Muddling through, purposefully
A few excerpts from The Enemy at the Gate, Andrew Wheatcroft’s excellent history of the 1683 siege of Vienna and its aftermath:
The Habsburg domains never had much of a military tradition, relying instead on local institutions, employing mercenaries, or encouraging individuals to recruit (and pay for) their own bands of irregulars. In stark contrast to the military state created by the Ottomans, it was a makeshift arrangement. The Landeszeughaus demonstrated the power of the rich city, but it also showed the basic amateurism that marked Austria’s war-making.
The Landeszeughaus, Graz
The Austrian historian Michael Hochedlinger, describing this ‘belated great power’, put it rather neatly: a ‘splendid baroque surface, it perhaps had more of a trompe l’oeil and resembled a colossus on feet of clay, whose fate was always hanging by a thread’.
These two ideas - the deception of surface and the deceit of trompe l’oeil - were characteristic of the Habsburgs.
The Belvedere, Prinz Eugen’s palace in Vienna (source)
These qualities were inherent in the tradition of purposefully muddling through (weiterwursteln) which, many critics averred, was the Habsburg version of progress…
Real victories were unfamiliar to the Habsburgs: more often than not, from the early sixteenth century, their skill had been to turn defeat into victory by artful propaganda. The endless and inconclusive Long War between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs from 1593 to 1606 was made to look like a triumph, in which the failures were glossed over and the successes magnified. But in the second Long War, from 1683 to 1699, followed by a short reprise from 1716 to 1718, there were real triumphs on an unparalleled scale.
There had been a string of six miraculous victories, which people could recite like a litany.
The first, of course, was the salvation of Vienna by King John Sobieski of Poland.
The Poles save Vienna with the largest cavalry charge in the history of the world (source)
The second was Charles of Lorraine storming Buda in 1686 with the old pasha lying dead by the gate.
Back in Buda (source)
The third was the Battle of Nagyhársany in 1687, often called ‘the second Mohács’, the capstone to Charles of Lorraine’s triumphs; the memory of Suleiman I destroying the old Kingdom of Hungary at Mohács in 1526 had finally been redeemed.
The fourth victory was the Elector Max Emmanuel of Bavaria’s who captured Belgrade, the city of battles, in 1688; the Turks recaptured it the following year.
Belgrade, 1684 (source)
‘Türkenlouis’ destroyed the Turkish army at the Battle of Slankamen in 1691.
(source)
In the sixth battle at Zenta in 1697 Prince Eugene of Savoy humiliated the Sultan Mustafa…. The Habsburg army’s sudden and unanticipated arrival surprised and shocked the Ottomans. Who was in command? The sultan was on one bank and the Grand Vizier on the other. They were even more surprised when, instead of the slow positional manoeuvring that they associated with western armies, he adopted a typically Ottoman tactic. As the light was beginning to fail, the entire Habsburg force, with the cavalry on each wing and the infantry in the centre, launched an immediate all-out assault on the protected bridgehead, enveloping it on all sides.
The real end of the Reconquest came only after one final war waged between 1716 and 1718… The Turks crossed the Danube close to Karlowitz, in sight of the place where the treaty was signed in 1699, and moved rapidly north towards Petrovaradin [Novi Sad, Serbia], where they began to lay siege to the newly rebuilt fortress. The general who faced them was, once again, Prince Eugene, fighting on ground that he knew well and the Turks did not. On 5 August 1716, he trapped the Grand Vizier’s huge army against the anvil of the fiercely defended fortress that loomed above the flat landscape along the Danube and in the network of streams and rivers around it…
The Grand Vizier was in an untenable position, attacked on one side by the garrison of Petrovaradin and on the other by Eugene’s vengeful army. At Zenta he had forced them into the river to drown, now he destroyed them with waves of cavalry, remorseless artillery and musket fire.
(source)
Those who fought in the battle remembered the sudden summer snowstorm that turned the land and the soldiers white. In the Austrian ranks it was whispered that the Virgin Mary herself had thrown her protection over them.