The Battle of Vienna, 1683

In July of 1683 the Ottoman Empire laid siege to Vienna, the seat of the Habsburg emperors. The Grand Vizier, Kara Mustafa, had come up the Danube with an army that nobody in the city could count and everybody in the city tried to, and Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg stayed inside the walls to hold them with a garrison of some fifteen thousand men. Relief, if it came, would have to come over the wooded hills that overlook the city.

Vienna was two months from the end and knew the number.

Kara Mustafa did not storm the walls, because he did not need to. He dug. That was the correct decision and it was very nearly the winning one. His sappers ran trenches forward toward the Burg bastion and the ravelin, closer every week, and where the trenches reached the ditch they went underneath and packed the galleries with powder.

A mine does not knock a wall down the way a gun does. It lifts it. The stone goes up and comes back as rubble and the breach is open before the defenders on it have finished falling. Vienna’s garrison spent August and the first week of September countermining, digging toward the sound of Ottoman digging in the dark, listening through the earth for men listening back, and where they found a gallery they broke into it and fought in it, underground, in the dark, with knives.

By the first week of September the outer defences were going. The ravelin was taken. Starhemberg had perhaps a few thousand men still standing out of fifteen thousand, and dysentery was doing more than the mines were, and he was signalling the hills with rockets at night because it was the only way left to ask.

On the sixth of September an army came over the Danube and into the Wienerwald, and Kara Mustafa did not stop it in the passes, which is the mistake the whole campaign turned on. Seventy thousand or so: Imperial troops under Charles of Lorraine, Saxons, Bavarians, Franconians, and the Poles under their king, Jan Sobieski, who had the overall command because everyone agreed he should.

They spent the eleventh getting up the Kahlenberg, hauling guns up a wooded mountain in the dark. At first light on the twelfth they came down it.

It took all day. The infantry on the left went first and ground forward village by village through vineyards and terraces while the Ottomans fed troops across to meet them, and the fighting there was as hard as anything on this record, and almost nobody remembers it, because of what happened at six in the evening.

The cavalry had come down onto the open ground on the right, Polish and Imperial and German together. Sobieski put eighteen thousand of them into one line, with three thousand winged hussars at its head and himself at the head of those, and sent it at the Ottoman camp.

I have been present at every large thing men have done to each other and I will tell you plainly that there has not been another one of those. Not that size, not in one movement, not before and not since. The ground went. The Ottoman line did not break so much as cease to be a line, and inside three hours the camp was taken with the tents standing and the guns in place and the Grand Vizier’s own treasury in it, and Kara Mustafa was riding south with what he could hold together.

He got as far as Belgrade. On Christmas Day his own janissaries strangled him with a silk cord on the Sultan’s order, which is the ending the histories usually give the story, and they are welcome to it. It was not the interesting part.

Here is the interesting part. In those three hours I was slower than they were. It has happened perhaps twice. Eighteen thousand horses at the gallop over open ground move faster than the thing I do, and for a little while that evening the front of that charge was ahead of me, and men were already down before I reached where they had been standing.

I caught up. I always catch up. But I want it written down that for the length of one charge on one evening in September, something human outran me.