1672 to 1680.
The suppression of the dangerous conspiracy above described—however on many grounds we may sympathise with its authors—can hardly be considered in itself other than as an event favourable to the interests of Christian Europe. Unfortunately, however, the Austrian Government, not satisfied with the severity exercised on the leading conspirators, wreaked its impolitic and unjustifiable revenge upon the kingdom of Hungary at large. It was treated as a conquered country. The Protestant churches were closed; the preachers who declined to subscribe to conditions incompatible with the exercise of their functions were arrested, banished, and in some instances condemned to the galleys. Resistance and civil war ensued, more fertile in atrocities even than war with the Turk. The adherents of either party, as usual in cases of intestine strife, adopted popular designations long remembered for the misfortunes with which they were associated. The national partisans were called Kuruzzen, probably a corruption of Kreuzer, or cross-bearer; and the German lanzknecht was modified into the term Labanz. Each impaled, or flayed, or roasted the other on every opportunity. The Kuruzzen not unfrequently passed the Austrian frontier, reviving, wherever they appeared, recollections of the atrocities of the Sackman. The name to this day is coupled with that of the Turks in Lower Austria. Then, as at subsequent periods, the insurgents received aid and encouragement from France, and in 1679 they were even joined by a force levied in Poland, and officered by Frenchmen. The young Tekeli also came forward to wreak his vengeance upon Austria. He defeated the Imperialists in several encounters, and even led his forces, joined by hordes of Tartar cavalry, to the walls of Neustadt, over the March field, and far into Moravia. A pestilence which brokeout in this year could hardly persuade man to resign to the powers of nature the task of decimating his species; and it was not till the mortality of disease had reached an awful pitch that the spirit of mutual destruction came to a pause. In 1681 a diet was convened at Œdenburg with views of reconciliation, and attended by the Emperor in person. A palatine was elected, old privileges and institutions, the power of the Ban, and the frontier militia were revived, the licence of arbitrary taxation restrained, a general amnesty conceded, and the laws of the empire re-established, under which religious freedom was to be enjoyed by the professors of the Helvetic or Augsburg forms of Protestantism. The disruption, however, had gone too far to allow of a speedy and solid reunion of parties. The spirit of ambition and revenge in the bosom of Tekeli was not to be appeased even by the concession of his marriage with the widow of Rakoczy, which conveyed into his hands the important fortress of Munkacs. The deputies of the Austrian Government also betrayed unfortunate and unreasonable indications of a lurking tendency to revengeful measures. The Hungarians, on the other hand, considered merely as their due the concessions obtained from the Emperor. At last the parties agreed so far as to determine upon sending an embassy to Constantinople, with the purpose of obtaining a prolongation of the twenty years’ truce, which was about to expire. Count Albert Caprara was the envoy selected. He left Vienna in February, 1682, with a large suite and rich presents, and instructions to spare no pains for the avoidance of a Turkish war. The utter fruitlessness of his mission was apparent to him from the date of his arrival at Constantinople. He found the war party in that city, with the Vizier Kara Mustapha at its head, eager to avail themselves of the distractions of Hungary, which Tekeli’s emissaries could hardly exaggerate in their reports. Troops were sent before his face to the assistance of the rebels, and the conditions of peace demanded by the Porte were such as to extinguish all hope of an accommodation. An annual tribute of 50,000 dollars was demanded in the first instance, the surrender of the territory between the Theiss and the Waag to the Turks, and of several places of strength to Tekeli. The latter was also to be recognized as Prince of UpperHungary, and of equal rank with the Prince of Transylvania. Finally, the restitution of all the confiscated estates of the conspirators was insisted upon. Troops poured in from Asia and Egypt to support these pretensions, and swell the European forces collecting under the eye of the ambassador; and the demands of the Turks rose with the tidings they now received of the progress of the arms of Tekeli, till at last they claimed the fortresses of Raab, Komorn, and Szathmar, and an indemnification for their war expenses of six million dollars. The ambassador saw the futility of further attempts at negotiation. His firm but temperate reply to the Vizier Kara Mustapha procured him the treatment of a prisoner of state. His couriers were detained, and he was reduced to despatch the tidings of Turkish insolence and preparation by secret messengers, and by the way of Venice to Vienna. He himself was compelled to accompany the Turkish army of invasion on its march. There was but too much ground for the Turkish confidence. The undefended condition of the Austrian frontier, the general inadequacy of the military preparations of that power, were known and appreciated at Constantinople; but it also happened that three Arabian astrologers had predicted the reduction of Vienna, the fall of the West Romish Empire, and moreover the further advance of the armies of the faithful to Rome and to the Rhine. Even without respect to such prophecies as these, the moment was propitious for reducing to entire subjection the long disputed kingdom of Hungary; and the influence of Kara Mustapha, eager for war, prevailed against the serious opposition of the Ulema, of the mother Sultana, Validè, and even against the inclination of the unwarlike Sultan Mohammed himself. The Vizier, while he dazzled the latter with splendid visions of ulterior conquest, was influenced in secret by ambition on his own account. He destined for himself the plunder of Vienna, and he considered his own advancement to the throne of Hungary, at least as a tributary to the Porte, a reasonable and attainable reward for his anticipated success as leader of the army of the faithful. His influence with the Sultan, exerted to the utmost, gained the ascendancy over that of the Sultana. He contrived to win over the chief of his spiritual opponents. The soldiery, including that formidable body the Janissaries, were naturally of the faction which promisedthem plunder and blood. The strong party which appealed by various methods against the injustice of the war was silenced by harsh measures; and by the autumn of 1682 the army was in motion under the immediate command of the Vizier, and accompanied by the Mufti and the principal dignitaries of the empire. It was halted, and encamped for the winter, at Adrianople, to refresh the contingents which had marched from the more distant Asiatic provinces, and to prepare for effective operations in the spring. Here also it was joined by the Sultan, the pomp and expenditure of whose progress, and especially the hundred carriages devoted to the female portion of his retinue, moved the soldiery to rough comparisons with the practice of Murad IV., who took the field with one wife and two pages. The army had to contend with those autumnal rains which more than once had impeded under Soliman the progress of similar expeditions. The superstition of the people interpreted these incidents of climate into omens of failure; but the Vizier, though his own tent was swept away by an inundation which, on the first night after the troops were halted, ravaged the camp, was unshaken in his purpose, and the horse-tails continued planted before the royal residence in the direction of Hungary. The tedium of winter quarters was relieved by a royal chase, for which 30,000 peasants were collected to drive the game. The result, if the beaters themselves are not reckoned, was small—one wild boar, six roes, and thirty hares—but a much larger number of the beaters perished from exhaustion. Where the Sultan met with their corpses he observed that they had probably spoken ill of him, and had met with their reward—a safe and satisfactory assumption. In the following spring, while the army was mustered in presence of the Sultan, a still more violent storm occurred, which among other exploits of its fury carried off the turban from the head of the sovereign. Undeterred by this omen, the Sultan accompanied the march of his army as far as Belgrade, where on the 12th May he received the ambassadors of Tekeli. Here, however, he also received intelligence of an event which, could his Arabian soothsayers have predicted its results, might still have made him pause in the prosecution of his purpose. This was no less than the signature of an alliance between the Emperor and John Sobieski, king of Poland. On thefollowing day he committed the green standard of the Prophet, and with it the chief command, to the Vizier, who undertook the further conduct of the campaign uncontrolled by the presence of a master who had not the taste of his earlier ancestors for the fatigues of the march or the dangers of the field. The strength of the regular force with which he took the field is known with accuracy from the muster-roll which was found in his tent in the lines at Vienna. We thus find the total strength of the regular troops amounting to 275,000 men. The attendants on baggage, commissariat, camels, horses, &c., were never numbered, and would be difficult to calculate. If we add the force which afterwards joined the Turks under Tekeli, including 12,000 Tartars, 13,000 Janissaries, and 2000 Spahis, and amounting in all to 60,000 fighting men, we cannot estimate the numbers which poured into Hungary at less than 400,000. The approach of the Turkish army, following upon his own successes, excited the pride of Tekeli to the utmost. He assumed the title of Duke of Hungary, and threatened with banishment and even with death all who should fail to appear at a Diet which he summoned to assemble at Kaschau. He struck coins, now become rare, with his own likeness, and the legend, “Emericus Comes Tekly in Kaesmarki, Dux Ungariæ,” and on the obverse a naked sword with the words “Pro Deo et Patriâ.” Several French officers and engineers served in his forces, in pursuance of the unworthy policy of Louis XIV., whose jealousy of the House of Hapsburg rejected no means, however disgraceful, and no ally, however discreditable; and overlooked all the evil consequences to Christendom of the success of the schemes he thus supported. The last proposals for peace conveyed from the Austrian court to Tekeli, by the Baron Sapomara, were haughtily rejected. At Essek, where he was received with royal honours by the Vizier, he accepted at the hands of the latter his investiture as Prince of the kingdom of Hungary, which he acknowledged subject to the Porte. With all his pomp, and after all his exploits, he was but what J. Zapolya had been before him, a scourge in the hands of Providence to a miserable country, a tool and catspaw to the Sultan and the Sultan’s slaves.