but also because it's a Holy League. And if you're a Protestant, you don't want to support a Holy League that's run by the Pope. The Saxons are more flexible, they'll do that, but other places, Brandenburg, for instance, wouldn't be so interested.
24:28 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the Siege of Vienna, all coming up.
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27:35 Dan Snow? Right, so you've got the Ottomans advancing up through southeast Europe. They have got these Hungarian sort of allies, stroke vassals. How big is that force?
27:47 Speaker 06 The whole force is probably about 120,000 men. So it's quite substantial. They rendezvous in Adrianopol, what is now Edine. This is where they always rendezvous. In fact, Sultan has wintered in Edine in anticipation of the campaign, which is why everybody knows that a campaign is going to begin. They rendezvous, I think, in something like April. They're coming from Anatolia, modern day Turkey, as well as from the Balkan Peninsula. So it's a big, what's called a double army.
28:24 Speaker 06 And they march up the old Roman road that goes from Constantinople through Plovdiv in Bulgaria today, Nish in Serbia, and goes to Belgrade. They then have to cross the river and they march up the west bank of the Danube.
28:47 Dan Snow? And that's a long way.
28:49 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's about a thousand kilometres.
28:51 Dan Snow? It's a long, single campaign advance, isn't it? And through pretty rough country, does the route itself take an attritional effect on the Sultan's army?
28:59 Speaker 06 It's a Roman road and it still works. It's probably the best surviving Roman road because it's been repaired. It's not like the one that goes west-east across the Balkans, the Via Egnatia, which is bridges fallen down, windy staircases and things like that. This is a good road. It's been maintained. The Ottomans use it a lot. It's been cleared of woodland on both sides of the road so that there's less banditry. The Ottomans are used to this. They know how to march. They have depots all the way along the route so they can replenish the troops.
29:44 Speaker 06 Extraordinarily, they have these mobile wagons and the wagons have got baking ovens on them. So they've been going along baking the bread as the army progresses. They are fairly, pretty well equipped and they are well supplied. But they're bringing up cannon as well, so they've got very heavy cannon. The cannon is so heavy that when it's mounted on plank platforms, it just crashes through the wood. So they've got a tremendous amount of baggage with them.
30:16 Dan Snow? And the Austrians are, they've got the Holy League, they're gathering cash and men and weapons. How do they do? What do they end up facing this Ottoman army with?
30:25 Speaker 06 Very few troops because they initially plan to do a foray into Hungary, but they're defeated basically by the Hungarians. They're defeated very early on and they scamper westwards to regroup around Linz, which is quite away from Vienna. Leopold is so frightened, he goes even further west and hides in Perceau.
30:51 Dan Snow? So, so they've abandoned their capital at this point, the emperor certainly has.
30:54 Speaker 06 Yeah, and they've got ten thousand troops. They've evacuated the civilian population, very few of them remain. So they've just got ten thousand troops under a very able commander Rudolf von Starenberg. Otherwise, yes, as you say, they've abandoned it. But the Ottomans are moving fast. They don't bother to take some of the fortresses that are manned and occupied against them. They just march round them. So they're threatening their return route. So Kormannow, which is on the western edge of Hungary, that remains in imperial hands. They don't give it up.
31:36 Speaker 06 So the Ottomans arrive at Vienna with part of their escape route already blocked off. And they begin the siege in early July.
31:47 Dan Snow? So there's only, what, when they begin the siege, there's something like ten thousand troops in Vienna?
31:51 Speaker 06 There are ten thousand troops, yeah. You've got about the same number on the Ottoman side who are assault troops.
32:00 Speaker 06 And the rest of the army is, if you like, trying to make Vienna airtight to stop supplies coming in. So they are engaged, camped around Vienna at a distance, but aware that there is a possible relief force gathering.
32:16 Dan Snow? Wow, okay, so the key here is going to be the relief force. How airtight do those Ottoman besiegers make it? Do they shut Vienna up completely?
32:25 Speaker 06 Yeah, they do. There's very little information comes. By the end of August, I don't think even dispatches are getting through. Because the garrison has no idea where the relief force is.
32:43 Speaker 06 Mind you, the relief force, because it doesn't have proper maps, doesn't know where it is either, it's struggling through. And Sobieski, the Polish king who is supporting the Holy League, actually has to ask for information about how close to the Danube is Vienna, that sort of basic information. They have no maps. But as far as the Gareton is concerned, it believes it's been cut off.
33:09 Dan Snow? What's motivating them? You mentioned they have good leadership. Tell me about him, or are they driven by love of country and love of city? What's going on?
33:16 Speaker 06 It's a very, very slow siege. Because what the Austrians have done is, the walls are not in a good state of repair. But what they have done is build what are called ravillins. They've had these for some time, which are, if you like, freestanding forts outside the walls of the city. So they can fire in advance at people. They've got ditches and moats. So the first thing the Ottomans have to do is clear the ravillins, clear the palisades before they can get close enough to the walls to make a breach. So that slows them up.
33:55 Speaker 06 The Ottoman artillery is very poor. The Ottoman mining is very good. It's the other way around for the Habsburgs, because their artillery is very good, but they don't have mining skills. So you've got this imbalance. The artillery is important, because when the vizier appears before Vienna, and he communicates with them, and says, if you surrender now, then I'll let you all go. Everybody can go, you can stay and remain Christians, to the glory of Islam. If you stay, then you will face the Sultan's wrath.
34:39 Speaker 06 And this is standard 16th, 17th century etiquette in siege warfare. Once you bring up your siege guns, then it's too late for the garrison. They must expect if they lose to be slaughtered. So in other words, you've got a window of opportunity to surrender. And Staringberg does not surrender. So the occupants know they're going to be slaughtered if they let the Turks in. So they are motivated.
35:12 Dan Snow? You mentioned mining skills, just in case people aren't clear about that. There's two ways, I guess, of breaching a wall. One is to smash it with heavy cannon. The other is to dig a big mine underneath it and put lots of pick props up and then set fire to those. And the whole thing comes crashing down and you get breaches that way. There's a lot of mining activity, is there?
35:30 Speaker 06 They're using gunpowder. What they do is they work out the distance to the obstacle they want to blow up. And they do this by the highly developed skill of having somebody run with a tape measure, as it were, in order to work out the distance. And what they do is they put in gunpowder. They get actually physically under the wall. You then put in the gunpowder, you seal up the back of the gallery that you've dug, but not seal it up so much that there's no air getting in, so it's quite a skill. And then you try and do a Guy Fawkes with the gunpowder. And they're quite successful at doing this. Well, there is one occasion where they blow themselves up.
36:14 Speaker 06 But they blow up in particular, the main one is very beginning of September, where they blow up the wall, which is adjacent to the palace. So in other words, the palace is built in to the fortifications. And they've blown this up and they've created a huge breach. Through which men could invade and attack if necessary. The Ottomans do attempt to break through. They are repulsed and then bits of lumber are put up to try and fill the gap. But it is a desperate situation and really the end is near.
36:54 Dan Snow? And are the Austrians digging countermines? Are they trying to intercept these mine works and fighting underground in these tunnels?
37:01 Speaker 06 Yeah, one of the instructions is people have to go down to the cellars of the houses and listen. And they listen for the sounds of scraping. And then they attempt to put a mine down as well. At the same time, overground, they're building trenches and digging trenches. And the trenches are running into one another from the two sides. So there's trench warfare happening in the area, the glaciers next to the wall.
37:32 Dan Snow? A hellish landscape both above the ground and below it. It gets to the point, does it? You mentioned there's an assault on the breach. So Vienna comes within a heartbeat of falling at that point. There are Turkish troops swarming through the breach.
37:45 Speaker 06 And from this point onwards, every night, they are sending up distress flares from the spire of St. Stephen's, saying that the whole situation is now desperate. And then, I mean, this is the great moment, that on the 5th of September, they set off the distress flare, as they've been doing. And they see in the distance a flare goes up to acknowledge the distress flare and let them know that the army is coming. It's rendezvous at Tull, it's now marching eastwards.
38:25 Dan Snow? What an astonishing moment. And not a minute too soon, who is that relief force?
38:29 Speaker 06 The relief force consists of the Habsburg forces. There are about 80,000 altogether in the Holy League army. The Habsburg forces, a few supplied by minor princes of the Holy Roman Empire, like Baden. The big boys are Saxony and Bavaria and the Poles. There are about 30,000 Poles are coming in and supporting the Holy League.
39:01 Dan Snow? On the ground, how was it managing that coalition, cobbling that force together and getting them to march to the sound of the guns? I mean, that presumably required a lot of diplomacy and leadership.
39:09 Speaker 06 Yes, and you've got the problem of Jan Sobieski, who is a king and refuses to take orders from the Imperial Commander Charles of Lorraine. Charles of Lorraine is married to a Habsburg princess, and he is titular Duke of Lorraine. Lorraine's been taken by Louis XIV. He's titular Duke of Lorraine, but Sobieski is not going to serve under him. Sobieski insists that he's made commander. So it is Sobieski who, in a sense, decides how the battle will be fought. Unfortunately, he makes a reasonably good job of it. But
39:52 Speaker 06 Charles of Lorraine, the Imperial Commander, is very experienced and very shrewd when it comes to dispositions.
40:03 Dan Snow? It's the Dan Snows history. The climax of the Siege of Vienna follows this. Don't go away.
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41:43 Dan Snow? So after they acknowledge that flair, what do they do?
41:49 Speaker 06 They have to go through the Vienna Woods. From Tulum to Vienna, you've got to go through the Vienna Woods. These are unmapped. Troops get lost in them, but they are able to come and break out of the woods that are around Karlenberg and move on to the plain between the Danube and the Wiener River, which is a wide plain and ideally suited for taking on the Ottomans because you can use the rivers to prevent an outflanking movement. So I think that's more by luck than by judgment.
42:30 Speaker 06 They end up in this ideal position, but nevertheless, they do have the advantage of the lie of the land. Ottomans have only got really one battle plan and they've had it since about the 15th century. And one of the hobbies of military men is to go and to gather how to defeat the Ottomans. And they will say the same thing. What you need to do is have to stop them outflanking because the Ottomans will make an assault with a hard center and they will use their light cavalry to outflank you and get you from the back. And at that point, your army will tend to collapse.
43:10 Speaker 06 So if you can block them off at the sides and prevent them outflanking, then you can ride them down. And that basically is the plan, which the Holy League puts into operation. They fight on this broad plain. I mean, the front is about 12 kilometers wide. I mean, it's a huge. Area of engagement. And as I think somebody said at the time, we weren't really dealing with a single battle, we were dealing with a whole mass of isolated battles as units confront enemy units and fight, often without any reference to what's going on any further
43:54 Speaker 06 afield. Most battles are like that, but this is in a more, more exaggerated way. And as the Ottomans begin to fall back, then Sobieski is able to make the decisive cavalry charge. And the decisive cavalry charge he makes with his famous winged lancers, they're always depicted with what look like eagle feathers and tiger and leopard skins round them. They're not eagle feathers, they're vulture feathers or buzzard feathers. And the leopard and tiger skins are, I don't know, something else that's been dyed. But they look fairly effective
44:35 Speaker 06 and they, the wings project up from the saddle more than the height of the rider. And they're a bit like Stuka bombers with, you know, the Stukas had loudspeakers on them, so that when they dived down, they made a tremendous racket. When you charge and you're a winged lancer, your feathers start giving out this sort of humming, keening sound to intimidate the enemy. And this is the largest cavalry charge, I think, in history, certainly since the Romans. Eighteen thousand minimum, possibly twenty thousand
45:14 Speaker 06 men on horseback ride down the Ottoman army and they just clear it and they advance and take the baggage train and occupy the grand vizier's tent. The grand vizier has already fled. He flees too early, according to the Sultan. But before the grand vizier flees, he executes his pet ostrich because he doesn't want it to fall into enemy hands. And I think that bit of savagery is deservedly punished afterwards.
45:52 Dan Snow? It is, I hesitate to say this, but it's cinematic, isn't it? I mean, you can see why Tolkien was so obsessed with this moment. The battle, quote unquote, really is, as you say, these skirmishes, and then this just enormous, all encompassing avalanche-like cavalry charge. And that's it. That's the end. Astonishing.
46:10 Speaker 06 And he comes in at the side and just goes down the Ottoman line, was taking it out, not in a direct confrontation, but taking it unit by unit. So it is a quite extraordinary charge.
46:23 Dan Snow? And is that it? I mean, the Ottoman, does the army manage to retreat in any good shape? Or is this a band of fugitives streaming through?
46:32 Speaker 06 They've had a huge number of casualties. I think something in the regions of 70,000. The Austrians capture a lot of the troops and a lot of the camp followers, because a lot of the Ottomans are bringing with them their women and girlfriends. And they set up a slave market in Vienna. You'd not expect that, that there'd be a slave market functioning in Vienna, but there is one functioning in Vienna in 1683. The Grand Vizier escapes to Belgrade. The Sultan, who's in Belgrade, blames him and says, you put together a useless
47:14 Speaker 06 battle plan, which he probably did. The Grand Vizier blames his subordinates, particularly the Khan of the Crimea. But Mehmed IV orders him nonetheless to be strangled. And that is the end of our ostrich-killing Grand Vizier. Only a few days later, he himself is dead.
47:37 Dan Snow? Is it also the end of Ottoman attempts to drive much further into Central Europe? What's the trajectory of the Empire after this?
47:46 Speaker 06 Essentially, you're right. It is almost the end. Because I think two years after the failure at Vienna, Mehmed IV is deposed.
48:00 Speaker 06 And I think it's his brother that is put on the throne. Amazingly, Mehmed isn't killed. Normally, if a Sultan's overthrown, he's murdered. Mehmed is allowed to live, although I think he's locked up in a tower. It's not quite the end. Podolia carries on under Turkish administration, but it's destroyed at the end of the 17th century. The Peace of Kalovets puts an end, really, to Ottoman pretensions north of the Danube. And from now on, the Ottoman Empire will be in retreat is not sufficient explanation.
48:43 Speaker 06 It will be in disintegration because from now on, effective control over the Balkans is lost and the power is taken by these local notables, as they're called. And if the Sultan is going to do anything in the Balkans, it has to be in negotiation with these, the local Ians, as they're called, the local power brokers. So Ottoman power has been broken on the battlefield. It's also been broken in terms of the military administration as well.
49:20 Dan Snow? And then you get the strange 200-year death of the Ottoman Empire. A slow-motion nightmare that lasts for generations.
49:29 Speaker 06 Yes, I mean, even by about 1700, Eugène of Savoy is talking about the Eastern Question. I think it's virtually those words, "The question is what will replace the Ottomans", is something he says. And the fear is, is that it's going to be Russia. And it's Russia that starts to look to fill the Ottoman space. So everybody suddenly becomes concerned with propping up the Ottomans to prevent the Russians taking over. And of course, the Russians are increasingly successful. I mean, Peter the Great is really involved in the north, but Catherine the Great.
50:13 Speaker 06 Starts advancing very significantly to the Crimea, into Moldavia, down the Black Sea coast, within less than a century after the Battle of Vienna, the Russians are pressing on to the Danube. So that is the concern that people have afterwards. And why the Ottoman Empire survives is because it's a necessity.
50:41 Dan Snow? Various other powers like the Brits, try and prop it up. What an extraordinary tale. There's lots of legends and myths and moments that have derived from this siege. You've explained how you think it matters on the ground at the time. Actually, very important. It's rather refreshing to talk to someone about a great decisive battle of history they think actually might have been decisive. Usually the fashion nowadays to say, oh, it's completely irrelevant. So a very serious strategic military consequence at the time. But what about its status as this kind of iconic moment?
51:11 Speaker 06 Well, I think it is iconic because what follows on is the clearing of Hungary. Hungary is cleared out of the Turks pretty much entirely within three years. Charles of Lorraine goes on to fight his way over the next few years down the Danube, Battle of Estegon, Battle of Vards, these type of things, until he relieves or his subordinates relieve Buda in 1686. And after 150 years, Buda and Pest become Christian again and pass under the control of the Habsburgs. And the Habsburgs press on. Leopold thinks
51:56 Speaker 06 he's got the advantage and moves into the Balkans and gets as far south as Skopje, which is the capital of what is now North Macedonia. He's only a couple of hundred kilometres from the Aegean, but his supply line is too long and he has to retreat. But what it means is that the Habsburgs are also flagging up their interest in the Balkan Peninsula. And that, of course, will be the big one with the Habsburgs and the Rassians both vying for influence in the Balkans.
52:34 Dan Snow? And there's a direct line from there to some damn fool thing happening in the Balkans in 1914 and the mighty upheavals of the 20th century.
52:43 Speaker 06 Yeah.
52:45 Dan Snow? Extraordinary story. Can we let's quickly deal with one or two of the myths, because there's a few myths. The croissant, was the croissant invented as a symbolic crescent shaped pastry to celebrate victory over Islam?
52:58 Speaker 06 I don't think so.
53:01 Speaker 06 The other one is that they discovered coffee for the first time. And in 1983, I went to the commemorative exhibition, anniversary exhibition in Vienna of the Battle of Vienna. And they were very keen to try and show that this really wasn't a confrontation of civilizations. They were going to learn something from one another. And the thing that they honed on, you know, was that people learnt about coffee from the Battle of Vienna because some sacks of coffee beans were found. Now, I mean, coffee was being used before that.
53:42 Speaker 06 It was sold in apothecary shops as a stimulant for bad nerves. So coffee's been known about before then, but that's one of the typical myths. So I think the croissant is the same.
53:53 Dan Snow? It's amazing what you can learn about someone when you're beaten to death in a muddy trench with an entrenching tool.
53:58 Speaker 06 Yes.
53:59 Dan Snow? Yes, that's cultural exchange. Martin, that was what an amazing story. Thank you very much for coming on and telling us all about that. Do tell us what the name of your book is.
54:08 Speaker 06 The book is The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe.
54:14 Dan Snow? Thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
54:16 Speaker 06 Thank you.
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