The Ottoman Siege of Vienna

STEVE KOGAN writes:

In the winter of 1933 at the age of nineteen, the English travel writer and World War II hero Patrick Leigh Fermor began a trip through Europe that he later described in a series of works drawn from his notes, journals, memories, and reflections. The first book is titled A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube. The following passage is taken from his chapter on Vienna:

I had never understood till now how near the Turks had got to taking Vienna. Of the first seige in Tudor times there were few memories in the museums. But the evidence of the second, more than a century later, and of the narrow escape of the city, was compellingly laid out. There were quivers and arrows and quarrels and bow-cases and tartar bows, scimitars, khanjars, yatagans, lances, bucklers, drums, helmets damascened and spiked and fitted with arrowy nasal-pieces; the turbans of janissaries, a pasha’s tent, cannon and flags and horesetail banners with the bright brass crescents. Charles of Lorraine and John Sobieski caracoled in their gilded frames and the breastplate of Rüdiger v. Starhemberg, the town’s brave defender, gleamed with oiling and burnishing. (When John Sobieski of Poland met the Emperor on horseback in the fields after the city was saved, the two sovereigns conversed in Latin for want of a common tongue.) . . .

A huge wall encircled the roofs of the city. Eagle banners fluttered fom the gables and the battlements and above them loomed many of the towers and steeples I could see when I looked out of the windows. . . .  Hundreds of tents encompased the walls; spahis and janissaries pressed forward; the wild cavalry of the Khan of Krim Tartary scoured the woods and bristling regiments of lancers moved about like counter-marching cornfields. . . . And lo! Even as I looked, the same guns, captured and melted down and recast as bells when the Moslems were driven downstream, were peacefully chiming the hour from the steeple of St. Stephen’s.

It had been a close run thing. What if the Turks had taken Vienna, as they nearly did, and advanced westward? And suppose the Sultan with half the east at heel, had pitched his tents outside Calais? A few years before, the Dutch had burned a flotilla of men-of-war at Chatham. Might St. Paul’s, only half re-built, have ended with minarets instead of its two bell-towers and a different emblem twinkling on the dome? The muezzin’s wail over Ludgate Hill? The moment of retrospective defeatism set off new speculations: that wall – fortifications two and a half miles in length and sixty yards wide – had once enclosed the Inner City with a girdle of rampart and fosse. Like the fortifications of Paris which gave way to the outer boulevards in the last century, they were pulled down and replaced by the leafy thoroughfare of the Ring. Very much in character, the Viennese of the late ’50’s whirled and galloped about the ballrooms to the beat of Strauss’s new “Demolition-Polka,” composed in celebration of the change. But for as long as it stood, that massive wall of defensive masonry, twice battered by the Turkish guns and twice manned by the desperate Viennese, had been, for all its additions, materially the same as the great wall of the thirteenth century, and the cost of building it, I learnt with excitement, had been paid for by the English ransom of Richard Coeur de Lion. So the King’s fury on the the battlements of Acre had been the first link in a chain which, five centuries later, had helped to save Christendom from the paynims? The thought of this unconscious and delayed-action crusading filled me with keen delight.

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