July 25th, Vienna. The Ottoman engineers work in the dark, chipping away at the stony soil with pickaxes and
judging distance with twine.
20 feet above at surface level, other engineers are creating trench works, throwing boards on top for a roof and heaping them with earth,
so that the soldiers can approach the enemy defenses under cover.
They're also setting up sandbag positions for the artillery, but down here
there's only cold earth and the toneless music of tools on stone
When the men emerge to rest the Sun makes them squint. Finally their officer measures the distance and nods.
Directly beneath the enemy. The men pile bags of gunpowder at the end of a tunnel and lay a long fuse.
An engineer then touches a candle to the fuse, blows on it, and waits patiently
Once it glows, he begins to run.
The first day of the siege, Vienna panicked. A teenage boy dressed in women's clothing
possibly an actor or a saboteur in disguise threw burning wood and straw into the city's arsenal.
The door of the powder storage caught fire,
Though soldiers extinguished it before the whole arsenal went up.
The arsonist barely made it around the block before a crowd of citizens
tore him apart with their bare hands.
The mob was so consumed with fear, they didn't even consider his value as a prisoner.
They'd heard what happened in fortress towns outside Vienna.
When they resisted, Ottoman troops had beheaded the leading citizens and pressed the rest into slavery.
Vienna had received the same offer from Kara Mustafa.
Surrender and live in peace as Muslims or Christians, or resist and condemn yourself to death and slavery.
The city's commander Starhemberg chose resistance.
But those initial days of panic were done. And now the siege was grueling, bloody routine.
The engineer George Rimbler had finished his earthworks.
The city already had an old medieval wall studded with defensive towers and earlier,
The defenders had planted triangular fortress islands, Revelins, into the dry moat that channeled attackers into overlapping fields of fire.
Rimbler had augmented this by building an earthen rampart at the top the slope leading up to the steep moat,
studding it with block houses and bunkers that had to be taken one by one.
And in front of those fortifications, he built a spiked palisade.
Now, enemies had to take multiple layers of defenses, and those tunneling towards the city
would emerge in the moat with musket fire pouring down on them from front and behind.
Rimbler had also strengthened the Revelins with extra defenses and dug trenches between all of the earthworks so defenders could reinforce
positions under assault. The heaviest defenses though were in front of the palace.
Rimbler knew that that's where the Ottomans would hit them.
It was the longest stretch of wall without a tower and it was flat and dry for easy digging. And Rimbler was right
The moment Kara Mustafa arrived he set up his command tent directly across from the palace while his troops surrounded the city
Charles of lorena across the river couldn't stop him, and within days Mustafa was testing rivers defenses.
Trenches zigzagged forward towards the Habsburg capital. But despite Kara Mustafa's vast advantage in numbers,
he had problems. The majority of his forces were levies, not professional soldiers.
And sure, they're useful for surrounding a city but not so great in an assault.
The Tartar horsemen were barely under his control, and they scoured the countryside.
Bad roads made him leave his heaviest cannons and mortars behind, and the gunpowder sent from the frontier territories was poor.
In fact when it rained he couldn't fire his cannons. And it rained a lot.
Through the first week of the siege, the Ottomans pushed forward toward the defense's inch-by-inch,
digging trenches, gathering forces, and unleashing waves of Janissaries on night raids to hit the palisade.
In this battle between trench and block house with soldiers mere feet from each other,
the primary weapon was not sword or musket, but instead the grenade.
Squads lit these bombs from brazzers and slowly marched hurling handheld, faulty explosives at each other.
Ottoman grenades were cased in glass and clay. They were lighter, and killed by sheer explosive blast.
But the Hapsburg grenades were iron and though heavy and short ranged, caused hideous shrapnel wounds. The toll was heavy.
But Starhemberg refused a truce to collect the fallen. So as they advanced, inch by inch,
Ottoman soldiers had to march past their dead comrades from previous attacks.
And to top it all off, winter was coming.
That's what had doomed Suleiman when he tried to take the city back in 1529: The bitter cold. The Grand Vizier
swore history would not repeat itself, because soon his mining tunnels would be ready.
July 25th, the palisade.
Night was falling on the defenses as Rimbler inspected his works.
He was concerned. The day before, the Ottomans had detonated two mines at the end of the line, then tried to storm the broken palisade.
Both assaults had failed,
but they would only keep coming. And inside the city, Starhemberg had citizens listening in their cellars.
Rumors said Turks were infiltrating through the sewers, and during Mass that morning, a cannonball had smashed into
Saint Stephen's Cathedral and struck the organ. But here, on the line, things still looked pretty solid.
Then the earth lept upward. Rimbler saw sky and earth intermingle, and he crashed down the wrong way.
Stones rained down. He tried to wipe the dirt from his eyes and found his arm wouldn't respond.
It was shot through with splinters from the shattered palisade.
Screams rang out, men scattered.
Garrison soldiers flooded the ruined gap, firing muskets and rolling grenades downhill.
One of Rimbler's engineers grabbed him and dragged him backward over the splintered, studded earth to relative safety.
The line was holding.
That attack would set the pattern for the next week and a half. An ottoman mine would explode,
attackers would surge into the gap, and defenders would sally from their trenches and block houses to drive them back.
The ottomans advanced, but the earthworks were slowing them. His defenses were working.
But Rimbler wouldn't live to see it.
He died in one of the city's makeshift hospitals. The man who had done the most to defend Vienna would receive none of the credit.
Yet by that time, Vienna's garrison were trying a new tactic: Counter mining.
Dug their own tunnels, worming toward the Ottoman lines.
Sometimes they sallied out into the enemy works, burning trench supports to destroy routes towards the city. And on occasion,
they detonated a mine beneath Ottoman defenses,
Disintegrating the earthworks the enemies had raised to fire down on the defenders.
Then there was the most confused, up-close fighting when two teams of miners
intercepted each other underground.
Now that was terrifying!
Earth would crumble away, revealing an enemy
so close you could see candlelight reflecting in his eyes.
At such times the tunnels descended into
shuffling melee, with miners swinging pickaxes, then retreating before the ceilings collapsed in on friend and foe alike.
And when they could they sealed enemy tunnels with grenades or powder barrels
Meanwhile, inside the city things were deteriorating.
During the beginning of the siege, Viennese citizens slipped the lines to trade food with the Ottomans, but Starhemberg stopped that,
worrying that it was an avenue for spies. So apart from a few cattle raids by the university students,
he effectively locked the citizens of Vienna inside. And despite his leadership,
the citizens began losing their grip as food ran low.
They ate household pets with some sardonic wit, renaming cats "roof rabbits".
*Zoe meows worriedly*
I'm with you Zoe, that's messed up.
Overcrowded and lacking sanitation, flux and dysentery chewed at the garrison.
As August dragged into September,
the Ottomans blew through the palisade and made a ramp up the first revelin, and the apocalyptic panic from the earlier days of the
siege returned. When the defenders took Ottoman prisoners,
they decapitated and filleted them, sometimes alive, and hung their skins on the city wall.
Then, on September 4th, the unthinkable happened. A roar from underground. 30 feet of medieval wall,
right next to the bastion, bowed up then collapsed. Through the gap, the shell-shocked defenders
Saw the Ottoman banners. Turkish batteries set up on the fallen defenses hammered the gap.
Janissaries breached the wall.
Musketeers sprinted in, trying to hold. They built a barricade of sandbags and cotton bales.
Engineers, having anticipated a breach, rolled a spiked obstacle in front. And they had been lucky.
The mine had detonated during a changing of the guard.
Therefore, the previous shift and the fresh soldiers, both uninjured in the blasts, loosed fire down the slope,
shooting blind into gunpowder smoke. Ottoman troops, sensing an end to this hellish siege,
sallied from tunnels and trenches to rush the gap. They focused fire on the defenders in the gap and nearby bastion,
trying to keep their heads down as their comrades tried to break through.
For two hours the Ottomans pushed, and for two hours the Viennese held. When the smoke cleared,
two-hundred defenders were dead, and the breach littered with Ottoman casualties. Vienna still resisted,
but it was clear that the city was days, if not hours from falling.
And three days later a mine took down to the other end of the wall, another desperate defense. In the distance
they could see five more tunnels burrowing toward them. Kara Mustafa was preparing for a general assault,
and Starhemberg only had four thousand men left.
He began fortifying the city, ready to fight for Vienna street-by-street. But while doing so,
Starhemberg was sending letters through the line, out to Lorraine and Leopold's court. They said a relief force was coming.
They'd said it for weeks. So where the heck were they, and could they make it in time?