September 13.
At sunrise of the 13th the Viennese rushed forth in crowds to taste the first sweets of their liberation from a two months’ imprisonment. The only gate yet open, the Stuben, was soon clogged with the multitude, and the greater number clambered over the rubbish of the breaches, eager to gratify in the Turkish camp their curiosity, or their rapacity, or both. With respect to the more transportable articles of value, the Pole had been before them; but in the article of provisions there was yet much for hungry men to glean. Prices rapidly fell, and superfluity succeeded to starvation.
Among those who sought the camp with other purposes than plunder or curiosity, was the good Bishop Kollonitsch. His inexhaustible benevolence found employment there in collecting and saving some 500 infants, whose mothers, many of them, as is supposed, Turkish women, had perished by the swords of their ruthless masters. The King mentions one instance of a beautiful child whom he saw lying with its skull cloven; but in general even Turkish inhumanity had shrunk from the task of child-murder. These, with many half-murdered mothers and some Christian adult survivors of the massacre, the Bishop transported to the city in carriages, at his own cost, and took measures for the future support and education of the infants thus rescued. Popes may spare themselves the trouble of the forms, the ceremonies, and the intrigues necessary for adding such names as that of Kollonitsch to the list of saints in the Romish calendar: the recital of these actions puts the Devil’s advocate out of court, and the simple record, though traced by a Protestant pen, is their best canonization. Another worthy member of the church, the Father Aviano, had recently performed a service for which the Duke of Lorraine and the army had doubtless reason to thankhim. As confessor to the Emperor he had used his influence to prevent the latter from embarrassing the army with his presence at Crems, and distracting men and officers from their duty by the etiquettes and ceremonies which that presence would have inflicted, and the intrigues which it would have fostered. On the news, however, of the victory, the Emperor had dropped down the river as far as Durrenstein, and thither the Duke of Lorraine despatched the Count Auersperg with the details of the late occurrences. At tenA. M.of the 13th, the Commandant Stahremberg issued forth from the walls he had so stoutly defended to visit the camp and exchange congratulations with the leaders of the liberating army. On this morning, too, the Duke of Lorraine and the Elector of Saxony met with the King of Poland for the first time since the mass of the Kahlenberg. The meeting between all these worthies had every appearance, in the first instance, of cordiality. They perambulated the camp and the approaches together amid the acclamations of the troops; but when they entered the town, the King had the shrewdness soon to perceive that, though the gratitude of the people was as warm as the cordial and kindly nature of the Viennese could make it, its full expression was checked by authority. In two churches which he entered the people pressed to kiss his hand; but when a few voices uttered thevivat, which had evidently been forbidden by the police, he recognised at once in the clouded mien of the Austrian authorities that jealousy and ingratitude which proved afterwards the only guerdon of his vast services. At an angle of the wall between the Burg and Scottish gates, the King, wearied by the heat of the day, rested for awhile; a stone, with his name inscribed, marked the spot till the year 1809, when the French engineers blew up the rampart. In one of the above-mentioned churches, that of the Augustines, a grandTe Deumwas sung. The Abbé Coyer remarks that the magistracy were absent from this ceremony, which perhaps explains a passage in a letter of the King, in which he says:—“I perceive that Stahremberg is not on a good understanding with the magistrates of the city.” The sermon was preached from the famous text—“There was a man sent from God, and his name was John”—a happy plagiarism from the quotation of Scripture by Pope Pius V. on the occasion of the victory of Lepanto. The service concluded, 300cannon shots from the ramparts spread wide the intelligence of the relief of the city—no superfluous announcement; for in Wiener Neustadt and other places the trembling inhabitants had drawn a contrary conclusion from the sudden cessation of the firing, and thought the city lost. The King, after dining with the commandant, only delayed his departure to hold a long discourse with a man of much accomplishment, the court interpreter, Meninski, whose conversation had probably more charms for him than that of the dull notabilities by whom he was surrounded. He was himself a good linguist, and a proficient in the Turkish language. This over, he hastened to quit the scene of cold civilities for the camp. He was escorted to the gates by the populace. It may be mentioned that during the dinner an alarm was raised that the Turks had rallied, and were advancing. The King desired his officers present to leave the feast and mount, and was doubtless preparing to follow, when they returned with assurance of the falsehood of the report. This circumstance is mentioned in a very simple and detailed diary of the siege by the Doctor of Laws, Nicholas Hocke, one of the most curious of the many contemporary publications. The electors of Saxony and Bavaria appear to have been exempt from any share of the feeling of jealousy manifested by Austria. Both in the first hour of enthusiasm offered to accompany the King to the end of the world. The former indeed soon found his appetite for a Hungarian campaign subside, and shortly withdrew with his army to his electoral dominions. The younger Bavarian thought fit to pass a longer apprenticeship under so great a master in the art of war. The Duke of Lorraine had little exercise of his own discretion; he knew too well by what tenure the command of the army of Austria was held to do otherwise than reflect the livid colour of the spirit in which the hereditary sovereign of the House of Hapsburg contemplated the elective King of Poland. The King’s letters are full of complaints of the unworthy treatment which he daily received from the Duke and his subordinates; but we may charitably ascribe such mean conduct on the part of so great a commander to influence from above. In an early letter the King describes him by report as speaking little, and timidly, from the constant dread of infringing on the instructions of the court. Some jealous feeling was doubtless excited,and might be excused by the fact that the chances of battle had given the Polish sovereign and his army prior and exclusive possession of the spoils.
The King, immediately on his return to his quarters, directed a removal of them in advance. Some of his cavalry indeed were already on the track of the enemy, killing and taking prisoners in great numbers. There were cogent reasons, both political as well as military, for his removing himself as soon as possible from the immediate neighbourhood of Vienna. The heat of the autumnal season had made the camp and its environs one vast charnel, swarming with flies and vermin. This circumstance had caused the Duke of Lorraine to transfer his quarters from Ebersdorf to Mansdorf, and would alone have induced the King to follow such example. He was however also aware that his presence at Vienna was an obstacle to the expected entrance of the Emperor, who shrunk from any public acknowledgment of the services which had saved his crown from danger and his capital from destruction, at the expense of the most trifling infringement of etiquette, or the momentary concession of a point of which he was peculiarly tenacious. The practice, as regarded the reception of crowned heads in general, offered no difficulty. It was not derogatory to the Imperial dignity in French phraseology to give them the right; but the claim of an elective monarch to this distinction had always been disputed by Austria. “Je suis fort aise,” writes the King, “d’éviter toutes ces cérémonies.” He moved to the neighbourhood of Schwechat in the first instance. He writes on the 17th from Schonau, some fifteen miles from Vienna, on the road to Presburg, describing the interview which, after the removal of difficulties, did take place with the Emperor. The latter, having ascertained the departure of the King, landed at Nussdorf on the 19th, where he was received by the princes and other commanders of the German troops. After inspecting the camp and defences, he attended a solemn thanksgiving in the cathedral, at which the bishop Kollonitsch presided, and reviewed and thanked the burgher guard and free companies, &c. who lined the streets. On the 15th he reviewed the Bavarian forces near St. Marx, and afterwards took heart of grace and accomplished the dreaded interview with the King at Schwechat. That it ever took place at all was due, however, to the straightforward proceeding of the King, who, finding himself put off with excuses of the clumsiest manufacture, asked the courtier Schafgotsch the plain question whether the ceremonial of the right hand was or was not the cause of the delay. He extorted for once the plain answer, Yes, and gravely proposed an expedient for obviating the difficulty, which was, that the two sovereigns should meet face to face on horseback, and remain in that position, at the head the one of his army, the other of his suite; the one attended by his son, the other, as the head of the Empire, by the Electors. This happy expedient was accepted, and the interview took place.
The King’s own account of this singular interview is doubtless more to be depended upon than the numerous Austrian relations, which extol the condescension and cordiality of the Emperor.“Of the Electors, the Emperor was only accompanied by the Bavarian. Saxony had already quitted him. He had in his suite some fifty horsemen, employés, and ministers of his court. He was preceded by trumpets, and followed by body guards and ten foot attendants. I will not draw you a portrait of the Emperor, for he is well known. He was mounted on a Spanish bay horse. He wore an embroideredjuste au corps, a French hat, with an agrafe and red and white plumes; a belt mounted with sapphires and diamonds; a sword the same. I made him my compliments in Latin, and in few words.[17]He answered in prepared phrases in the same language. Being thus facing each other, I presented to him my son, who advanced and saluted him. The Emperor did not even put his hand to his hat. I remained like one terrified. He used the same behaviour towards the senators and Hetmans, and even towards his connexion the prince palatine of Belz.[18]To avoid scandal and public remarks, I addressed a few more words to the Emperor, after which I turned my horse round; we saluted, and I retook the route for my camp. The Palatine of Russia[19]showed my army to the Emperor, at his desire; but our people have been much provoked, and complain loudly that the Emperor did not deign to thank them, even with his hat, for all their pains and privations. Since this separation, every thing has suddenly changed; it is as if they knew us no longer. They give us neither forage nor provisions. The Pope had sent money for these to the Abbé Buonvisi, but he is stopped at Lintz.”
The King does not mention the words of his reply to the Emperor’s harangue, “I am glad, Sire, to have rendered you this small service.” The Emperor is said two days afterwards to have sent, with a present of a sword for Prince James, a clumsy apology for the silence and coldness of his demeanour.
We cannot certainly judge of passages like these by the standard of our present modes of European thought and action. There may be circumstances under which these apparent air-bubbles become ponderable realities. In dealing, for instance, with the Emperor of China, the slightest abandonment of a point of etiquette might involve the most serious consequences, and the concession of a diplomatist could perhaps only be retrieved by the guns of an admiral. At the worst we might smile at the pedantic tenacity of the courts of Vienna or Versailles of the seventeenth century on points of ceremonial and precedence, but no such considerations can temper the indignation which the perusal of Sobieski’s letters excites, at the practical and substantial ingratitude and neglect he experienced at the hands of Austria from the moment that his services ceased to be indispensable. That some quarrels and jealousies should arise from the juxtaposition of the Sclavonic and Teutonic elements was perhaps inevitable. To be cheated, starved, and neglected, is usually the lot of armies serving in the territory of an ally whom they cannot openly coerce and pillage; but the Polish sovereign had to endure more than this. His sick were denied boats to remove them down the river from the pestilential atmosphere of the camp; his dead, even the officers, were denied burial in the public cemeteries. Thestarving soldier who approached the town in search of provisions was threatened to be fired upon. The baggage, including that of the King, was pillaged—the horses of stragglers on their road to rejoin the army carried off by force—men on guard over the guns they had taken, robbed of their effects; and every complaint treated with cold neglect and every requisition dismissed almost without an answer. The royal tents, which before the battle, though, as the King observes, spacious enough, could not contain the throng of distinguished visitors, were now deserted, and the demeanour of the Duke of Lorraine himself and every other Austrian authority, showed that this treatment was deliberate and systematic. It may have been some satisfaction to Sobieski, it almost becomes one to his admirers now, to find that the Austrian government was impartial in its ingratitude, and exercised on others, besides the Poles, its singular talent for disgusting and offending those who had done it service. The Elector of Saxony, as we have seen, lost no time in withdrawing his person and his troops. The father Aviano departed for Italy, disgusted with the intrigues of the court and the licence of the camp. The Duke of Saxe Lauenburg retired, offended by the only instance in which the Emperor appears to have shown a creditable sense of his obligations. The hero of the defence, Count Stahremberg, was justly rewarded with 100,000 crowns, the golden fleece, and the rank of field-marshal. The Duke of Saxe Lauenburg, who had held high command in the late action, considered himself ill-used by this promotion over his head of an officer inferior to himself, as also to Caprara and to Leslie, in length of service. Lastly, the Duke of Lorraine himself had as little reason as any one to be satisfied. The King writes of him later, more in pity than in anger, “the poor devil has neither any of the spoils of war, nor any gratification from the Emperor.” We have indeed met with no instance but that of Stahremberg in which any signal mark of favour or munificence was bestowed on any party conspicuous in the late transactions. Gold medals and nominations to the dignity of state counsellor were indeed awarded to many of the city officials. The young volunteer, Eugene, was attached to the service for which he had quitted that of France by his nomination to the Colonelcy of aregiment of dragoons which still bears his name; but this promotion only took place in December, and was rather a retaining fee to a young man of high rank and promise than a reward for positive service. Kollonitsch received a cardinal’s hat from the Pope; and Daun, Sereni, and other distinguished officers, obtained from the liberality of the city rewards in plate and money, more commensurate with the exhausted state of the municipal exchequer than with the value of their services; the sums varying from 400 rix-dollars to 100 florins.
The state of affairs above described affords some reason for surprise, that the King should have persevered any further in his co-operation with the Imperial troops. He was as free to depart as the Emperor of Saxony. The Abbé Coyer supposes that he still entertained hopes of procuring a bride for his son in the person of an Austrian Archduchess, and, as a consequence of such a connexion, the establishment of his descendants on an hereditary throne in Poland. The treatment, however, which he experienced at the hands of Austria could have left him little reliance on such expectations, and his letters to the Queen indicate a higher motive for his perseverance, in a sense of the obligation of the oath by which he had bound himself to the assistance of the Emperor. This, and his appetite for military success, are sufficient to account for his endurance. The Emperor, on the other hand, if we may trust the Abbé, would have heard of his departure for Warsaw with pleasure, being advised of some Hungarian intrigues for raising up a rival to Tekeli in the person of the young Prince James, and placing him on the throne of Hungary. There is no evidence to show that Sobieski was influenced by any ambition but that of serving the common cause of Christianity, and adding to the military laurels which, in his case, almost hid the crown. One satisfaction Sobieski allowed himself in writing an autograph letter to the King of France, to whom, as the writer well knew, the tidings it contained would be gall and wormwood. The King also made over to the Elector of Bavaria some choice articles of the Turkish plunder, in the hope that, through him, they might find their way to the Dauphiness of France, and to the Tuileries. The following Pasquinade of the time is neat and bitter enough to deserve insertion here:—
Tria Miranda!Omnes Christiani arma sumunt contra Turcam,Præter Christianissimum.Omnes filii Ecclesiæ bellum contra Turcam parant,Præter Primogenitum.Omnia animalia laudant Deum ob partam de Turcis victoriam,Præter Gallum.
Tria Miranda!Omnes Christiani arma sumunt contra Turcam,Præter Christianissimum.Omnes filii Ecclesiæ bellum contra Turcam parant,Præter Primogenitum.Omnia animalia laudant Deum ob partam de Turcis victoriam,Præter Gallum.
Tria Miranda!Omnes Christiani arma sumunt contra Turcam,Præter Christianissimum.Omnes filii Ecclesiæ bellum contra Turcam parant,Præter Primogenitum.Omnia animalia laudant Deum ob partam de Turcis victoriam,Præter Gallum.
Tria Miranda!
Omnes Christiani arma sumunt contra Turcam,
Præter Christianissimum.
Omnes filii Ecclesiæ bellum contra Turcam parant,
Præter Primogenitum.
Omnia animalia laudant Deum ob partam de Turcis victoriam,
Præter Gallum.
The endeavours which Louis XIV. had made to detach, at all risks to Christendom, the King of Poland from the Austrian alliance, and the satisfaction with which he had viewed the critical position of the Austrian capital, were no secret. It is true that, to preserve appearances, he had raised the siege of Luxemburg and forborne an invasion of the Spanish Netherlands on pretence of setting free the King of Spain to assist his Austrian relations. These devices, however, deceived no one, and it was generally believed that it was his intention, after the humiliation of Austria should have been accomplished, to come forward at the head of the large force he was collecting on the Rhine as the saviour of Christendom.
A sovereign more deeply concerned in the issue than Louis, the Sultan, was perhaps the better prepared of the two for the reception of the unwelcome tidings of the relief of Vienna. The report of the confidential emissary despatched by him to the camp had been so unfavourable as to dissipate at once the expectation of success which no one down to that period had dared to represent as doubtful. Every preparation indeed had been made at Constantinople for a general illumination, and effigies of the Pope and of the principal Christian sovereigns had been prepared as materials for a bonfire. The report in question raised the Sultan to such a pitch of fury, that it required the influence of the Mufti to restrain him from directing a general massacre of all the Christians in his dominions. It had, however, the further effect of preparing him for the news of failure, and before it reached Constantinople, his rage had subsided into a deep melancholy. No sudden order for the destitution or death of Kara Mustapha betrayed his indignation, and the Vizier continued for a while to exercise and to abuse the powers with which he had been intrusted.