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The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent

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What an interesting book! The present War on Terror does have certain overtones of the past struggles between Christianity and Islam. The Jihadists refer to the Western nations as Crusaders and while most in the West make a distinction between Islam per se and the Jihadists, they are not blind to the fact that the Jihadists (or Islamofacists or whatever you want to call them) are almost completely Muslim.

And certainly, the Christianity of Europe is nominal at best and is not a motivating factor in the West's approach to the current situation. There are other more overriding interests. If one went on Sunday to the Cathedrals and traditional Christian denominations and conscripted the congregants into an army, it would consist mostly of older women and some children. And it would be small.

It was not always so. This book recounts the time in the late seventeenth century (mostly in 1683 to be precise) when the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire (and ruler of the Muslim world) and his Grand Vizir took a hundred thousand men (or more) into and through the Hungarian territories into Austria on a quest for new lands to tax (more than for converts) and after conquering lesser cities on the way, laid siege to Vienna.

Europe was very much different than the Europe of the past two centuries. There were nations, but not so much nation states as the two great kingdoms of France ruled by Louis XIV and the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire ruled out of Austria and Spain. Both also had relationship with ancillary and related smaller states and territories. The complex web of treaties were often, but not always, related to whether the ruler and the population were primarily Roman Catholic or Protestant.

This was not the first time that the Ottomans came out of Turkey to attack Vienna. In 1529 they came and laid siege to the city until disease forced them back. In 1683, they came and were making progress in undermining the walls of the city until the King of Poland, Jon Sobieski and came from the north and drove the Turks out. This led to a more extended war with the Ottomans that lasted until 1699 and captured Hungary for the Habsburgs.

John Toye has written a very concise telling of the second siege. There are nine chapters in just fewer than two hundred pages. The first chapter provides the origins of the Ottoman attack. Understanding the court politics and the names and titles of all the players is probably the most difficult part of the book. However, once the reader has that under control, all goes smoothly. The author provides a helpful list of key names and titles on pages x and xi. There are also some maps up front and provided within the text as needed.

The second chapter informs the reader about the situation in Austria and Vienna. We learn about the court of Leopold his character, talents, his key advisors, and I. The third chapter gives us a broader picture of the Habsburg Empire and its competitive relations with France and what its true condition was late in the seventeenth century.

The fourth chapter tells us about the move of the Ottomans through Hungary and how Vienna began its preparations. This involved getting some people out (including Leopold I) and other people in. It also involved getting as many supplies as possible (such as money, wood and food). In chapter five we get the description of how the siege began and what the techniques were for the attackers and the defenders.

Chapter six takes us outside of Vienna and what was going on between the city and its allies as well as the maneuvering of the Ottoman camps. In chapter seven the author gives us the movements of Sobieski and the others who would come to the aid of the beleaguered city.

All of this is prelude to the climax of the book in chapter eight when the armies come out of the north and sweep the Ottomans off the walls of Vienna and into a panicked rout. The last chapter ties up what happened in Europe after the battle. Like most victories, it leads to claims by many as the reason for the success. Offenses are taken at real, perceived, or manufactured slights, advantage is taken by those still strong over those weakened by the struggle (read Louis XIV trying to take advantage of the limited resources of the Hapsburgs now fighting in Hungary).

This was a very important event in the history of Europe, of the relations between the West and Islam (at the time the Ottomans were essentially synonymous with the faith - the Sultan held the key to the Kabah and flew what was believed to be Mohammed's banner). It is an event that everyone should understand better. The troubles didn't begin on 9/11 nor were the Crusades of the eleventh century the only armed struggle before that event. It is a long and rather aggressive history, from both sides.

While some claim history to be bunk, it is critical to learn the true history of what has happened in the past and how it has flowed into and created the world we inherited.

The failure of the Turkish army to take Vienna in 1683 marks the beginning of the long decline of the Ottoman state but it was a close-run affair. Kara Mustafa's janissaries laid siege to the Austrian imperial capital while allied horsemen ravaged the surrounding countryside. Leopold III and his court had fled leaving the rescue of Vienna to Charles, Duke of Lorraine and John Sobieski of Poland. Had Mustafa been a little less reckless in failing to fortify his positions the outcome of the battle (and the history of Europe) might have been different.

Stoye has done an excellent job in painstakingly recounting each detail of the negotiations among the Christian princes and charting the march of the various armies. Where his sources have been unclear or lacking he is honest in not speculating too freely. However, if any battle cried out for a historian with a sense of colour and drama this was it. Massacres of prisoners, hand-to-hand fighting in trenches and tunnels, banners with crosses and crescents waving over blood-drenched salients, wild Tartars from the steppes duelling with hussars clad in armour and angel wings, vizirs strangled with bow-strings: the siege of Vienna had all this and more but Stoye is the not the man who can breathe life into such a story. Nor are the maps and illustrations much help.

This book is a noble effort and will certainly serve readers interested in the minutiae of central-European politics but the siege still awaits a better story-teller.

The siege by the Islamic Turks of the Christian city of Vienna in 1683 was a watershed incident in European history. Had the Turks been successful, there well might have been no Christian Europe to dominate the world stage for the next 500 years. Facing that magnitude of threat, European powers that were normally jealous and hostile to one another suppressed their mutual antagonisms to defeat the armies of Islam and their brutal Tartar Allies. The Ottoman empire lost control of half of their European territories which led to the long, slow, decline and inevitable collapse, even as the Hapbsburgs were able to parley the Viennese victory into control of the Balkans and expand their influence into France and the Rhine country. An enthusiastic recommendation for inclusion into both academic and community library World History collections, "The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent" by John Stoye (Fellow in Modern History, Magdalen College, Oxford, England) is a superbly presented and accurately detailed account of this pivotal incident between the forces of a militant Islam and the armies of a European Christendom.

This is a meticulously researched and documented history of a distant event with contemporary repercussions. However, it is remarkable how indifferently the question of illustrations and maps was dealt with. I don't understand why someone would produce such a wonderful and detailed account and then accompany it with maps and illustrations that are virtually meaningless. The maps are either insufficiently detailed to permit following the documentation in the text, or the illustrations (themselves of some interest because of their contemporaneousness) so indistinct as to render references to them useless. There should be a match between the illustrations and the text--either reduce the textual detail to match the illustrations, or (far better) include illustrations that support the text.

You can't fault the excellent scholarship, but this book simply is not well organized or planned. Far too much time is spent detailing movements of people back and forth, and far too little time on explaining the technicalities of the siege and combat. There is no attempt to discuss, for example, the different types of military equipment used by the various factions. There is remarkably little discussion of the actual siege or battle; citadels fall in one perfunctory line, but Allah forbid that we not be told in painstaking detail about some tedious march alongside a river that took place three weeks earlier.

Ahh, but it concentrates on the politics, you say? Even that is not well done. The author writes whole paragraphs about people who play no role in the narrative. Why must we be told about arcane details of a particular Viennese politician's background, when we never hear about him again, and he plays no role in the narrative? What was the point? People are mentioned, discussed, and then for no apparent reason dropped, without explaining why they were relevant to the siege.

Finally, the maps are lousy, despite their importance for this kind of book. They appear to have been inspired by Tolkien's maps in "The Lord Of The Rings," with the exact same style and appearance -- And lack of detail, or meaningful organization. Would it be too hard to simply do a schematic map of Vienna showing the siege positions? Why must we be cryptically referred back to an antiquated black and white plate showing the southern portion of the city, rather than have an actual clear schematic map showing what happened? I get that the author is using a historical document, great, but we should have some modern maps that precisely clarify and follow the narrative.

Could have been a lot better if a good editor had leaned more heavily on the author.

If you're a generalist, or looking for a book that will help you to appreciate what the defenders of Vienna felt, thought, or endured, this book is not for you. Though undeniably informative, the great bulk of this work is devoted to extremely detailed descriptions of the dozens of political negotiations and troop conscriptions carried out by Hapsburg envoys and the political chess game between the empire's foes and its myriad lukewarm allies. How anyone could characterize this book as 'highly readable' as the leading review claims, is utterly beyond me. This is a book about arcane diplomacy as much as anything else, and is exceedingly tedious in it's approach - I had to force myself to finish it, which should be far from the case for such an inherently fascinating subject. This is a valuable source for further research, and a great neutral description of the political climate and negotiations that led to Vienna's redemption, but of the siege itself, it will provide you with little insight as to what it was like to be in Vienna in 1683, and will not impart any of the stories, legends, or heroic deeds of the city's defenders - to which the author occasionally and tantalizingly alludes.

Not many people today realize that militant Islam reached as far West as Vienna in its attempt to conquor Europe. After reading this meticulously researched and coherently presented book, the reader will come to realize what a close call Western civilization had before the gates of Vienna in 1683. France, the largest country and most militant power in the West, refused to help the Emperor because it suited its own political ends, even at the cost of the eastern part of Europe being lost to the Moslems. The saviors were a motley group of small German principalities and the Kingdom of Poland, led by its ruler Jan Sobieski. Were it not for these groups, and particularly the Poles, our history might have been completely different now. What thanks did the Empire give to Poland? As a later Austrian diplomat said in another connection: "Our ingratitude will astonish the world." Merely a century later, Austria took part in the dismembering of Poland, and wiping that heroic kingdom from the map of Europe for well over a century. If Sobieski had still been alive, he would have wished that he and his army had stayed home in 1683!

A helpful account of the siege of Vienna in 1683, and its relief by combined German-Polish arms. This book is not a particularly sexy battle story. Hopefully there are better descriptions elsewhere of the battle itself.

This work is rather an excellent primer on late seventeenth-century European political complexity. There were so many independent German states (duchies, bishoprics, estates, and other assorted entities) that keeping track of who's who is a challenge. Mr. Stoye shows, in this seventeenth-century Europe, how supremely difficult it could be to put an army together, let alone to move it anywhere, and get it to do anything useful. (Getting the army to safely and peacefully go back where it came from afterwards was also a fairly tricky exercise.)

Stoye's focus was on the historical records of the Christian nations involved in the battle for Vienna. According to the author there was a much stronger European tradition of official letter-writing and record-keeping. Available Christian records were much more numerous than Ottoman records.

The only complaint is a lack of adequate maps. While the book did include an extremely helpful cutout diagram of Vienna's defenses (walls, moats, palisades, etc), the black & white maps in the fairly cheap Pegasus paperback edition were difficult to read. It was an unwelcome distraction.

All in all, recommended and - if one has any interest in the origins of modern Europe - well worth reading.

Compared to other books on the wars at the time between the Ottoman Turks and Europe, this one is quite dry. There is some explanation of the major background elements (which assumes you are already rather familiar with everything) and maps are included - but, the maps are so poorly printed, they aren't very legible. Would definitely like to have seen both better maps and better printing for greater and easier legibility.

The coverage of the battles and the conditions of the various sides was also terribly academic, which on its own might not have been so bad, but it was also terribly terse.

The book is shorter than one would have expected to give a really rich, fully-fledged out history of this momentous time in history.

A somewhat dry but thorough narrative history of the second siege of Vienna. The work was originally written in the early sixties, and lacks many of the qualities that people look for in more modern works of popular history. Although it is very thorough when it describes the political and diplomatic events of the seige, there is little here for a social or a military historian. There is no discussion of the general way of life, of the personal experiences of small people, or of the weaponry or tactics of the day. Similarly, there is no discussion of the economic factors that helped lead up to the conflict, or were affected by the conflict. Nor are the events put into the long-term history of centuries of conflict of the Ottoman and Austrian empires, nor the context of the development of Islam in Europe. Nor is there a description of the cultural impact of the seige on further generations of eastern Europeans.

These criticisms may be unfair. For a historian of the early sixties, John Stoye writes a good thorough narrative account, and teases out the facts of what really happened when with judicious skill. This is what historians of his era generally did. To ask for more, is to ask for a book written later, which would look at more. If you are reading any other books related to the seige of Vienna, then this is probably a very good book to get, as it will explain, carefully and readably, the sequence of events: a need that more modern historians sometimes overlook in their attempts to be very clever or insightful. It is a bit dry however, by modern standards.