Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843

The deceased vizir left no children: and the sultan is said to have offered the seals, in the first instance, as if the office had become in fact hereditary in the family, to Mustapha, another son of Mohammed-Kiuprili, a man of retired and studious habits, who had the philosophy to decline the onerous dignity.4 However this may have been, (for the story appears to rest on somewhat doubtful authority,) within seven days of the death of Ahmed, the vizirat had been conferred on Kara-Mustapha Pasha, who then held the office of kaimakam, and had for several years been distinguished by the special favour and confidence of the sultan. The new minister was connected by the ties both of marriage and adoption with the house of Kiuprili. His father Oroudj, a spahi, holding land at Merzifoun, (a town and district in Anatolia contiguous to Kiupri,) had fallen at the siege of Bagdad, under Sultan Mourad-Ghazi in 1638: and the orphan had been educated in the household of Mohammed-Kiuprili as the companion and adopted brother of his son Ahmed, one of whose sisters he in due time received in marriage. The elevation of his patron to the highest dignity of the empire, of course opened to Kara-Mustapha the road to fortune and preferment—from his first post of deputy to the meer-akhor, or master of the horse, he was promoted to the rank of pasha of two tails—and after holding the governments successively of Silistria and Diarbekr was nominated capitan-pasha in 1662 by his brother-in-law Ahmed; but exchanged that appointment in the following year for the office of kaimakam, in which capacity he was left in charge of the capital on the departure of the vizir to the army in Hungary. His duties in this situation, as lieutenant of the grand-vizir during his absence, gave him constant access to the presence of the sultan: and being (as he is described by the contemporary writer above quoted) "a wise and experienced person, of a smooth behaviour, and a great courtier," he so well improved the opportunities thus afforded him, as to obtain a place in the monarch's favour second only to that of Kiuprili himself. This excessive partiality was, however, scarcely justified by the good qualities of the favourite; for though the abilities of Kara-Mustapha were above mediocrity, his avarice was so extreme as to lay him open to the suspicion of corruption: and his sanguinary cruelty, when holding a command in Poland in the campaign of 1674, drew down on him the severe reprobation of his illustrious brother in-law. The predilection of the sultan for his society continued, however, unabated:—and during the visit of the court to Constantinople in 1675, he was still further exalted by becoming, at least in name, son-in-law to his sovereign, being affianced to the Sultana Khadidjeh, then only three years old. The fêtes of the betrothal, which were celebrated at the same time as those for the circumcision of the heir-apparent, (afterwards Mustapha II.,) were unrivalled for splendour in a reign distinguished for magnificence:—and on the death of Ahmed-Kiuprili in the following year, this fortunate adventurer found little difficulty in stepping, as we have seen, into the vacated place.

The first cares of the new vizir were on the side of the newly acquired frontier in the Ukraine; for, though all claim to that part of the Cossack territory had been expressly resigned by Poland at the treaty of Durawno, the Czar of Muscovy had never ceased to assert his pretensions to the whole Ukraine, in virtue of the convention of 1656 with Khmielniçki; and during the Polish campaign of 1674, his troops on the border, under a general named Romanodoffski, had several times come into collision with the Turks—an era deserving notice as the first hostile encounter between these two great antagonist powers. The defection of Doroszenko, who had gone over to the Russians at the end of 1676, and surrendered to them the important fortress of Czehryn, the capital and key of the Ukraine, and the repulse of the serasker Ibrahim before its walls in the following year, showed the necessity of vigorous measures: and, in 1678, the grand vizir in person appeared at the head of a formidable force in the Ukraine, bringing with him George Khmielniçki, son of the former ataman, who had long been confined as a state prisoner in the Seven Towers, but was now released to counteract, by his hereditary influence with the Cossacks, the adverse agency of Doroszenko. Czehryn, after a close investment of a month, was carried by storm, the garrison put to the sword, and the fortifications razed. But though the war was continued through another campaign, it was obviously not the interest of the Divan to prolong this remote and unprofitable contest at a juncture when the state of parties in Hungary bid fair to present such an opportunity as had never before occurred, for definitively establishing the supremacy of the Porte over the whole of that kingdom. Negotiations were accordingly opened on the Dniepr between the Muscovite leaders and the Khan Mourad-Gherni; and a peace was signed at Radzin, Feb. 12, 1681, by which the frontiers on both sides were left unaltered, while the Porte expressly renounced all claim to Kiow and the Russian Ukraine, which had been in the possession of the Czar since 1656. The ratification of the treaty was brought to Constantinople in the following September by an envoy, whose gifts of costly arctic furs, and ivory from the tusks of the walrus, might have unfolded to the Turks the wide extent of the northern realms ruled by the monarch whom they even yet regarded only as a tributary of their own vassal the Khan of the Tartars, and scarcely deigned to admit on equal terms to diplomatic intercourse.

Though the truce for twenty years, concluded between the Porte and the Empire after the defeat of Ahmed-Kiuprili at St Gotthard in 1564, had not yet expired by nearly three years, the political aspect of Hungary left little doubt that the resumption of hostilities would not be so long delayed. To understand more clearly the extraordinary complication of interests of which this country was now the scene, it will, however, be necessary to take a retrospective glance at its history during the seventeenth century, after the treaty of Komorn with the Porte, in 1606, had terminated for the time the warfare of which it had almost constantly been the theatre since the occupation of Buda by Soliman the Magnificent in 1541, ad had, in some measure, defined the boundaries of the two great powers between which it was divided. The Emperors of the House of Hapsburg, indeed, styled themselves Kings of Hungary, and Diets were held in their name at Presburg; but the territory actually under their sway amounted to less than a third of the ancient kingdom, comprehending only the northern and western districts; while all the central portion of Hungary Proper, as far as Agria on the north, and the Raab and the Balaton Lake on the west, was united to the Ottoman Empire, and formed the pashaliks of Buda and Temeswar, which were regularly divided into sandjaks and districts, with their due quota of spahis and timariots, who had been drawn from the Moslem provinces of Turkey, and held grants of land by tenure of military service. The principality of Transylvania, (called Erdel by the Turks,) which had been erected by Soliman in favour of the son of John Zapolya, comprehended nearly one-fourth of Hungary, and (though its suzerainté was claimed by Austria in virtue of a reversionary settlement executed by that prince shortly before his death,) was generally, in effect, dependent on, and tributary to the Porte, from which its princes, elected by the Diet at Klaucenburg, received confirmation and investiture, like the waiwodes of the neighbouring provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia. During the interval between the death of John Sigismond Zapolya in 1571, and the election of Michael Abaffi in 1661, not fewer than thirteen princes, besides nearly as many ephemeral pretenders, had occupied the throne; and, though at one time the family of Batthori, and, subsequently, that of Racoczy, established a kind of hereditary claim to election, their tenure was always precarious; and, on more than one occasion, the prince was imposed on the states by the Turks or Austrians, without even the shadow of constitutional forms.

This modified independence of Transylvania, however, often gave its princes great political importance, during the endless troubles of Hungary, as the assertors of civil and religions liberty against the tyranny and bad faith of the Austrian cabinet; which, with unaccountable infatuation, instead of striving to attach to its rule, by conciliation and good government, the remnant of the kingdom still subject to its sceptre, bent all its efforts to destroy the ancient privileges of the Magyars, and to make the crown formally, as it already was in fact, hereditary in the imperial family. The extirpation of Protestantism was another favourite object of Austrian policy: and the cruelties perpetrated with this view by George Basta and the other imperial generals at the beginning of the century was such, that a general rising took place under Stephen Boczkai, then waiwode of Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia, who extorted from the Emperor Rodolph, in 1607, the famous pacification of Vienna, which was guaranteed by the Porte, and which secured to the Hungarians full liberty of conscience, as well as the enjoyment of all their ancient rights. This agreement was soon violated; but the Protestants again found a protector in a Transylvanian prince, the celebrated Bethlen-Gabor;5 who, assuming the royal title, occupied Presburg and Neuhausel in 1619, formed an alliance with the Bohemian revolters under Count Thurn, and was narrowly prevented from forming a junction with them under the walls of Vienna, which, if effected, would probably have overthrown the dynasty of Hapsburg. He is said to have entertained the design of uniting all Hungary east of the Theiss, with Transylvania and Wallachia, into a modern kingdom of Dacia, leaving the west to the Turks as a barrier against Austrian aggression—but his want of children left his schemes of aggrandizement without a motive, and at his death in 1630 they all fell to the ground. The Thirty Years' War procured the Hungarian subjects of Austria a temporary respite; but Leopold, who was elected king in 1655, and succeeded his father Ferdinand in the empire three years later, stimulated by the triumph of his predecessor over the liberties of Bohemia, resumed with fresh zeal the crusade against the privileges of the Magyars. Not only was the persecution of the Protestants recommenced, but the excesses of the ill-paid and licentious German mercenaries, who were quartered on the country in defiance of the constitution after the twenty years' truce, under the pretence of guarding against any fresh attack from the Turks, were carried to such a height that disaffection became universal even among those who had hitherto constantly adhered to the Austrian interest, so that (in the words of a writer6 of the time,) "they began to contrast their own condition with that of the Transylvanians, who are not forced to take the turban but live quietly under the protection of the Turk—while we (as they say) are exposed to the caprices of a prince under the absolute dominion of the Jesuits, a far worse sort of people than the Dervishes!" As early as 1667, a secret communication had been made to the Porte through the envoy of Abaffi; but Kiuprili, who was then on the point of departure for Candia, and was unwilling to risk a fresh rupture with the empire in his absence, gave little encouragement either to these overtures, or to the more advantageous propositions received in 1670 from Peter Zriny, Ban of Croatia, and previously a famous partisan-leader against the Moslems; in which the malecontents offered, as the price of Ottoman aid and protection, to cede to the sultan all the fortified towns which should be taken by his arms, and to pay an annual tribute of 30,000 ducats. The conspiracy had, however, become known at Vienna; and instant measures were taken for seizing Zriny and his Croatian confederates, Nadasti, Tattenbach, and Christopher Frangipani, who were all executed in the course of the following year. The Emperor, now considering Hungary as a conquered country, formally abolished the dignity of Palatine, and nominated Gaspar Von Ampringham, grand master of the Teutonic knights, to be viceroy of the kingdom; while the Protestants were persecuted with unheard-of rigour, and many of their ministers imprisoned in the fortresses, or sent in chains to the galleys at Naples.

The confederates of Upper Hungary had been better on their guard: and on the news of the fate of Zriny and his associates, they forthwith assembled in arms at Kaschau or Cassovia, and electing Francis Racoczy, son of the late prince of Transylvania, and son-in-law of Zriny, as their leader, bade defiance to the Emperor. The civil war continued several years without decisive success on either side; till on the death, in 1676, of Racoczy, (who had previously abandoned the popular cause,) the famous Emeric Tekoeli, then only twenty years of age, was chosen general. He was the hereditary enemy of the Austrians; his father Stephen, Count of Kersmark, having been besieged in his castle by the Imperialists at the time of his death; and while he pressed the Germans in the field with such vigour as to deprive them of nearly all the fortified places they still held in Upper Hungary, the negotiation with the Porte for aid was renewed, and being backed by the diplomatic influence of France, then at war with the empire, was more favourably received by Kara-Mustapha than the former advances of the malcontents had been by his predecessor. The war with Russia, however, prevented the Turks for the present from interfering with effect, but Abaffi was authorized to support the insurgents in the mean time, while Leopold, fearing the total loss of Hungary, summoned a diet at Œdenburg (in 1681) for the redress of grievances, in which most of the ancient privileges of the kingdom were restored, full liberty of conscience promised to the Lutherans and Calvinists, and Paul Esterhazy named Palatine. But these concessions, wrung only by hard necessity from the Cabinet of Vienna, came now too late. Tekoeli replied to the amnesty proclaimed by the Emperor, by the publication of a counter-manifesto, in which were set forth a hundred grievances of the Hungarians; and, having obtained a great accession of strength by his marriage (June 1682) to Helen Zriny, the widow of Racoczy, whereby he gained all the adherents of those two powerful houses, he summoned a rival diet at Cassovia, where he openly assumed the title of sovereign prince of Upper Hungary, exercising the prerogatives of royalty, and striking money in his own name, which bore his effigy on the obverse, and on the reverse the motto inscribed on his standards—"Pro Deo, Patria, et Libertate."

Though Tekoeli professed to act by the authority of the Porte, from which he had received a firman of investiture with the usual ensigns of sovereignty, no formal declaration of war had yet been issued from Constantinople; and many of the Ulemah protested against such a measure, at least till the twenty years' truce, concluded in 1664, should have expired. The aid openly afforded, however, to Tekoeli by Abaffi and the pasha of Buda, as well as the constant march of large bodies of troops to the Danube, afforded sufficient indication that an attack would not be long delayed; and Leopold, disquieted at the prospect of having at once to contend against his own revolted subjects, and the mighty force of the Ottoman empire, sent Count Caprara on a mission to Constantinople, in the hope of averting the storm; while, at the same time, he made overtures for an alliance with Poland, still smarting under her losses in the late Turkish war. The mission of Caprara led to no result, from the exorbitant demands made by the Ottoman ministers on behalf both of the Porte and its Hungarian allies, which amounted to little less than a total cession of the country, and a few days after the arrival of the ambassador, the despatch of the firman to Tekoeli, and the display of the imperial horsetails in the plain of Daood-Pasha, showed that the resolution of the Divan was fixed for war. The negotiation with Poland presented almost equal difficulties, from the rooted jealousy entertained by the Poles of the ambition of Austria, and the opposition of the French envoy, De Vitry, who even carried his intrigues so far as to embark in a plot for the death or dethronement of the king, and the substitution of the grand marshal Iablonowski. The firmness of Sobieski, however, whom no minor considerations could blind to the importance of saving Austria and Hungary from the grasp of the Osmanli, overcame all these machinations; and the ratification of the diet was eventually given to a league, offensive and defensive, with Austria, on March 31, 1683—the same day on which the vast host of the Ottomans broke up from its cantonments about Adrianople, and directed its march towards the Danube.

The sons of Naodasti and Zriny, who had been executed ten years before, were retained as hostages, under the name of chamberlains, in the imperial household; and it fell to the lot of the former to announce to Leopold, that the legions of the crescent were pouring down on Hungary. The cheek of the Emperor blanched at the tidings; for well did he know that, till the arrival of the Poles, his disposable force amounted to scarce 35,000 men, under Duke Charles of Lorraine, who could barely make head against Abaffi and Tekoeli, while so high were the hopes of the Magyars raised of a speedy and final deliverance from Austrian tyranny, that a plot is even said to have been laid between Zriny and his sister, now the wife of Tekoeli, for seizing the person of Leopold in the palace of Vienna, and giving him up to the Tartars, who had already commenced their ravages on the frontiers. The sultan meanwhile—the cumbrous luxury of whose harem and equipages had retarded the march of the army—had halted at Belgrade, after holding a grand review of his forces, and placing the standard of the Prophet in the hands of the vizier, in token of the full powers entrusted to him for the conduct of the campaign. On the 10th of June, Tekoeli, who had crossed the Danube to welcome his potent auxiliaries, was received at Essek with royal magnificence by Kara-Mustapha, who imitated, in the ceremonial observed on this occasion, the pomp of the reception of John Zapolya by Soliman, on his march against Vienna in 1529; but after receiving personal investiture of the royal dignity conferred on him by the sultan, he returned rapidly to Cassovia, where he had fixed his headquarters. The khan of the Tartars had already arrived at Stuhlweissenburg, and was speedily joined by the vizir and the main Turkish army, which, passing the Danube to the number of 140,000 men, swept like a torrent over the rich plains of Lower Hungary: the towns, abandoned by the panic-stricken German garrisons, every where opening their gates to the partisans of Zriny and Tekoeli, in the hope of escaping the fate of Veszprim, which had been sacked by the janissaries for attempting resistance. The march was pressed with unexampled rapidity, till on the 28th the whole army was mustered under the walls of Gran; and the vizir, summoning to his tent the khan and the principal pashas, announced that his orders were to make himself master of Vienna.

The veneration with which the Turks have always regarded the memory of the greatest of their sultans, has led them not only to shrink with superstitious awe from attempting any enterprise in which he failed, but even to attach a prophetic importance to his recorded sayings. A promise attributed to him, that "an Ottoman army should never pass the Raab," had been recalled at the time of the signal defeat experienced by Ahmed-Kiuprili on that river, and his memorable repulse before Vienna had been ever held as a warning, that the Ottoman arms were destined never to prevail against the ramparts of the Kizil-Alma. These considerations, however, had little weight with Kara-Mustapha; bridges, hastily thrown over the ill-omened stream, afforded a passage to the army, (July 8,) and the march was again directed without stop or stay on Vienna. A body of Hungarians in the pay of the emperor, under Budiani, passed over to the ranks of their insurgent countrymen on the first appearance of the standards of Tekoeli; and the Duke of Lorraine, who had withdrawn his infantry to the island of Schutt and the other bank of the Danube, was worsted in a cavalry fight at Petronel by the Tartars, whose flying squadrons were already seen from the walls of Vienna. Proclamation had been made, forbidding the citizens to speak of the present state of affairs!—but the emperor and court, who had confidently reckoned on the invaders being delayed by the sieges of Raab and Komorn, no sooner learned that they had passed those fortresses unheeded, and were rapidly approaching the capital, than, seized with a panic-terror, they fled from the devoted city, on the same day with the combat at Petronel, (July 7,) in such dismayed haste, that the empress was forced to lodge one night under a tree in the open air; nor did they deem themselves in safety from the terrible pursuit of the Tartars, till they reached Lintz, on the furthest western verge of the hereditary states. The Austrian towns along the Danube were overwhelmed by the advancing tide of Turks, or ravaged by the Hungarian followers of Tekoeli, who vied with their Moslem allies in animosity against the Germans; and the light troops and Tartars, overspreading the country, pushed their predatory excursions so far up the river, as even to alarm the imperial fugitives at Lintz, who consulted their safety by a second flight to Passau. The three great abbeys of Lilienfeldt, Mölk, and Klosterneuburg, were preserved from these desultory marauders by the strength of their walls, and the valour of their monastic inmates, who took arms in defence of their cloisters; but the open country was laid waste with the same ferocity as in the invasion by Soliman, and many thousands of the country people were dragged as slaves into the Turkish camp. The regular columns of the janissaries and feudatory troops, meanwhile, continuing their advance, appeared on the morning of the 14th under the walls of Vienna; the posts of the different corps were assigned on the same day, and in the course of the following night, ground was broken for the trenches on three sides of the city.

The ancient ramparts of Vienna, which had withstood the assault of the great Soliman, had been replaced, not long after the former siege, by fortifications better adapted for modern warfare; but during the long interval of security, the extensive suburbs, with the villas and gardens of the nobles and opulent citizens, had been suffered to encroach on the glacis and encumber the approaches; and the ruins of these luxurious abodes, imperfectly destroyed in the panic arising from the unexpected celerity of the enemy's movements, were calculated at once to impede the fire from the walls, and to afford shelter and lodgement to the besiegers. Such preparations for defence, however, as the time allowed of, had been hastily made by the governor, Rudiger Count Stahrenberg, a descendant of the stout baron who, in the former siege, had repulsed the Tartars in the defiles near Enns, and an artillery officer of proved skill and valour. Most of the gates had been walled up, platforms and covered ways constructed, and the students of the university, with such of the citizens as were able and willing to bear arms, were organized into companies in aid of the regular troops, whose number did not exceed 14,000. But the flower of the Austrian nobility, with many gallant volunteers, not only from Germany, but from other parts of Christendom, were within the walls, and animated by their example the spirits of the defenders, whose only hope of relief lay apparently in the distant and uncertain succours of Poland. The Duke of Lorraine, with his cavalry, had still hoped to maintain himself in the Prater and the Leopoldstadt, (which were on an island separated from the city by a narrow arm of the river,) and thus to keep up the communication with the north bank:—but an overwhelming body of Turkish horse, (among whom were conspicuous the Arab chargers and gorgeous equipments of a troop of Egyptian Mamlukes, a force rarely seen in the Ottoman armies,) was directed against him on the 17th, and after a desperate conflict, he was driven across the main stream with the loss of 500 men, and with difficulty secured himself from pursuit by breaking the bridge. The suburb of Leopold, in itself a second city, was given up to the flames; and the Turks, erecting two batteries on the bank opposite Vienna, completed the investment on the only side which had hitherto remained open. Kara-Mustapha, in the confidence of anticipated triumph, now summoned Stahrenberg to surrender, by throwing a cartel into the city, wrapped up in linen and fastened to an arrow: and no answer being returned, the fire of the batteries on the Leopold island opened on the town; and in less than a week ten others were completed and mounted with cannon on the landward side.