[10] Sigbert Count von Heister, one of the best soldiers of his day. At the beginning of the siege his hat was shot through by a Turkish arrow. Arrow and hat are preserved in the Ambros collection at Vienna.
[11] Kolschitzki’s services would appear to have made a deep impression on the public mind. Several narratives of his adventures were published at the time; and his portrait, in his Turkish costume, figures in the frontispiece of most of them.—E.
[12] Count Daun is said to have first suggested the use of the scythe affixed to a long staff for the defence of the breaches at this siege. Under the name of the Lochaber axe it had long been used by the Scots. In the recent wars of liberty in Poland it has acquired much celebrity, and many stories are told of its terrible effects in the hands of the peasantry. Of the weapon called the morning star, a species of club with spikes, 600 were furnished from the arsenal.—E.
[13] I give this incident as I find it in the work from which these pages are borrowed, and in other accounts, but I am at a loss to account for the alleged date of its occurrence. The army of the Christian allies had not completed its passage of the river, and was mustering in the camp of Tuln, and I can find no account of any reconnaissance being pushed forward at this date. The statements, however, of the fact are numerous and positive.—E.
[14] See Appendix.
[15] The first coffee-house in Europe was established in Constantinople in 1551. A century later, in 1652, a Greek established one in London. The first in France was at Marseilles in 1671, in Paris the following year. In Germany that of Kolschitzki was the first, the second was opened at Leipzic in 1694. In 1700 Vienna counted four, in 1737 eleven. In the city and suburbs there are now one hundred.
[16] The King’s Italian physician.
[17] The King was practised in this language, which he always used in his addresses to the Polish diets. When the young Charles XII. of Sweden opposed the usual resistance of boyhood to his Latin preceptor, he was informed of this fact; and the example of the great soldier proved an efficient substitute for flogging. Sobieski learned Spanish at the age of fifty.
[18] Constantine Wisnowiecki, allied to the Imperial family by the marriage of the king Michael with the Archduchess Eleanor.
[19] The appellation of Russia was at this period applied to the province of Gallicia. The territories of the Tzar, which have since assumed it, came under the general designation of Muscovy.