To meet this torrent of devastation, the Emperor Leopold could muster but scanty forces. A full half of the territory now united under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was in the hands of the Turks, or of the Hungarian rebels; or then formed part of the territories of Poland. The finances of Vienna have never been a source of strength. "Business men laugh at our finance, for my part I weep over it," said Eugene to the Emperor not long afterwards, lamenting the want of the sinews of war. The Imperial influence of Leopold in Germany was small. The German princes were distant, jealous, slow to move. Brandenberg was irritated over the Silesian claims, that fruitful source of future war. France was all but openly hostile. Spain was powerless. Venice, a shadow of her former self. Poland alone, under her heroic monarch, John Sobieski, might give present and substantial assistance. Yet all knew that to lean upon the support of Poland was to risk leaning upon a bruised reed indeed.
Poland was, indeed, to all appearance, still a great country. The Russian province of Poland, Lithuania, Gallicia, Posen, part of Prussia proper, were Polish. Roughly speaking, her frontiers stretched from the Dneiper to near the Oder, from the Baltic to the Carpathians. But a great territory does not make a great nation. The approaching fall of Poland was foreshadowed by her fortunes, even in the seventeenth century.
The extraordinary calamities of that country should not blind us to the means by which she brought some of her misfortunes upon her own head. Her constitution seemed skilfully contrived to unite the vices of aristocratic and democratic governments with the virtues of neither. Her people were turbulent without freedom, proud without steadiness of purpose. She lacked the equality and the popular support proper to a republic, as she lacked the fixed succession to the highest office and the consistent policy which are supposed to be the advantages of monarchy. A mob of tens of thousands of armed citizens pretended to form a deliberative diet. Their convention was always a signal for confusion; their dissolution was often the prelude to civil war. In the huge concourse a single veto could stay proceedings, unless indeed the malcontent paid for his opposition with his life. An attempt to introduce representative assemblies was always resented, and the experiment restricted, by the jealousy of the citizens. Delegates, not representatives, came to the meetings. They were vigilantly observed, and strictly cross-examined on their return, by self-constituted judges, as to the performance of their mandate. Real debate and deliberation, free judgment and rational decision, were as impossible in one kind of assembly as in the other. Below these citizen-nobles, the people were slaves. The two halves of the state, Poland and Lithuania, were set against each other continually. The monarchy became purely elective in the sixteenth century. The king was the nominee of some foreign court, or of some domestic party, or family. Factions nourished from abroad were thus kept alive. Once elected, the king found his power curtailed on every side; and was generally as solicitous for the advancement, and future succession perhaps, of his family, as for the good of the state. He might be a stranger, or he might owe his position to the support of a foreign power. He seldom or never could be more than the nominee of some faction, the king of a party to the end of his days.
John Sobieski, the Polish king, and himself once a Polish nobleman, was not a candidate put forward by France for the Polish crown, but was generally supposed to lean towards a French connexion. His wife was French; he had passed some of his earlier years in France, and had served in Louis' musketeers of the Guard. His most formidable rival for the crown had been Charles Leopold of Lorraine,[6] the Austrian candidate, who was now commanding the Imperial armies. An ill omen for any unity of action in the future, between the two, against the Turks.
Sobieski had fought his way to royalty. He had contended against the enemies, from Sweden to Turkey, with whom Poland was continually embroiled. His medals bore the proud device of a sword piercing three laurel crowns, with on its point a royal diadem, and the truthful motto below, Per has ad istam. Poland had been afflicted by Cossack insurrection, Tartar devastation and Turkish conquest. The king, Michael, had signed the disgraceful peace of Buksacs, by which the Poles became Turkish tributaries. Sobieski and the other nobles repudiated the treaty; and at Choczim, in 1673, Sobieski overthrew the Turks with such slaughter that "the turbans were floating thick as autumnal leaves upon the Dneister." The crown of Poland rewarded his victory; but the turbulence and inconstancy of his subjects prevented his reaping the fruits of success. At the most critical moments he was left destitute of men and of money, in the face of a host of Turks and Tartars. At Lemberg before his coronation, and at Zurawna after it, he was glad to have successfully defended the remainder of his country. The peace named from the latter town, left part of the Ukraine and nearly all Podolia with the fortress of Kaminiec, in Turkish hands.
The Turks scrupulously observing their part of the agreement, believed that they thereby secured the neutrality of Poland. Sobieski had suffered injuries and affronts at the hands of Austria. The punctilious pride of the Emperor was likely to add to the difficulty of forgetting these. At the last moment only would Leopold consent to address the man who was to save his empire by the title of Majesty. The Poles either were loth to begin a new Turkish war at all, or represented the advantage which might be gained by holding aloof, till both combatants were exhausted. If they fought, Podolia, not Hungary, the recovery of Kaminiec in the former, not the relief of Vienna, should be their object. The Lithuanians were specially jealous of Sobieski, and slow to move. The Cossacks were not to be depended upon. The country was exhausted of men and money by former campaigns. The French ambassador, Forbin, Cardinal de Janson, was instructed to work upon the king by promises of the future support of Louis, of visionary crowns in Hungary, and of lands in Silesia as the price of his inactivity. No means were to be spared to detach Poland from Austria. The Cardinal worked cautiously, being an old friend and in expectation of future favours from Sobieski; but a special agent who was with him, the Marquis de Vitry, spared no pains to foment jealousies and to excite fears, and distributed money among the partisans of a peace policy. An abortive scheme was entertained for supplanting the king himself by another, more amenable to French influence. But the conspiracy was discovered, and the effect was disastrous to the French faction. The Poles rallied round the victor of Choczim and of Lemberg, and the authors of the intrigue against him were thrown into prison, or left the country. The French agent, Vitry, himself retired from Poland. Fortunately also for Christendom, and for the house of Austria, the wife of Sobieski, Marie Casimire de la Grange d'Arquien, a Frenchwoman, had determined to thwart the diplomacy of her native land. The failure of an intrigue, by which her father, a needy Marquis, was to have been converted into a wealthy Duke; a refusal of the French court to receive her, a French subject by birth, as an equal should she revisit France;—these causes made her an Austrian partisan. Sobieski, at the age of fifty-three, still burned with youthful ardour for his wife of forty-one, though scandal would have it that this King Arthur had his Lancelot in the Field-Marshal Jablonowski, one of the foremost of his officers. "His incomparable Maria," as the king addressed his queen in his frequent letters, was at all events vain and intriguing, and seldom influenced for good the husband whom she also adored. Yet on this occasion her persuasions seconded the arguments which would undoubtedly have swayed Sobieski apart from her. His true atmosphere was that of the battle-field. His most glorious victories were won over the infidels. The danger which menaced Austria was a common menace to Christendom. Warsaw itself would not be safe if Vienna fell. The foremost champion of the Cross would not be wanting in such a crisis. In his enthusiasm he deemed it possible to unite the jarring elements of European society in a grand crusade. Visions floated before him of a great League, including the Christian powers and the Persians, by which the Turkish Empire should be overthrown, Constantinople recovered, Moldavia and Wallachia united to the Polish crown, and a republic of Athens and the Morea established. A scheme too great for accomplishment in the face of the selfishness of France and Austria and the inherent weakness of Poland.
But a general subscription was needed to put any army into the field at all. Rome and Italy were foremost in contributions; even ecclesiastical property was allowed to be mortgaged in the cause. The Pope, an economical reformer in Rome, as befitted the member of a banking family, the Odescalchi, was able to provide two million scudi. Christina, ex-Queen of Sweden, bestirred herself to increase the fund. The Regent of Portugal sent money, and sanctified the gift by a simultaneous holocaust of Jews. 1,200,000 florins were to be advanced by the Emperor to pay the Polish troops. The Pope undertook to guarantee the repayment, and contributions were expected from the King of Spain. Both these latter alike were swayed by the double motive—fear of the Turks, and the desire to set free the Empire to act against France again. Leopold, as his contribution to the harmony of the allies, had condescended to yield the title of "Majesty" to the King of Poland, and had held out hopes of a marriage between the son of Sobieski and an Austrian Archduchess, which might ensure the succession of the former to his father's throne. A dispensation from the Pope released the Poles from the duty of keeping their oaths to the Turks. The Emperor and the King exchanged oaths not to resort to such a dispensation from their engagements to each other. The treaty of alliance was signed; but before the Polish troops could be mustered in any numbers, the Turkish armies had united with those of Tekeli, and were pouring across the frontier.
FOOTNOTE:
[6] The Duke of Lorraine had married the Emperor's sister, the widow of the late Polish king, Michael. The French had driven him from his hereditary states, and he found employment at the head of his brother-in-law's armies, against them and the Turks.