In Our Time - The Siege of Vienna

Episode Date: May 14, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests Andrew Wheatcroft, Claire Norton and Jeremy Black discuss the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, when the Ottoman Empire tried to capture the capital city of the Hapsburg monarchs. The ensuing tale of blood and drama helped define the boundaries of Europe. In June 1683, a man called Kara Mustafa made a journey to Vienna. That a Muslim Turk should come to a Catholic city was not unusual, but Kara Mustafa did so at the head of the Ottoman Army. Vienna was the capital of the Hapsburg Empire and he intended to take it. The ensuing siege has been held responsible for many things, from the invention of the croissant to the creation of Viennese coffee. But most importantly, it has come to be seen as a clash of civilisations, one that helped to define a series of boundaries, between Europe and Asia, Christian and Muslim, Hapsburg and Ottoman, that influence the view between Vienna and Istanbul to this day. But to see the siege as a defining moment in east/west relations may be to read back into history an idea that was not true at the time.Claire Norton is Lecturer in History at St Mary's University College, London; Andrew Wheatcroft is Professor of International Publishing at Stirling University; Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Exeter.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in June 1683, a man called Kara Mustafa Pasha made a journey to Vienna. That a Muslim Turk should come to a Catholic city wasn't unusual, but Kara Mustafa did so at the head of the Ottoman army.

Vienna was the capital of the Habsburg Empire. and he intended to take it. The ensuing siege, a tale of blood and drama, has been held responsible for many things from the invention of the croissant to the creation of Viennese coffee. But most importantly, it's been used to define a series of boundaries, which in Europe and Asia, Christian and Muslim, Habsburg and Ottoman,

these boundaries that influence the view between Vienna and Istanbul to this day. With me to discuss the siege of Vienna at Claire Norton, lecturer in history at St. Mary's University of London, Andrew Wheatcroft, Professor of International Publishing at the University of Stirling, and Jeremy Black, Professor of History, at the University of Exeter. Jeremy Black, can you explain why the siege of Vienna is considered such an important battle, even in world history? The Siege of Vienna, and in particular the fact that it ended with the destruction of the Ottoman Field Army,

an enormous battle on the 12th of September 83, the siege of Vienna set a pattern for the Turks being slowly driven back, so that an Ottoman Empire which had covered a quarter of Europe by the beginning of the 20th century was shrunk to a fraction where it now is around Istanbul. So it was very important for the redefinition of the boundaries of Europe, for the change in the Balkans, for Austria becoming a Balkan power,

and in the immediate short term, it started a process of war which went on to the end of the 1690s, which saw most of Hungary taken out of Turkish control and transferred into that of Christian Europe. Just for a moment, because this is not what we're going to discuss, but just for a moment, had they taken Vienna, what might have ensued? Well, that's a fascinating question, and it's entirely valid to ask counterfactual questions

when we're looking at what contemporaries at the time thought was possible. It was probably pretty near the extreme of the logistical capability of the Turkish Empire. I mean, there are interesting things. There's a marvellous play by Henry Fielding, the coffeehouse politician in 1730, in which a group of London tradesmen, politic and dabb. discuss whether the Turks can move and conquer London. Edward Gibbon, of course, speculated on the Turkish galleys being seen in the English Channel. But the practicality probably is that Vienna would have become a powerful fortress for the Turks.

What's interesting is whether if this had happened, the Balkans would ever have come back into Christian Europe. Let's get an idea of the size of this, Jeremy. We're talking about Ottoman Empire. We're talking about it crossing three continents. Yes. Just give the listeners, this was a mighty empire at the time in 16.88. Can you give people an idea of the size and stretch and diversity of it? The Ottoman Empire stretched to include Iraq on the east.

It stretched down into the Arabian Peninsula so that Sultan was the guardian of the holy places of Mecca and Medina. It included North Africa, Egypt, for example, Libya. It stretched its cissorinity to include Algeria. It dominated the southeast Europe. And at that stage, it was still controlling the northern shores of the black sea. sea, the carnate of the Crimea, was a subordinate of the Sultan. You have here the second largest

state in the world in terms of population after China. Would it be true to say, or rather more accurate, to refer to Eastern Europe, what we now think of Eastern Europe, as Western Asia at that time? I think to a certain extent that is very clear. And, you know, the Turks had taken over Hungary in the 1520s after the Battle of Mohatch in 1526. Hungary, I mean, there were Christians there,

because many people were Christians, but the people who were running the show were Muslims, they were a Turkic aristocracy, and this was a dynamic and expanding power. There was genuine fear in much of Europe, much of Christian Europe, about the potential. They wouldn't have been reassured to hear academics several centuries later saying, oh, well, this was the limit of their logistical capability.

That was real anxiety. That they were on the march and would take over. Yes, you take England. Algerian slavers were in the English Channel in the 16th. near where I live in Devon, taking people out of coastal villages and selling them in the great slave markets in Algiers to be transported to Constantinople. Andrew Wheatcroft, what was the reaction in the city to the advancing Ottomans? They arrived very suddenly. They took the decision to go there and they went, a fortnight after taking the decision. They went very brutally. Karamastafapascha was a brutal man. They slaughtered, they burnt, they made it quite clear they were out to destroy.

Now you're in the city. What do we know of the reaction in the city? Panic. They weren't expecting it. They'd arrived, not merely suddenly, but without any advance warning at all. And that was because the people in the city seemed to be unaware of anything happening to the east,

whereas the Turks had a very good intelligence network. And the city they were sitting in was almost immediately denuded of the people that were there. Anybody who get out of a city left very quickly and went westwards. About how many would leave? Sorry, I seem to be obsessed by figures on these sort of talks. Sorry, about how many

people do we know left? The rich left on the The rich left, but probably about 20 to 30,000 people just got up and left. And they were replaced by the people from the countryside who didn't want to be left around to be enslaved or killed by the Turkish armies. I say Turkish,

but of course they weren't. But they were called Turks or Turkish at the time, and I've just gone along with that way of discussing them. Tell us what they weren't if they weren't Turkish. Well, they were... I mean, tell us what they weren't Turkish, sorry. Hungarians, Transylvanians, peoples from the Balkans, the army came

from, as Jeremy said, throughout the Ottoman Empire, brought together for this great attack in the West. But led by the Turks? They were led by the Turks, but the Turks were Ottoman, as Claire will explain much better than I can. They were a ruling class.

And some of them, by origin, were not even Muslim to start with. They converted to Islam. So it's a very complex kind of force that was coming, but the heart of it were the Turks for sure. And how big was, do you know how big the Ottoman army was? Well, that's a matter of dispute. I mean, it's probably around 80 to 100,000 people, much smaller than people thought at the time.

They said as they saw them advancing under a huge cloud of dust that was kicked up by their advance. advance, there were six miles it took for them to cover the ground, so to speak. But most of that, 80 to 100,000 in fact, were supernumeries. The heart, the Jansari Corps, probably, the most effective part of the Ottoman Army, was much smaller. So the rich fled, including the Emperor Leopold I first, whose previous convictions, as it were, had led to, prompted some of this, but we might come to that later. the poor from, or people around the place, rushed into the fortress for protection

as they had done for centuries and millennia. What sort of place were they protecting? Was it protectable? Was it thought to be one of the great impregnable fortresses? It was a very grim place. It was sat beside a sluggish river. It had been surrounded by walls since 1221, I think. In fact, the first walls were paid for by the English.

They had to ransom King Richard B. Lionheart, was picked up coming back through Austria by someone he'd fallen foul of. And 600 buckets of silver were used to build the first walls. And they were there, and they resisted the first Ottoman incursion in 1529, because this had happened before. And just. And then for the next century and a half, they kept on building stronger and stronger fortifications, according to a modern model. But in fact, the walls that were there, although they looked very powerful and almost impregnable,

were actually not as good as they thought they were. And so when the Ottomans advancing you very well, what point to attack if they wanted a breakthrough into the city. Why was Vienna considered by the Ottomans to be, the phrase was a golden apple? Jeremy's explained that it was on the furthermost edge of their massive empire, almost the limits of it, logistically difficult, yet they took a great army there to try to get.

Why was it so important for them to capture Vienna? Well, I think there's a what's a contradiction here is that they didn't know they were going to Vienna when they started out. This was a secret. It was a secret really between the Sultan, Mahmhmed VIII, and Karamustafar Pasha. It was their idea. And one can speculate as to why they wanted to do it.

But they held a council of war late in June just before they decided their final target. And Karam Mustafa Pasha said, fellows, we're going to Vienna. And two weeks later they were there. Clearly they're there, but they could have gone somewhere else. The expectation was they were going to attack a fortress or the protective belt, so to speak, to Vienna,

but not to attack the city itself. Well, we know it was a commercial centre for Eastern Europe. We know it was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from the 13th century, and it was a great fortress in the borderlands, but was the allure that the great thing would be to capture the centre of the Holy Roman Empire, the capital of the Holy Roman Empire?

Was that the sort of reason why these two and with that advice, decided it's Vienna. I think there was actually a sort of denastic or personal hatred between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, because the Ottomans looked upon the Habsburgs as being usurpers. When they took Constantinople in 1453, by right of conquest, they became the emperor, by descent from the Roman emperors.

And there was this kind of strange elective character in the West, who also claimed to be the Holy Roman Emperor. Emperor. And it's strange because the relationship between the Habsburgs and the Ottoman was always worse with other monarchs around. They could deal quite happily with them, but the Habsburgs there was a great sense of resistance

for identity. Clare Norton, the Ottoman's new Vienna, as we know they've been told, has been mentioned. They had very good intelligence, and plenty of them had been, Turkish people had been there. Particularly a travel writer Evlia Celeby, he described the city in some

detail. Can you just thicken the plot about what they knew the Turks knew about Vienna and about Vienna itself? Well I think Evlia Chelyabee is one of the most famous Ottoman travellers who went there in the 17th century and had left an account and he actually visited

the city as part of an ambassadorial retinue. The ambassador Karamemad Pasha was going there following the conclusion of hostilities between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans in the early 1660s to sort of build bridges and a bit of intelligence gathering. And both

of them leave accounts of the city. The ambassador's account is a little more dry, it's concerned with ceremonial and a description of the fortifications, but Everlier's account is far more lively, and it seems that Evlia was interested not just in looking at the city, but engaging with the people there, sort of finding out about their society and making friends. So he gives us a description of their houses, marketplaces, churches, but he also tells us what he liked about, the city, what he admired. He admired, for example, the life. Brie linked to St. Stephen's Cathedral. He listened to organ music there and really appreciated that.

It filled his lungs with passion and his eyes with tears. Exactly. But he also made friends with sort of Viennese people, particularly there was one doctor who spoke a few words of Turkish, who then takes him round, who shows him a number of surgical operations taking place, which delighted him. And he has very good things to say about Viennese standards of medical

care. But he also does indulge in a little ethnocultural stereotyping. He compares the Hungarians and the Austrians and he much prefers the Hungarians he says. After all, they treat their guests more honourably in his words. They're

cleaner. They don't torture prisoners. So while he admires the place, there's still that residual you're kind of the foreign other, the enemy outside. There was a feeling that European, I'm using it, No, there weren't in Europe at the time.

Travelled into the Ottoman Empire and we treated reasonably okay. There was much greater history of tolerance. But when Ottomans went across, there was no food for them, there was nowhere to worship, and often they were persecuted. So there's an unbalanced there, is that right? That's correct. I mean, with European Christian travellers coming over, there were already existing Christian and also Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire.

So there was a community that they could slot into. There was food they could eat. They would have, you know, other people they could worship. with and there was a great tolerance for non-Muslims in the Ottoman lands and an acceptance and a desire to trade and communicate with them. But for Muslim Ottomans going the other way, as you said, there wasn't halal food, there's no place to worship. If they died, there were no places to be buried.

And often they were just not welcome in Europe. Can we talk about, and Andrew Wilcroft referred to it, but the number of peoples, let's use that word, tribes even, in the Ottoman, are. me. When your travel writer Chalaby went across there, would he know when he was going, would he feel I am in the same empire? Would he feel I'm going from one state to another, one city state to another, one country?

What would it feel like as, would it, I've said it. Okay. I think, yes, there would be a reasonable cultural difference between the capital cities of Istanbul, Constantinople and Vienna. However, when travelling through the borderlands, what is now Hungary, between the Habsburg and the Ottoman empies, any such distinction might not be so noticeable. The communities on both sides, both the Habsburg side and the Ottoman side, had very much in common with each other.

They were living very similar lives, facing similar circumstances and difficulties. But they also came from very similar backgrounds, as Andrew mentioned. Both the soldiers on the Ottoman side in the garrisons and those in rural and urban areas were a mixture of Turkish-speaking Muslims, but also Hungarian-speaking, Serbian-speaking Christians. We forget that in the border fortresses on the Ottoman side were a good percentage of Ottoman Christians

fighting alongside their Muslim counterparts. And they would have much in common with the people on the fortresses just across the line, so to speak. So in the border land, there was a sort of border law like there was between England and Scotland for 2, 300 years in the late Middle Ages, and that border law was almost of itself. Exactly, yes.

So it's a particular border culture and ethos. We know that the border commanders on both sides negotiated with themselves, often in contradiction with orders coming from their imperial centres, to carry on raiding but to sort out those raids, to collect taxes off each other's peasants because they would be getting a cut of the proceeds. So there's a lot of cooperation going on there.

It's quite a joint community in some ways when there's not imperial conflict going on, obviously. Jeremy Black, before we move in, which in the middle next question, onto the siege itself, was it thought around the place at the time in 1683 that this was a massive collision? People in Europe sit back a gap and say, what will happen now?

These two titans have are locked. Yes, very much so. Including in Protestant Europe, there was no sense that this is just a problem for the Catholics. So, for example, clergymen in England would preach about the danger to Christendom. There's an article about the reaction in Catalonia, Barcelona, which has showed people were very anxious about what was going on in Vienna. So there was a sense of common menace.

But there was a feeling you've made the distinction with Catholic and Protestant. Leopold was a fanatical, or deeply convinced, whichever Roman Catholic, he fled Vienna. But, I mean, he was very much in mind who would have upheld a religious war, was a 30-year religious war. Did it seem to be a Catholic fight more than a general Christian fight? That's a very interesting question. Leopold himself, yes, within their own dominions, the Habsworth was quite persecuting. But interestingly enough, within the Holy Roman Empire, the area of roughly modern Germany, Protestant princes, for example the future George I of Britain, who was then the electoral prince of Hanover, the margrave of Barden, were to come forward and serve in the armies of Leopold I,

as part of the armies of what were known as the Empire, as opposed to the Austrian Empire, as opposed to the Austrians, fighting the Turks. Okay, Andrew Weakrop, the Ottomans have got there, let's say they're 8 to 100,000, some people have said 150,000, but I think your figures, obviously. But they've surrounded the place, they've brought their own tents, they're very skillful at siege warfare, and they just get on with it. Can you tell us how they got on with it? Yeah, I think the most important thing is that the quality of organisation in the Ottoman armies, far superior to anything the West had to order. offer that stage. So they were well equipped, they had food supplies bought them on a regular basis, and they had a plan developed over time as to how you actually besieged the city. And it's often thought now that the French learned how to deal with fortification and

how to perceive cities actually from observing the Ottomans. So they surrounded the city, and they had already decided because spies had told them what the base place would be to attack was an area of ground, coincidentally, just in fact in front of the Imperial Palace. And it was dry ground because one of the big problems if you were going to besiege if it was too wet. And the way of attacking a city was not to shell it into submission, but to dig underneath the walls and to let them fall down as the explosions loosened, so to speak, the way in which they were held together, because they were not often actually cemented together. They were just simply lying one heavy stone on another.

And so there was a technique, and the technique was that they dug. And they had a little sort of pickaxe. They dug in a different way from Westerners' dug. They dug sitting down, and they could move very, very fast. And so they surrounded the city, and within a day, they started to dig tunnels towards the city. The city was pretty unprepared, frankly. They had had six days to actually get the thing into a defensible state.

What can you do in six days? Well, the first thing they did was to repair where they could the defences that were already extant. Please keep going. The only thing they could do in the circumstances was really to strengthen the outer palisade, the wooden wall that was outside the city, which mostly over 150 years,

has kind of rotted away. And that was a very good decision. They had in the city, they were all the size of big tree trunks. They hammered these things into the ground. around and they created a wooden wall outside the main line of stone and bastions, really earth faced with brick. And that wooden wall held up the Ottomans for nearly three weeks. They'd never anticipated that.

And the problem with the siege from an Ottoman perspective was one of time. If they didn't do it quickly enough, winter would come on, if you look at the time scale. As in 1529, they had to retreat because they didn't want to be trapped so far. away from home by the onset of winter. It could be very cold and wet and uncomfortable around Vienna at that time here. So they had to get a move on, and they thought that they would get through

the outer palisade in the space of a week. They didn't. Jeremy. Yes. One really interesting thing about the siege of Vienna is there's two other major sieges in the 1680s in the world. The big siege in India, Golkonda in 1687, and the siege of Albazen in the Amur Valley

by the Chinese. Now in the case of Vienna, the Turks knew they'd have to fight their way through. In both the other major sieges, the one in India in which the emperor himself, Arangzeb, the Mughal emperor besieged it, standard pattern with Indian sieges. What you do is you display your strength

and somebody on the other side opens the gates to you. So they're four miles long fortresses, they didn't need, walls didn't need to be broken through. In the case of China, exactly the same. The Chinese army comes into sight, the Russians surrender, because you know you've got a bigger force. But in the case of Vienna, the Turks knew they would

to fight their way through. And that is a really tough call because you don't have modern high explosives. It is very, very difficult. And as Andrews said, they've got to get it done by winter. Why it is more serious than 1529 is the Turks arrive earlier than in 1529, so they've got more time to break through. They're in a bigger army and it hasn't rained very much. So they're able to bring up all sorts of supplies, including artillery, whereas the 1529 campaign was a disaster to fall them. Clare Norton, let's go back to this intermingling of empires because we're talking

about different peoples in what we look back on as a monolith and we've already, the three of you have already destroyed that idea. Would it have been very different from appearance alone if one of us had gone and looked at these two, who was an Ottoman, who was a member of the Habsburg army, and so

would there have been obvious differences? I'm not entirely sure. I mean, I think when we're talking about the army besieging, the Ottoman army besieging Vienna, there would have been, as Andrew has said, Hungarian soldiers there, probably some Croatian, some Serbian soldiers too. We know there were Christian sectban units there as well. There were also probably Western European mercenaries fighting there. Many Western Europeans transferred their allegiances over to the Ottoman army. So in terms of what the people themselves were like, maybe we wouldn't have been so easily

able to distinguish between them, but obviously they would have been wearing and carrying different armour and such things as that, I imagine. So people would have been able to tell. Jeremy Black, to what extent bringing in the idea of the big ideas that are around this, which is the clash of civilizations, we see it as a clash of empire, to what extent do we know people at the time were thinking of it in those terms? I think the reality is that people are thinking of it as a clash of civilizations, We as scholars know that there is an interpenetration of civilizations,

but at the time, as far as Christian Europe is concerned, this is a major challenge. And indeed, Louis XIV, gets a lot of stick because he doesn't give enough help to the Austrians because he's perceived as letting down the side. The whole theme, he's referred to as the Christian Turk, precisely because he's seen as breaking ranks and having an envoy at Constantinople

and willing to cooperate with the Turks. everybody else, including major Protestant German dynasties, which had fought the emperor as recently as the 1640s. As far as us is concerned, lots of prayers in Anglican churches for the success of Christians. Lots of prayers. And of course, we were to be allied with the Austrians from 1689 in war against the French,

and we were to play a role in trying to ensure a negotiated end to the war in the Balkans, one that left the Austrians with a lot of, of Hungary under their control. Andrew Wheatroy. One of the things that support this is this kind of media war that was taking place because all over Europe, people

interested in what was going on in the Eastern Front. None of them would never have been there. And materials produced, it was translated to many different languages. So it's astonishing how much information was given to people throughout Europe. And as you say, there were prayers and churches and so on, but it extended all the way

through society this concern for what was happening in the East. And the sense that this is a real threat to everybody. You've talked very graphically about the way they attacked and these wooden palisades were built. The city, defence of the city was marshaled by, excuse me, the Duke of Lorraine, was that his main tactic?

Because he had to knock an army out of a lot of people who'd been more or less left behind or come in for refuge. So what else did he do? Because it is surprising, as you imply, and as what I've read him, that this very professional army was held up for so long. Lorraine was actually a good general, I think.

He got on well with people, that was the first thing, but he took a decision when he was faced by this advancing Turkish army that he had to keep an army in being and outside the city. So he delegated the work of defending the city to Count von Stahenberg, who turned out to be a pretty ordinary kind of soldier, but very resolute in defence. And he managed to galvanise the people of the city. Fortunately, he actually had a lot of trained soldiers.

He had roughly 15,000 people who he brought into the city, the trained army, the trained infantry and the artillery. He brought them from Germany, did it? No, they were in northern Hungary, in fact. This was the army that had been created. They knew the Ottomans were going to attack. They just didn't know where. So these were brought back into the city.

Many of them were sick because there were diseases rife in the whole area of the damage. There were about 10,000 and that was the heart of the defence. The problem was, that's all they had. And over the time of the siege going on, constant bombardment sometimes day and night, there was a kind of attrition, and the garrison got smaller and smaller. And massive food shortages? Well, there were food shortages, but they were very inventive. Firstly, they ate the cats, then they ate the rats, then they ate absolutely everything.

But certainly... What's left? They managed to keep going. And curiously, at the beginning of the siege, there was a sort of interplay between the besieging Ottomans and the Habsburgs. They swapped food. They grew vegetables in the city, and they sold the to the Ottomans, and the Ottomans provided meat for them.

That was put a stop to. But the siege as it went on became harsher and harsher, and not just in the losses, but the way in which they regard to the enemy. For example, capture Turks will be flayed, sometimes by dead, sometimes alive, their skins hung over the fortress. The Ottomans didn't quite do the same kind of thing, but there was no quarter-given on either side. And that's going back to what Jeremy was saying.

There would be no treaty. There would be no way of treating themselves, or pushing themselves forward to an agreed settlement. They had to conquer the city and the city, had to descend itself if the people were to survive. Claire Norton, can you give us some idea of what life was like in the Ottoman tents, in the Ottoman camps around the city?

I read how well organised they were, but how well organised were there? Could you describe that? And what was life as a siege soldier like? Generally, the Ottoman Army was very well organised, ensured that there were sufficient and adequate provisions for their soldiers. Procedures were put in place to ensure that sufficient grain and other foodstuffs would be brought in for the soldiers.

But also they did live quite frugally. A number of people have commented on the discipline, frugality and stoicism of Ottoman soldiers, especially in comparison sometimes to their European counterparts. However, as with any army, there's also times where not sufficient money is put aside for the army. And one of the criticisms of an Ottoman historian Nahadi is that the Grand Vizier did not give sufficient monetary inducements or bonuses to the men to sort of encourage them and build their morale up so that they would fight more effectively. So there are, although it probably was relatively well supported, there's these niggling doubts that some people have had saying,

well, he should have been more generous. She should have paid more attention to the needs of his soldiers to get the best out of them. It's been mentioned en passant, Jeremy Black, but I'd like to return to it that the Ottoman forces were aided by Protestant Hungarian Christians. Can you take that on? Yes, there was opposition in what would now be regarded as Slovakia, which was then referred to as part of Hungary.

there was opposition in particular there to the Habsburgs, and it reflected back on the 30 years war, what you were talking about earlier, the struggle between the Catholic Habsburgs and Protestants, which was a matter, not just in Germany, but also in the Habsburg hereditary lands, the Herbalander. And as a result, going right the way back to the beginning of the 17th century, I mean, there had been, for example, a lot of fighting in the early 1620s

in which Protestants from Hungary and Slovakia had been, back to the Turks advancing on it on Vienna then. So there is a tension. I mean, what's interesting, what is very interesting, and in a sense we're all coming at this from different directions, we're all saying the same thing, is on the one hand, you have a clear-cut ideological clash of civilisations. On the other hand, on the ground, you have all sorts of nuances, all sorts of complex relationships, and in a way part of the tension in history is the interplay between those two. Yes, that is fascinating, that it is seen as a great ideological battle, and people are praying in English churches and in Barcelona,

and yet on the ground, as you've demonstrated, or you've described very vividly, the siege was eventually lifted by so I read, you tell me wrong, by a massive charge of Polish lancers who actually chucked away their lancers and pulled

out their sabres. Can you? Yes, I mean, what it was, was on land, it was the equivalent of the Great Battle of Lepanto in 1571 in the Mediterranean, which again had been an enormous international, papal, organised coalition against the Turks. And this, in a sense, was the same thing on land.

Andrew, can you tell us about that Polish charge? Now, the Poles were subsidised by the Pope. He couldn't get the French to go. He gave a lot of money to the Poles. The Poles took it on and came almost, they were the US cavalry, weren't they? They were on the hills of Vienna. Thousands of them, if I ask for numbers,

you'll say less than there's in my notes, but they said there were about... 18,000? 18,000. 18,000. 18,000. They're on the hills there with their lances and they determine the day in 15 hours. Now can you talk about that, please? You tell me the battle that is.

I think the first thing is, as someone said elsewhere, a damn close run thing. They arrived, they got to the top of the hill. They discovered that in fact it was going to be very difficult to do that because there were no maps, no plans. They all finally arrived along this strip of land from the Danube to five hills along. And on the right flank, because King John Sobieski was the ranking leader, so to speak,

the place Honour went to the Poles. They were on horseback, terrible getting up on top of the hill. And the battle started at dawn on the Danube side with the infantry coming down the hill. The last people to come down with the poles picking their way through the rocks and boulders until the battle towards the end of the day, about four or five in the afternoon, ended up with a line of victorious Christians from the left flank to the right flank. On the right flank were the Polish cavalry,

who drew themselves up, very good order, in blocks. It was a traditional Polish way of fighting. And people that assumed for a long time, this was an outmoded way of fighting, lancers attacking a foe rather as they did in the late middle ages. But it worked. because they were attacking a demoralised army. And a small detachment was sent forward, first of all,

into the vast demoralized body of Turks. They thrust home, you could hear the sound of the lances cracking as they hit their targets. And at that point, the Ottomans decided they'd had enough. And so they started to flee. And so the whole Polish force started to move forward, but they were pushing against an open door because they were already retreating.

So in one sense, the great charge that decided the battle for Vienna, the lancers striding forward, was only a tiny detachment. But that small detachment convinced the Ottomans that there was nothing to be won. And so they started to flee towards Hungary. So at six o'clock on that day, the battle was won. All the battle was lost, depending on which side. I'm restrained my prejudices, I suppose. And Mustafa fled.

And a day later he was executed, but we might come to that in a moment. moment. Clan Orton, let's turn to the aftermath of the battle then. How did the Ottomans explain away their defeat? Because they had massive records, didn't they? They had people with the army who kept records, and you refer to it. So we've got a lot of detail notes about what they thought, what went on, what they ate, what they did. Anyway, how did they explain away their defeat? I mean, I think for the Ottomans, obviously it was a blow that the siege had been unsuccessful, but I don't think they saw it as being quite as momentous as either their European, Western European, counterparts or maybe modern historians have seen.

After all, they'd lost many sieges before, possibly half of the sieges that they would engage in would be unsuccessful. They'd lost the first siege of Vienna earlier in the 16th century. But of course, they wanted to examine what had gone wrong. So Silla Dara, who was a historian who had accompanied the army there, he touches on a number of reasons. He does mention the weather, it raining a lot as they're going, up. He mentions them taking the wrong type of guns. They didn't take the really heavy

cannons, the Ballyamese cannons, so that they could knock down the walls. But he also, very pointedly, blames the Grand Vizier. He sort of says, well, the grand vizier misled the Sultan. The grand vizier took overstepped his authority by choosing Vienna, a bit of more than he can chew. But I think what's happening here is he's trying to distance the court and the Sultan from any responsibility, really. So there's a bit of that going on as well. Andrew How did the Austrians react and the Ottomans obviously

Many of them were slaughtered It said that the Polish cavalry took a week to collect the loot from the tents Now let's leave it at that They're weakish You also To collect the loot from the tents

of the Ottomans They retreated We'll talk about whether it was the end of their world Or not in a moment But what about the Austrians They have won a famous victory Did they think feel that Not only won a famous victory

but they believe that a kind of new world. And the bells rang out across Europe, we must have it. Yes, and they put up a great plaque, and it said that this victory had been run without the most Christian king of Europe, ii, the French, that they'd done it on their own. And there was this kind of idea that they could then move forward,

they would take Buddha, they would even go to Constantinople, that was the idea that they recover the whole of Christendom. And Leopold was very taken with this, his advisers were taking... So he came back, did he when they'd won? Oh, yes, he did, yes, cautiously. Yes. He arrived after everybody else. But he had this kind of vision.

And, of course, they push forward, and they discovered that the Ottomans weren't defeated, just as you were saying, Claire. But in fact, they would come again. And they went on coming again for, you know, really until the 1790s. They kept on attacking again. They wouldn't lie down and die,

which is what the Austrians always assumed they should be doing. And this had huge implications for the future of the Austrian Empire. So there's two things going on for the rest of this programme, Jeremy. One sense is, did this define things? And the other sense, are we exaggerating to say define things? Ottoman Empire went on for another 250 years, which is not a sniff. And so what did it define, do you think, this victory, this event? Well, it changed, I think, the fate of Central Europe.

I mean, it's true that the Ottoman Empire took longer to decline, like the Spanish Empire did, than most other empires took to rise and fall. But it changed the fate of Central Europe because the Ottomans were pushed back into the Balkans. It was to take a long time to conclusively gain Belgrade. But once they'd regained Buddha and Pest, the Turks never took it back again. So they'd been pushed back.

There was also, I think, an enormous psychological sense that psychologically, Christian Europe, particularly the Catholic areas of southern Germany and Austria, no longer felt under the psychological sense, of threat. I think that's very important. And while, as Andrew says, the Turks weren't completely destroyed, there was no equivalent to after Lepanto.

After Lepanto, the great naval victory in the Mediterranean in 1571, again, the Christians had thought this was all going to change things, and within two years there was an enormous new Turkish fleet, which was, you know, able to do very well. So in many senses, you know, history is not always

the absolute turning point, but if you're going to go for turning points, you can't think of a better one for the for the history of Central Europe than 1683. Claire Norton, can I take this on with you? Do you think that this battle created boundaries or it was used to create boundaries between Christyman, Muslim, Ottoman and Habsburg, European and Asian,

those three boundaries. Was it used to create boundaries? Did they become firmer because of it? Or can you take that on? Yeah, I think it has been seen both by the European contemporaries and also by historians today as a very symbolic and iconic battle in a clash of civilizations.

Rather than maybe a clash of neighbors, I mean, it certainly was that the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire did hold great enmity for each other and did wish to destroy each other in some ways and were competing to be the new emperor, the new Caesar, to take on the mantle of the Holy Roman Emperor. However, I'm not sure whether we should see it as a clash of religious civilizations.

I'm not sure that the Ottomans were particularly motivated by a desire to spread Islam or destroy Christendom. And I think sometimes historians have over-emphasised that aspect to it. And I think that's a bit problematic, really. Let's go into this, because it's up. What do you think, Andrew? Well, Andrew Eichl. Metternich said that Asia begins at a Landisstra,

which is the road east out of Vienna. And there was this idea that a different world existed as soon as you got beyond the lighter, which was the boundary putting in. Hungary and the Austrian provinces. It was a sort of another world. It was a savage and barbaric world. And that was nothing really directly

to do with the Ottomans, I think. It was just simply that the sense of being Ottoman, the cruelty, the way in which they worked, somehow suffused the people that lived there, so that it was almost to do with the territory, the territory between Western civilization that stopped at Vienna,

all the way through to the Balkans. And there's a kind of myth that runs through from that time onwards, Even after the Austrians had taken back the whole of Hungary, they'd eventually taken back Belgrade, they even had hopes of going to Serbia and so on, that this was a world that was strange and alien to them. And they were frightened of it.

And you can read right through the 18th century how terrified they were of the Turks coming back, helped in a way by the fact the Turks did keep on coming back and sometimes winning minor victories, but they were still savage victories where many, many Austrians were killed. I was just going to say, but at the same time that they have this thing, They do also have a lot of connections and alliances.

There's commercial, there's other military and political alliances going on. There's a lot of migration going backwards and forwards. A lot of interconnection on one level. And yet this sort of rhetorical level of hostility put on top, I think. I think that Siege of Vienna is crucially important for the deep history of Austria and southern Germany. I think societies have deep histories. For example, the deep history in Britain is one of the things you were talking about, or England, one of the things you were talking about last week on Magna Carta.

Now, this deep history, which is one of the things when you've noticed the Pope's recent comments on Islam, in a way he is reflecting a kind of collective impression in which there was this sense of being under challenge, this sense of being under threat. And obviously, as in all situations like this, there is not continual conflict all the time. There is not, you know, what Claire and Andrew is saying is absolutely correct. But nevertheless, there is this collective memory of tension, animosity, of antagonism. which we don't really understand, and it helps to explain why in Austria, this issue of the expansion of the potential expansion of the European Union to include Turkey,

is a far more emotive issue for an Austrian than it will ever be for a Brit. Finally, Andrew, do we underestimate the easternness of east of Austria on the European continent? I mean, I agree with clear. I think there was this kind of interpolation between the two. There are boundaries, but many, many boundaries. there may be village boundaries, town boundaries, boundaries for different people. But I love this idea of deep history, Jeremy. I think that's absolutely what it is.

And that might be another programme. Thank you very much, Claire Norton, Andrew Weedcroft and Jeremy Black. And next week we're talking about the evolutionary history of the whale. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.com. Thank you.