At the present moment, in 1883, the power of Austria is driven as a wedge into the midst of the former dominions of the Sultan. That this is so, perhaps that Austria even exists as a great power, and can hope to be a greater in south-eastern Europe, is owing in no small degree to the Polish aid which in 1683 defeated the Turkish armies before the gates, and saved Vienna. The victor, John Sobieski, King of Poland, then deserved and enjoyed the gratitude of Christendom. But the unequal fate of a man great in character and in abilities, but born out of due time, in an incongruous age and in a state unworthy of him, has seldom been more conspicuously illustrated than in his career. The great men of the last quarter of the seventeenth century whom we most readily remember are men of western Europe. Louis XIV., with the resources of France behind him, William III., wielding the power of England, of Holland, and of Protestant Germany, are the kings who fill the stage. The half-crazy hero, Charles XII. of Sweden, is a more familiar character than the great Polish king, the deliverer first of Poland, secondly of Germany, perhaps of Europe. The causes are not far to seek. The country which he ruled has disappeared from the roll of European nations. The enemy whom he defeated has become, in his last decrepitude, the object merely of scorn, or of not disinterested care. It seems now so incredible that the Turks should have been a menace to Europe, that it is no great claim to remembrance to have defeated them. Sobieski, too, in his greatness and in his weakness, was a mediÆval hero. He was out of place in the age of Louis XIV. He was a great soldier rather than a great general, a national hero rather than a great king. His faith had the robust sincerity of that of a thirteenth-century knight, his character was marred by the violent passions of a mediÆval baron. His head was full of crusading projects—of the expulsion of the Turks, of the revival of a Catholic Greek state, not without principalities for his own house. His plans would have commanded support in the days of St. Louis, but were impracticable in a Europe whose rulers schemed for a balance of power. Poland herself perished, partly through clinging to a mediÆval constitution in the midst of modern states. Her mediÆvally-minded king and his exploits are eclipsed by other memories, even upon the scene of his greatest achievement.

For the traveller who from the Tower of St. Stephen's, in the centre of the old-town of Vienna, looks down upon the places made remarkable by great historic actions in the valley of the Danube, has his eye turned first northward and eastward upon the Marchfeld. There, he is told, are Aspern and Essling, where the Archduke Charles beat Napoleon in 1809. There is the island of Lobau, where Napoleon repaired his forces, and whence he issued to fight yonder the great and terrible conflict of Wagram. The scene, not of a greater slaughter, not of a more obstinately contested fight, than Wagram, but the scene of a battle more momentous in its consequences, lies upon the other side. Among the vineyards, villages, and chateaux which cover the lower slopes of the Wiener Wald, among the suburbs of Nussdorf and of Hernals, Charles of Lorraine and John Sobieski smote the Turkish armies in 1683. There at one blow they frustrated the last great Mohammedan aggression against Christendom, and set free the minds and arms of the Germans to combine against French ambition upon their western frontier. The victory was one of those decisive events which complete long pending revolutions, and inaugurate new political conditions in Europe.

The treaties of Nimuegen in 1678-79 had marked a pause in a general European contest. France and the Empire, Holland, Spain, Sweden, Brandenberg, all retired from their active conflicts, to plot and strive in secret, till an advantageous opening for war should again present itself. Poland and the Porte had a little earlier concluded their strife by the peace of Zurawna. But in the general breathing-time the eyes of all were turned with anxiety upon Eastern Europe. So much of Hungary as was not in the hands of the Sultan was in insurrection against the Emperor. The insolence of the Turks, and their support to the insurgents, were continually becoming greater. The whole East resounded with warlike preparations, and it was without doubt evident that a great enterprise was being prepared which might make the reign of Mahomet IV. as illustrious for Islam, as calamitous for Christendom, as that of Mahomet II. had been. Rome, Venice, Vienna, were the three capitals in more immediate danger, but the whole continent was interested, and all other designs were necessarily suspended till it became clearer where this storm would fall, and what resistance could be made to it.

For, two hundred years ago, the Ottoman Empire still stood high among the greatest of European powers. Spain ruled over wider territories; but the dominions of Spain were scattered over the Old and New Worlds, and her European lands, in the Netherlands and in Italy, were divided from her by the sea, or isolated by the interposition of the frontiers of powerful and often hostile neighbours.

A compact yet widely spread collection of kingdoms and of provinces obeyed the head of the Mohammedan world. Northern Africa, Western Asia, Eastern Europe were ruled from the Bosphorus. All the chief centres of ancient civilization, Rome alone excepted, Thebes, Nineveh and Babylon, Carthage, Athens and Constantinople, bowed beneath the Crescent. The southern frontiers of the Sultan's territories reached beyond the Tropic of Cancer, the northern touched nearly the latitude of Paris.

The modern kingdoms of Greece, Servia, Roumania were wholly his; the kingdom of Hungary, the dominions of Austria and of Russia were in part his also. The Black Sea was entirely encircled with Turkish or tributary territory; no other power possessed the same extent of coast line on the Mediterranean. Not only the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Nile, but the Danube, the Boug, the Dneister, the Dneiper and the Don flowed for a great part of their course between banks subject or tributary to the Porte, and reached the sea by mouths wholly under Turkish control.

Territory ceded by Turkey in 1699.

The armies of the Sultan were unapproachable in numbers, unsurpassable in valour, by those of the Christian powers. Their discipline and warlike science were no longer what they once had been, the first in Europe; but their inequality in these respects to their enemies was not yet so marked as at present. Military and administrative skill were yet to be found in their empire. From the first appearance of the Turks in Europe Mohammedan rule had been, on the whole, extending. The Christian reconquest of Spain was balanced by the inroads of this new enemy upon the Eastern Empire. The Spanish reconquest of Grenada, in the fifteenth century, was more than counterbalanced by the Turkish conquest of Hungary in the sixteenth. The Turks upon the middle Danube were a menace at once to Poland, Germany, and to northern Italy. Nor was this a mere temporary inroad of theirs. Two-thirds of Hungary were then more firmly held in their grasp than Macedonia is at present, and their frontiers were not going back. In the seventeenth century the Ottoman power still more than held its own in Eastern Europe. Though the Spaniards and Venetians had destroyed their fleet at Lepanto in 1571, though Montecuculi at the head of the Imperial troops had routed their armies at St. Gotthard in 1664, though Sobieski and the Poles made the great slaughter of Choczim in 1673, yet the frontiers of the Turks were advanced by every war. After Lepanto, the peace confirmed them in the possession of the newly acquired Cyprus; after St. Gotthard, they retained the strong city of Neuhausel, which they had just won, in Hungary, and conquered Candia; after Choczim, they were confirmed in their possession of the province of Podolia, and their supremacy over the Ukraine, the Marchland of Poland.

Of their soldiers the most formidable were the Janissaries. The policy of the earlier Sultans had demanded a tribute of boys from their Christian subjects. These children, early converts to Islam, were brought up with no home but the camp, no occupation but war; and, under the title of Janissaries, or the New Troops, were alternately the servants and the masters of the Ottoman Sultans. The strength of the Christians was drained, the strength of the Ottoman armies multiplied, and the fields of Paradise replenished at once, in the judgment of pious Mussulmans, by this policy. At this time the ranks of the Janissaries were not solely filled by this levy, but it has been computed that 500,000 Christian boys may have become instruments for the subjugation of Christendom, from the first institution of the tax in the fourteenth century down to the final levy made in 1675. Our commiseration for the Christian parents may be mitigated by the consideration that to sell their children into slavery, uncompelled, was a not unknown practice among the subjects of the Eastern Emperors, before the Mohammedan conquest.

These Janissaries formed a disciplined body of regular infantry. In the seventeenth century the Turks clung to the sabre, the musket, and even bows and arrows, as their arms, neglecting the pike, "the queen of infantry weapons," as Montecuculi calls it, just as afterwards they neglected the bayonet. But in the use of their arms every man of the Janissaries was a trained expert. The Turkish horsemen were famed for their rapidity of action, being generally more lightly armed and better mounted than the Germans or Poles. The Spahis, or royal horseguards, were the flower of the cavalry. The feudal levy from lands held by military tenure, swelled the numbers of their armies, and every province wrested from the Christians provided more fiefs to support fresh families of soldiers. Thus the children and lands of the conquered furnished the means for new conquests. Light troops, who were expected to live by plunder, spread far and wide before an advancing Ottoman host, eating up the country, destroying the inhabitants, and diverting the attention of the enemy. The Ottoman artillery was numerous, and the siege pieces of great calibre. Auxiliaries, such as the Tartars of the Crimea, the troops of Moldavian, Wallachian, Transylvanian, and even Hungarian princes, made a formidable addition to their forces. These armies lay, a terror to the inhabitants, a constant anxiety to the rulers, upon the frontiers of Germany and of Poland;—a black storm of war, ever ready to break in destructive energy upon them.

Whatever schism divided Turks and Persians, towards Europe at least, from the Caspian to Morocco, Islam presented an unbroken front, contrasting powerfully with the bitter divisions of Christendom. Massinger, in the "Renegade," puts into the mouth of a Moslem what many a Christian must have thought of with shame and terror:—

United Islam, which had preceded her western rival Spain in greatness, seemed also destined to long outlive that power's decay.

When Spain, in the sixteenth century, had been at the zenith of her power under Charles V., the Turks, under their great Emperor Solyman, had been not unworthy rivals to her. Even then Solyman had penetrated to the walls of Vienna, in 1529, and probably the lateness of the season, October, and the absence of his heavy artillery, stuck deep in the soil of Hungarian roads, saved the capital of the Austrian dominions more effectually than the valour of the garrison or the relieving forces of Charles could have done. Then the tide of Turkish power touched its farthest limit, but the fear of its return was not destroyed till after the lapse of one hundred and fifty years. Till after the siege of 1683, it is said that a crescent disgraced the spire of St. Stephen's, the cathedral of Vienna—a sign to avert the fire of Turkish gunners.

In the seventeenth century, when the great empire of Spain was fast approaching dissolution, when France was the great power of Western Europe, the Turks were still the great power of the East, with territories even more widely extended than in the previous age. It is true that, after the death of Solyman, a series of incapable rulers and the natural decay of an eastern despotism had paralyzed the great powers of Turkey; but the stern reforming vigour of Amurath IV. (1623-40), and, still more, the wise administration of the first two Grand Viziers of the house of Kiuprili, had done much to restore good government, vigour and efficiency to the Ottomans.[2] Their empire, the speedy downfall of which had been predicted by the English Ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, had since fully recovered its former reputation. A clever Frenchman, M. de la GuillatiÈre, who visited the camp of Kiuprili in Candia in 1669, formed the highest estimate of the military genius of the Turks, and of their political insight into the power and designs of the Christians. He judged of the greatness of the Sultan by considering the number and quality of the persons who feared his displeasure. "When he makes any great preparation, Malta trembles, Spain is fearful for his kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, the Venetian anxious for what he holds in Greece—Dalmatia and Friuli, the Germans apprehensive for what remains to them in Hungary, Poland is alarmed, and the consternation passes on as far as Muscovy, and, not resting there, expands itself to the Christian princes in Gourgistan and Mingrelia; Persia, Arabia, the Abyssinians are all in confusion, whilst neither man nor woman nor beast in all this vast tract but looks out for refuge till they be certain whither his great force is intended."[3] It is a striking estimate of Turkish power, but not beyond what experience confirmed. It was not till the second siege of Vienna, and her relief by Sobieski in 1683, that the real instability of the power of the Sultan was disclosed, that his armies were routed, his frontiers curtailed, his power rolled back within the Save and the Carpathians.

Not for the first time, in the summer of that year, Europe trembled at the progress of the Crescent. Since then, the tide of victory has run almost uninterruptedly in favour of the Cross, and Turkey has sunk from being the terror to the position of protÉgÉe, tool, victim, or tolerated scandal of Europe.

The decline of her forces, the reversal of the former position of Turk and Christian in the East, date from this great catastrophe of Islam. For Eastern Europe at least the battle before Vienna was a decisive battle. We must remember, indeed, what is meant by a decisive battle, or by any other so-called decisive event. They are rather the occasions than the causes of the transference of power. The causes lie deep which can produce such great and such lasting results. The operation of many influences, throughout a length of time, brings about ultimately the striking revolutions in the history of mankind. No chance bullet which strikes down, or avoids, a commander; no brilliant display of military genius in the person of one man; no incapacity of a single officer, can do more than alter the minor circumstances of great events. The great man is not successfully great, unless his genius can seize upon the opportunities offered by a rising tide of popular opinion, or profit by the accumulated energy of a nation. The incapable leader can seldom make shipwreck of a power unless it be built upon unsafe lines. The presence of a thoroughly incapable commander argues something rotten in his cause. The revolution, the reformation, the reaction, the transference of empire will come; if not in one way, in another; if not in one year, in the next, or in following years. The foundations of success and of failure, are laid deep in the moral, religious and political habits and institutions of nations. The invincible determination and high political and military training of the Roman aristocracy bore them safely through the catastrophes of a Second Punic War and the revolt of their allies. The ordered liberty, and the generations of successful adventure, which were the heritage of the English nation, had won Trafalgar before a shot had been fired from the Victory. The Persian host went forth predestined to choke the Gulf of Salamis with corpses. No Kosciusko's valour could redeem the long anarchy and blindness of Poland. Napoleon, marching from victory to victory, but approached the nearer to that fall, which must await one man against a continent in arms. So the Turkish myriads, victorious at Vienna, would have fallen upon some less noble field before the skill of some other Sobieski. But the genius and courage of individuals may well determine the fate of armies for a day. One day's victory may call for years of warfare to accomplish its undoing. A few years of delay may work great changes in the fortunes of men.

It is no mistaken estimate of the relative value of causes, it is no unintelligent interest which makes us prone to linger over the one dramatic moment—that moment when the courses of the tendencies of ages are declared within the compass of a day. By no hard effort of imagination we identify our interest with that of the actors in the scene. To them, however confident, the result is never clear; to them the delay of a few years in the overthrow of some inevitably falling wrong may make that difference for which no ultimate success can compensate. It was cold comfort to the inhabitants of Vienna, or to the King of Poland, to know that even if St. Stephen's had shared the fate of St. Sophia and become a mosque of Allah, and if the Polish standards had been borne in triumph to the Bosphorus, yet that, nevertheless, the undisciplined Ottomans would infallibly have been scattered by French, German and Swedish armies on the fields of Bavaria or of Saxony. Vienna would have been sacked; Poland would have been a prey to internal anarchy and to Tartar invasion. The ultimate triumph of their cause would have consoled few for their individual destruction.

Prompted by feelings such as these we dwell upon the decisive hours, when the long assured superiority asserts itself, for good and all. We can hail Marathon, Salamis, Tours, or Vienna as the occasion, if not the cause, of the triumph of civilization over barbarism, of Europe over Asia. We must remember, too, that, if the day for a permanent advance of Turkish power was over, yet that a temporary Turkish victory, and a protracted war in Germany, could not have been confined in their influence to the seat of war alone. So cool and experienced a diplomatist as Sir William Temple did indeed believe, at the time, that the fall of Vienna would have been followed by a great and permanent increase of Turkish power.[4] Putting this aside however, there were other results likely to spring from Turkish success. The Turks constantly made a powerful diversion in favour of France and her ambitious designs. Turkish victories upon the one side of Germany meant successful French aggressions upon the other, and Turkish schemes were promoted with that object by the French. The author of the memoirs of Prince Eugene writes bitterly, but truly enough, of this crisis: "Le roi trÈs-chrÉtien avant d'Être dÉvot, secourait les chrÉtiens contre les infidÈles (at St. Gotthard and at Candia), devenu pourtant un grand homme de bien, il les agaÇait contre l'empereur, et soutenait les rebelles de Hongrie. Sans lui ils ne seraient jamais venus, les uns et les autres, aux portes de Vienne."

"If France would but stand neutral, the controversy between Turks and Christians might soon be decided," says the Duke of Lorraine. But France would not stand neutral.