CHAPTER III.
To return, therefore, to the troubles in Hungary, which gave occasion for French intrigue and for the interference of the Porte. The Turks, reinvigorated by the policy of the late Vizier Kiuprili, but directed no longer by his cool experience and judgment, were now not slow to take advantage of the difficulties of Austria. After their defeat at the hands of Montecuculi at St. Gotthard in 1664, they had consented to a twenty years' truce, by which they were still left in possession of the greater part of Hungary, and of that part where the pure Magyar population most prevailed. This truce had not expired when the oppressions exercised in the part of their country remaining to the Emperor drove the Hungarians to arms, and Count Tekeli to seek aid from the Sultan. Ordinarily scrupulous in the observance of their treaty obligations, the Turks were on this occasion overcome by the temptations held out to them of an easy extension of their frontier and of their influence. With the active aid of the Hungarians, and with the tacit consent of France, they deemed it possible to deal a mortal blow at the house of Austria. The Sultan, Mahomet IV., was perhaps not over ambitious, but he was spurred on by the zeal of a servant. The Grand Vizier, Kara Mustapha, though a nephew of the great minister Kiuprili, owed his advancement more to the beauty of his person and to the favour of the Sultana Validé, or Queen Mother, who ruled the ruler of Islam, than to other connexions or to ability. His ambition, however, was believed to aim at no less than a dependent kingdom for himself in Hungary or at Vienna. Here, at all events, and not against the Poles or Russians, did Kara Mustapha determine to gather his laurels and his booty. He had, indeed, already essayed a Russian campaign with little profit. A more striking success and greater glories, more abundant plunder with fewer toils, seemed to be promised by a campaign in the valley of the Danube, than by one among the marshes and forests of Poland, or of the Ukraine.
Too late, in 1681, the court of Vienna attempted a conciliatory policy in Hungary. The spirit of rebellion had been aroused, and the offers of redress and justice made by the Emperor were distrusted as a veil for treachery, or despised as the confession of weakness. Tekeli defied the Emperor, and assumed the offensive even beyond the borders of Hungary. Neither was the Porte to be propitiated. In vain an Imperial Embassy to Constantinople sought a prolongation of the truce, which was on the point of expiring at the end of the stipulated twenty years. The demands of the Turks rose with the progress of their preparations. A principality for their ally, Count Tekeli, in Hungary; extension of territory, with the strongest border fortresses for themselves; a great war indemnity—such were the terms which implied a determination not to negotiate. The ambassador, Count Caprara, was compelled as a prisoner himself to witness the departure of the Turkish hosts for the frontier. At the end of the year 1682 the main body were drawn together at Adrianople. Mahomet IV. encouraged his troops by his countenance in the camp, and beguiled the tedium of winter quarters by his favourite pastime of hunting. The sport was carried on upon a gigantic scale with thirty thousand beaters, many of whom perished by exhaustion. "No doubt they have spoken ill of me, and God hath dealt them their reward," was the reasonable conjecture of the Sultan upon their fate. This mighty hunter, however, relieved his army of his presence when the spring of 1683 saw it finally set in motion for the Danube. Kara Mustapha was invested with complete command. Accounts vary as to the precise point where Mahomet left his army. The ambition of his Vizier perhaps was interested in removing so soon as possible from the field the Sultan, to whom the glory of success would have been necessarily ascribed. Similar motives had, according to M. de la Guillatière, caused others before this to keep the easily persuaded prince back from the camp, whither his first impulse would have led him.
Oriental exaggeration is prone to magnify the hosts which Asiatic despots can command for their service. The muster-roll, found in the tent of the Grand Vizier after his defeat, affords a better basis for calculation. We find there, in round numbers, 275,000 fighting men enumerated, as the original strength of the Turkish army. Judging by the analogy of our Indian armies, the attendants and camp followers of all descriptions must have doubled these numbers. In Hungary, the Vizier effected a junction with Count Tekeli, who was at the head of nearly 60,000 men—Hungarians, Transylvanians, Turks and Tartars. Even French officers and engineers were to be found in Tekeli's ranks; and the character of his cause was vindicated by coins which he caused to be struck with the inscription, Pro Deo et Patria. Half a million of men probably, of all creeds and races that lie between the Carpathian mountains and the Arabian deserts, were arrayed under the standard of the Prophet in the valley of the Danube. Again, according to the Turkish returns, of these 50,000 men perished in the operations before the decisive battle that relieved Vienna. Of the whole vast multitude not more than 50,000 it was computed, ultimately regained the Turkish frontier.
But even if drawn up with the best intentions, the accuracy of such returns and estimates can never be more than an approximation to the truth. It is sufficient that hundreds of thousands were marshalled beneath the Crescent to burst in a storm of desolating war upon the Christian lands.
For the struggle between Turk and Christian was not of the character of those operations to which the term of civilized warfare is conventionally applied. Prisoners were seldom made. The Christian slaughtered; the Turk, if he spared, sold into slavery his captives; prisoners we cannot call them to whom future release was denied. Far and wide before the Turkish armies, the Tartars and the irregular horsemen, whose sole pay was plunder, whose diversion and whose business at once was rapine, spread in a desolating cloud over the country. The whole of the unconquered Hungary, the Austrian duchy, the plains of Moravia and the mountains of Styria were swept or threatened by the scourge. Poland they had long held to be their licensed field of plunder, and now Bavaria, and Bohemia even, trembled at the terror of their approach. The painful curiosity of their friends has attempted an estimate of the numbers of Turkish captives taken in this invasion. 32,000 grown persons, the great majority women, 204 of whom were maiden daughters of the nobility; 26,000 little children were, they tell us, carried off into slavery. This return seems to make no mention of lads, nor of elder girls, who would perhaps form the majority of those spared for the slave-market. How many of these perished under their hardships, or by the Turkish disasters; how many others tasted death, but before slavery; how many others may have lost home, wealth and honour, must remain beyond enumeration or even conjecture. It is said that in lower Austria and on the frontiers of Hungary alone, 4936 villages and hamlets were given to the flames in 1683.