Hey, everyone! Before we get started, we wanted to say something about these episodes.
This series was in production when we found out about the horrific terrorist attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand,
and we were sickened to see that the killers online manifesto and even their weapons referenced the siege of Vienna.
We at Extra Credits condemn racial violence
absolutely. Period. And when we put this topic up for vote we did so thinking an honest reading of the event would help undercut
disingenuous readings of it as some deathmatch between Christianity and Islam. The truth is far more complex.
And as always, we want to combat bad information with good and while we already plan to say all of this in our lies episode,
given recent events, we wanted to make that explicit upfront. In the description below, we've included links to relief organizations
we've donated to, helping the victims of the shooting and if it's within your means we urge you to do the same.
Please be good to each other,
look after your neighbors and do all you can to make sure that hate has no place in our society.
Thanks for listening, onto the show.
July 7th, 1683.
Emperor Leopold heard Mass
that morning, continuing his normal schedule as if enemy troops were not loose in his country. The head of the Holy Roman Empire and
defender of the faith may have been bookish
but he was also calm in a crisis. A courtier arrives. News from the field
The Turks have broken out. Dust from their march rising in great columns.
Tartar horsemen are ravaging the only troops blocking the advance. An Ottoman army is headed for Vienna.
Leopold can't stay.
His sons are both below the age of five; his wife pregnant and his closest heir the king of Spain, lies on his deathbed.
He makes the sensible decision to run. So that evening a convoy of fine carriages pulls out of Vienna.
Over 100,000 Ottoman troops are heading for the city.
But only 15,000 men defend its walls. They have only six days to prepare. How long can they hold?
But this siege began as an idea in Istanbul, over a year before.
Mehmed the Fourth was a student of history. Like Leopold,
he loved nothing more than spending his days in the palace library,
poring over accounts and records of the Empire. It helped him understand his country's history and where he stood in it.
He'd read how in 1453, his predecessor Mehmed the Second had conquered Constantinople.
The great city of Istanbul where he now ruled.
When his ancestors did that, they had become the inheritors of the Roman Empire, by right of conquest.
Among his other titles Mehmed was Caesar of Rome
But a year before that conquest,
an Austrian Duke of the Habsburg line rallied enough support from the elector counts to get crowned as a Holy Roman Emperor.
There couldn't be two heirs of Rome, and to the Ottomans, these German Kings were pretenders.
Mehmed knew that since then, the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs had battled for supremacy,
expanding towards each other as the kingdom of Hungary, which separated them, fell apart.
Now that land was a mixed frontier of Ottoman and Hapsburg forts, as much Western Asia as it was Eastern Europe.
Mehmed read how his predecessors had made great gains there, and he had to.
Indeed. The Empire was at its greatest extent ever. In 1529,
his ancestor Suleiman had even besieged the Hapsburg capital of Vienna. And he would have taken it, too,
if not for an early winter and though he had been a good custodian of the state, Mehmed knew his
accomplishments didn't measure up to those storied ancestors. To truly live in history,
he would have to do more than take further bites out of Ukraine.
But Mehmed's Grand Vizier, Kara Mustafa Pasha, had an audacious plan.
He too had something to prove.
His family had served as viziers to the Ottoman Sultans for a quarter century, and had helped the Empire reach its current height.
But Kara Mustafa was also adopted, and perhaps felt a need to prove himself worthy of his family legacy.
So he proposed that they outdo the Sultan's namesake. the great Mehmed the Second had plucked the red apple of Constantinople,
but they would finally pick the golden apple, the place that had evaded even the Sultan's illustrious ancestors.
Vienna. It was a bold plan.
One that would humiliate the Hapsburgs, seize their trade routes, and create a bastion to secure their territory in the Balkans, Hungary and Ukraine.
And though it was true that the city was a long way off, at the farthest limits of the Empire's striking distance, the prospect wasn't ludicrous.
In fact, 1682 was the best time in a century to take Vienna. See, for the last two decades,
the empires had been at peace, and Leopold had used that period of calm to refocus his military on guarding his western borders from French encroachment.
The eastern sector was neglected and Ottoman spies reported that more modern earthworks around Vienna crumbled from inattention.
The city's stone wall was still medieval. Its blocks held together by gravity,
rather than mortar,
meaning the city's defense was akin to sort of a giant Jenga tower.
Ottoman artillery only had to knock some blocks out and the whole thing would come tumbling down.
Heck, it sounds like Zoe could do that job if she was bored enough. Sorry, back to it.
In addition, the deeply Catholic Hapsburgs brutal oppression of Protestants had unsettled their rule in Hungary.
The Ottomans had long experience backing Protestant unrest,
and some on the frontier even considered the Muslim Empire a more tolerant ruler than the Catholic Hapsburgs.
So if they marched on Vienna, Protestants would rally to their aid.
So in January of 1682, Kara Mustafa formally declared war on the Holy Roman Empire.
Austrian diplomats watched as two Janissaries planted horsehair standards outside the palace in Istanbul.
It was an old tradition, one that recalled the Ottomans origins as nomadic horse tribesmen migrating out of Central Asia.
Because while Islamic, the Ottoman Turks had retained their distinct culture.
And for centuries, this gesture meant to prepare for war.
But in Vienna, Leopold and his ministers dismissed these reports. The real threat, they reasoned, was France.
The Ottomans were planning some kind of frontier incursion.
Probably to take a few forts, or at most cutting north to hit the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Meanwhile, the Ottoman army gathered. The Corps came first.
Elite horseback archers, levies from North Africa, Arabia, Egypt, and Anatolia,
huge artillery pieces, a baggage-train of camels, siege engineers adept at tunneling below enemy walls and bringing them down with gunpowder charges, and the famous Janissaries;
Elite assault troops drilled with swords and heavy bore muskets. Each carrying a bag of grenades,spheres of glass or clay encasing handfuls of powder.
Once, long ago, Janissaries had been Christian children taken as a tithe, converted, and indoctrinated as soldiers.
But now they were a privileged class, and families jockeyed to place their sons in their ranks.
Each unit was a sworn brotherhood, every man marked with a tattoo giving his serial number and unit designation.
As the army marched out of the capital, the Janissaries Supreme Commander, the man whose tattoo was a simple number, 1, traveled with them; the Sultan himself.
Now in the European imagination, Ottoman soldiers were a savage horde.
But in truth, this army was organized down to the smallest detail.
Every squad had a sleeping tent and a cooking pot.
They had mobile latrines tents, enough food to sustain them for the whole campaign, and even designated cobblers.
In fact, Ottoman military planners had calculated how long a Janissary could march before his shoes would need new soles.
Talk about crossing I's and dotting T's, both of which are not in the word shoes.
Let's move on. As they moved into the frontier, Protestant levees joined them, their numbers swelling to 140,000.
But when they reached Belgrade, the Sultan handed command to his Grand Vizier and turned back; Ceremonial Deniability.
If Kara Mustafa succeeded, the Sultan would take credit.
But if he failed, the blame would be his alone, and it was only then at the end of March,
1683, that the Grand Vizier informed his officers of their target and sent a final declaration of war to Vienna.
When the message arrived, Leopold realized he'd lost time dismissing the Ottoman threat.
He dispatched diplomats to John III Sobieski, the king of Poland and the Grand Duke of Lithuania.
Proposing a mutual defense pact, the 54 year old king elected to the throne on the strength of his military record readily agreed.
Should the Turks attack Krakow, Vienna would send aid, and you know vice-versa, not that they would ever dare.
Still thinking Poland was the target, the Emperor appointed his brother-in-law,
Charles Duke of Lorraine, as head of his army, though
an aristocrat, Charles was an experienced military officer, but also an eccentric one.
He dressed in high fashion,
but let his clothes wear out until they were stained and torn. His wig literally rotted off his head.
But he was also infamously durable in his career.
He'd survived head wounds, smallpox, and a nose dive off a bridge.
To command Vienna's garrison, Leopold picked count Ernst von Starhemberg, a man with an unremarkable military record,
but a steely disposition that might come in handy yet. The most important defender was not a duke or count, but a fabulously expensive
mercenary. George Rimbler was a German military engineer who'd written a treatise on fort design.
He'd also faced the Ottomans before and knew their siege capabilities.
For months, Rimbler worked day and night to modernize Vienna's crumbling outer earthworks, ditches, and revlons,
triangular platforms meant to funnel attackers into kill zones. Rimbler sunk pointed stakes into the earthworks to create
fences and fighting platforms. And though simple, when wrecked by cannonballs or mines, these wooden
palisades turned into debris fields that slowed or halted attacking infantry.
Stone, by contrast, collapsed into easily scalable piles and
then came July 7th. The day. Too late. Far too late that Leopold realized
Vienna was the target. Panic gripped the district. The city's nobles fled along with the Emperor.
60,000 of the city's wealthy took to the road, replaced by refugees from the countryside.
Rimbler and Starhemberg madly tried to finish the defenses. Torching
the city's outskirts to clear a field of fire. Charles took the army into a blocking position,
but he'd underestimated the Ottomans speed. By the time he deployed, the dust plumes of enemy cavalry were already behind him.
He fought his way clear and sent the infantry to bolster. The city's defenses spiriting his cavalry into the woods,
hoping to keep Vienna's supply lines open. and on July 14th, the Ottomans arrived at Vienna. Two days later,
cavalry stormed the smoking outskirts of the city throwing back the defenders and securing a base of operations. A
place for Kara Mustafa to draw up his artillery on the walls.
Vienna defenders saw smoke jet from the line of cannons.
Pencil lines appeared in the sky. The arc of incoming cannon fire. Then behind them the crack of lead on stone.
Broken glass coughed outward. A church steeple crumbled, then another. Any high tower, any house that poked above the earth
fortifications became a target. Vienna was burning and there was nothing to do but hold.
*Richard Lobo did the subtitles for this video