Charles of Lorraine, the Imperial commander, had under his orders less than 40,000. The levy en masse of Hungary produced 3000 soldiers only for the Emperor's service, so wide was the sway of the Turks, or so universal the sympathy for Tekeli. Six thousand Hungarians, supposed to be raised for the Emperor, went over to the enemy as soon as they advanced. Yet, contrary to his own opinion, Lorraine began with offensive operations against the Turkish fortress of Neuhausel. A partial success was followed by a disastrous repulse, and the army withdrew south of the Danube, as the main Turkish force approached upon that same side of the river. Lorraine had some idea of making a stand near the Raab to cover the Austrian frontier, but the number of the enemy and the temper of his own soldiers rendered such an attempt too hazardous. He determined to retreat, and await the reinforcements already promised by the Princes of the Empire. Garrisons were hastily flung into Raab, Komorn, and Leopoldstadt.[7] The infantry then recrossed the Danube and fell back towards Vienna along the SchÜtt island, under Count Leslie's orders. The cavalry marched upon the southern side of the river, but the superior rapidity of their retreat did not save them from molestation. On July 7 at Petronel, some twenty miles below Vienna, 15,000 Spahis and Tartars burst upon their march. For a time Count Taaffe, with the rear guard of 400 men, was in extreme danger. The exertions of Lorraine and of Louis of Baden rallied the cavalry and speedily repulsed their disorderly assailants, but in the confusion several of the officers fell, including Prince Aremberg and Julius Louis of Savoy, an elder brother of Prince Eugene, and much of the baggage became the prey of the Tartars. Altenburg and Haimburg, posts upon the Danube, had been already stormed, after a brief resistance, by the Turkish infantry.

Those stragglers who first leave the field are always apt to cover their own flight by the report of an universal overthrow. So fugitives came galloping to Vienna with a tale of disaster. They spread the rumour that the Duke of Lorraine was killed and the army totally defeated, while their alarm seemed amply confirmed by the glow of burning villages that brightened upon the twilight of the eastern horizon. The Imperial court, which had delayed its flight so far, in the hope that the enemy might linger about the fortresses of Raab or of Komorn, tarried now no longer. "Leopold could never bear to hear plain truths but when he was afraid," says Eugene. He had refused to recognize the imminence of the peril until now; and by his confidence had involved in his destruction others, who had not the same means of escape at the last moment which he himself possessed. Yet means of escape were barely open to him, when at length he understood that he must defend or abandon his capital. The roads to Upper Austria and to Bavaria, along the southern shore of the Danube, were rightly distrusted. The Emperor, his Empress, and the Empress Mother, with all their train of courtiers, of ladies, and of servants, shorn of pomp and bereft of dignity in their flight, poured over the Leopoldstadt island and the Tabor bridge in all the misery of panic fear. The prompt destruction of the bridge of Crems, above Vienna, is said alone to have saved their route from interception by the Tartars. A part of their baggage actually became the prey of the marauders. The whole court, including even the Empress herself, who was far advanced in pregnancy, were driven to seek rest in farms and cottages. Once they passed the night under a temporary shelter of boughs. In the universal panic, small room was left for hopes of a return to the capital and to the palaces that they had quitted. Milan, Innspruck, Prague were thought of as their future refuge. On to Lintz, and from Lintz to the frontier they fled, till their confidence at last returned behind the fortifications of the Bavarian city of Passau. But they were not the only fugitives from Vienna. The bold march of the Vizier upon the city, leaving Raab, Komorn, and Presburg in his rear, to fall an easy prey when once the great prize was captured; this had taken the citizens by surprise. The retreat of Lorraine, and the skirmish at Petronel, had filled them with abject terror.

People from the surrounding country who had taken shelter in Vienna no longer relied upon her as a stronghold, but turned their thoughts to an escape to Bavaria, or to Styria, or even to the distant Tirol. From nine o'clock in the evening till two o'clock in the morning, on the 7th and 8th of July, a never-ending stream of carriages and of fugitives were following in the track of the Imperial cortÈge. East and south, upon the horizon, the glare of burning villages told that the Turkish horsemen were there. High on the summit of the Kahlenberg, the flames of the Camalduline Convent dreadfully illuminated the track of the fugitives. Sixty thousand persons, it was believed, left the city in the course of a few days. Of those who, crossing the Danube, took the roads into Upper Austria or into Moravia, some fell into the hands of the Hungarian and Tartar marauders. But few of those who attempted to escape into Styria succeeded in reaching a place of safety. They perished by thousands, enveloped by the flying squadrons of the invaders.

In Vienna herself, deserted by her leaders and by so many of her children, violent tumult raged against the Government, and against the Jesuits, who were supposed to have instigated the persecution of the Protestants of Hungary. There was ample cause for terror. The fortifications were old and imperfect, the suburbs encroached upon the works, the number of the defenders was small. Thirteen thousand infantry, supplied by the army of Lorraine, and seven thousand armed citizens formed the garrison; and, besides these, about sixty thousand souls were in the city. The command was entrusted to Ernest Rudiger Count Starhemberg, an officer of tried skill and courage. He had served with Montecuculi against the Turks, and against both CondÉ and Turenne with the same commander and with the Prince of Orange. He entered the city as the fugitives forsook it. He set the people to work upon the fortifications, organized them for defence, and assured them that he would live and die with them. But while writing to the Emperor that he would joyfully spend the last drop of his blood in defence of his charge, he confesses that the place is in want of everything, and the inhabitants panic-stricken. Fortunately he and others with him were the class of men to restore confidence in the rest. Under him served many noble volunteers, for the example of the Emperor was not universally followed. The Bishop of Neustadt, once himself a soldier and a knight of Malta, was conspicuous among many brave and devoted men for his liberal donations to the troops, and for his superintendence of the sanitary state of the city. In one respect alone the place was well furnished; three hundred and twenty-one pieces of artillery were supplied by the Imperial arsenal for the fortifications.[8] The city was defended after the existing fashion, with ten bastions, the curtains covered by ravelines, with a ditch mostly dry. On the side of the Danube was merely a wall with towers and platforms, and all the works were more or less uncared for and decayed. The work of fixing palisades was postponed till the Turkish army was in sight. It is possible that by a slightly more rapid march the Vizier might have secured Vienna by a coup de main.

On July 13, the Turkish regular cavalry came in sight, preceding the infantry of the main army; and at the last possible moment fire was set to the suburbs, which impeded the defence. A high wind speedily caused them to be consumed. On the 14th, the Turkish army took up its position, encamping in a semicircle, round the whole of the circuit of the defences not washed by the Danube. A city, surpassing in size and population the beleaguered capital, sprang up about the walls of Vienna. The tents of the Vizier were pitched opposite the Burg bastion, in the suburb of St. Ulric. The camp was crowded not only by soldiers, but by the merchants of the East, who thronged thither as to a fair to deal in the plunder of the Christians. The Imperial troops still attempted to hold the Leopoldstadt island; but on July 16, the Turks threw bridges across the arm of the Danube, and shortly drove the Christians to the northern bank of the river. The houses of the Leopoldstadt were given up to fire by the Turks; and the bridge, leading to the northern shore, destroyed by the Imperialists. The investment of Vienna was now completed upon every side. Batteries from the Leopoldstadt, and from the south and west, crossed it with fire in all directions. Trenches were opened, and the elaborate approaches and frequent mines of the Turks, advancing with alarming rapidity, enveloped the western and south-western face of the works from the Scottish gate to the Burg bastion.

Upwards of three hundred pieces of artillery played upon the crumbling defences and the devastated city. The pavement of the streets was torn up, that the balls might bury themselves in the soft earth where they fell. The upper floors and roofs of the houses were barricaded with heavy timber, or covered with sandbags, to guard against the fire of the dropping shells. The streets themselves were blocked behind the walls, chains drawn across them, and the houses loop-holed and prepared for defence to the last extremity. All the gates had been walled up but one, the Stuben gate, which, being partially covered by the stream of the Wien, was left open as a sally-port. Early in the siege, the assailed, frequently issuing forth, returned the attacks of the enemy, frustrated their operations, and even captured provisions in the hostile lines. But as time went on, the diminishing numbers of the garrison forbade the waste of life incurred even in successful sorties.

The progress of the Turks was rapid with sap and mine. They were famed for their skill with entrenching and engineering tools, and the Christians learnt much from them, though their approaches were unlike the ordinary European works. Instead of parallel lines to the defences they drew curves, overlapping each other and continually approaching the place attacked. The trenches were deep, and fifteen or sixteen feet wide at the bottom where the ground allowed. The depth of the Turkish works effectually protected their soldiers, even when they had made a lodgment in the ditch; for the besieged could not depress their cannon sufficiently to hurt them.[9] They were protected skilfully by bomb-proof shelters of timber and of turf, beneath which thousands of men, hidden and shielded, crouched ready for attack, or for the repulse of sorties. Their mines penetrated in every direction to the counterscarp of the place, and ultimately to the walls themselves. At length the very cellars of the nearest houses were threatened by a subterranean enemy; and water and drums strewn with peas were placed in them, to tell, by the slightest vibration, of the work of the Turkish miner's pick below.

The Turkish miners were bolder than those of the garrison. The latter were hired labourers of the lowest class, of whom Starhemberg wrote to Lorraine that nothing would induce them to re-enter a mine after they had heard the sound of the enemy working near them. On the part of the enemy, men who had applied for a Timar, or military fief, often volunteered as miners to prove their courage and to win its reward.

At the very beginning of operations the city all but perished through a fire, which actually reached the windows of the Imperial arsenal stored with eighteen hundred barrels of powder. An explosion there would have opened a road for the Turkish army into Vienna, at once deprived of the means of resistance and reduced to ruins. The exertions of Captain Count Guido Starhemberg, nephew of the commandant, who personally superintended the removal of the powder through the opposite windows, together with a lucky change of wind, saved the city. Rightly or wrongly, an incendiary was suspected. The fear of treachery was added to the legitimate terrors of the citizens. Desertions took place to the enemy, and spies were actually apprehended within the walls. Hungarians and other Christians were arrayed upon both sides, and this community of language and manners, between besiegers and besieged, rendered such a danger more real.

But from the open force of the attack the worst calamities were to be feared. On the 23rd, 25th, and 27th of July the opening assaults were delivered. All were repulsed, but with loss of lives ill-spared.

Closer and closer crept the Turkish sappers. Assault after assault upon the outer fortifications gradually wrested important positions from the besieged. The Burg and LÖwel bastions, with the connecting curtain between them and the Burg ravelin, were reduced to an almost shapeless ruin by the Turkish mines and artillery. Every device was tried to retard the attack. The arts and ingenuity of a great city were at the service of the besieged. They made their own powder; and, when hand-grenades began to fail, the invention of an officer supplied their place with grenades of earthenware. Nevertheless, on August 7, the Turks made a lodgment upon the counterscarp, after twenty-three days of firing and terrible losses upon both sides.

The Janissaries now stood upon the very threshold of the city. Hand to hand fighting was carried on in the ditches. The citizens armed with scythes upon the end of poles contended with advantage from above against the Turkish sabres. Boiling pitch and water stood continually ready to overwhelm the assailants as they struggled up the shattered slope of the ramparts. Besiegers and besieged were continually within pistol shot of each other, and showers of Turkish arrows descended on the town. As yet no footing was obtained by the Turks within the body of the place, though the streets and houses stood ready barricaded against such an event. But the Vizier commanded two hundred thousand men, Starhemberg but twenty thousand. Disease and the toils and losses of the defence told fearfully upon the latter. Starhemberg himself was disabled by dysentery early in the siege, and did all that man could do, carried in a chair from post to post, amidst the hottest of the fire. On the other side, Kara Mustapha made his rounds in a litter rendered shot-proof by plates of iron. The chief engineer of the garrison, Rimpler, fell. Colonel BÄrner, commanding the artillery, and the Prince of Wurtemberg were disabled. Five thousand men, more than a third of the regular soldiers, perished. Food became scarce, vermin were eagerly sought for by the poor, and dysentery followed inevitably in the train of want. Fever sprang from the confinement, filth, and bad air inseparable from their condition. Sixty persons a day were dying of dysentery alone towards the conclusion of the siege. But the humour of the Viennese asserted itself still among their calamities, and the spoils of nocturnal chase upon the tiles were sold as "Roof Hares" in the market. The courage of long endurance, that rarest of all courage, was tried to the uttermost. The Bishop of Neustadt, bravest of the brave defenders, laboured unremittingly among the sick, nor cared less for the safety of the whole, by undertaking the control of sanitary measures. The otherwise useless non-combatants were organized by him into bands of scavengers, hospital attendants, and carriers of the wounded.

A despatch from Starhemberg, dated August 18, came safely to the hands of Lorraine. The commandant wrote boldly, perhaps with an eye to the probability of his intelligence reaching the Turkish and not the Imperial general. "I must in the first place, tell your Highness that we have up to this moment disputed the works with the enemy, foot by foot, and that they have not gained an inch of ground without paying for it dearly. Every time that, sword in hand, they have attempted a lodgment, they have been vigorously repulsed by our men, with such loss that they no longer dare to put their heads out of their holes." Nevertheless, he was providing for the worst. "I have caused a new work, well ditched, to be made in the middle of the Burg ravelin; the LÖwel and Burg bastions are also defended by a second line; and I am even now beginning another work behind these same bastions. I write this that your Highness may know that we are forgetting nothing, that we are wide awake, and taking all imaginable precautions. As in duty bound I assure your Highness, that to show myself worthy of the confidence which your Highness, and more especially his Majesty my master, repose in my small services, I shall never yield the place but with the last drop of my blood."

This despatch was safely carried to Lorraine by Kolschitzki, a Pole. Many other letters had miscarried, for few messengers penetrated, at the risk of life, between the city and the slowly mustering forces of Lorraine. Some swam the arms of the Danube. The most skilful, however, was this Kolschitzki, who relied upon his knowledge of the Turkish tongue and manners, and in Turkish dress penetrated the besieging lines, much as a countryman of our own relied on similar knowledge in a scarcely less memorable siege. The name of Kolschitzki of Vienna may be named side by side with that of "Lucknow" Kavanagh, though the Pole not only passed out through the besiegers, but succeeded in returning again in a like manner into the city with despatches, to sustain the courage of the defenders. From his stone chair, high up in the fretted spire of St. Stephen's, the watchman saw the rockets which rose as signals from the Christian outposts north of the Danube. But from the southern bank must the march be made for the deliverance of the city; and was it possible that Lorraine, or even Sobieski, could carry a force across the river in the face of such an army?

The garrison record, with painful exactness, the terrible annals of the siege; what ravelin is deluged with the blood of assailants and of defenders; where mines have blown the counterscarp into the ditch, or shattered the salient angle of a bastion; what new quarter of the city is devastated by the cannonade; what much-prized life is taken; when the bread begins to fail; what false hopes of relief, or what exaggerated tidings of calamity, circulate among the citizens. These details, of overwhelming interest to every man at the moment, and printed indelibly upon his mind, bring to the distant observer but one confused and appalling panorama of suffering and of endurance, of courage and of despair.

The growing anxiety of the city appears in a second despatch of Starhemberg's, dated August 27. He still tells of attacks repulsed, of sorties boldly executed, and of mines discovered and foiled, but he acknowledges the need of succour. "We are losing many men and many officers, more from dysentery than from the enemy's fire, the deaths from that disease alone are sixty daily. We have no more grenades, which were our best defence; our guns are some of them destroyed by the enemy's fire, some of them burst before firing fifty rounds, from the bad material used by the founder; and the enemy, seeing they can hold their lodgments in the ditch with a few men, are massing great numbers on the counterscarp, to have a large force ready there for some extraordinary effort.... We await, therefore, your Highness's arrival with extreme impatience; for my own part not so much from a wish to be relieved as that I may have the honour of respectfully assuring your Highness of my obedience, being, as I am, your Highness's most humble and obedient servant, Starhemberg." The courtly bravado of the subscription is in strong contrast with the hurried postscript that follows:—"My miners tell me that they hear the enemy working beneath them under the Burg bastion; they must have run their gallery from the other side of the ditch, and there is no time to be lost." When this despatch was written, both sides believed that the supreme crisis was at hand.

The 29th of August was looked for as the decisive day. On that anniversary Stuhlweissenberg and Belgrade had fallen before the Ottomans.[10] Above all, on that day the strength of Hungary had been smitten, and her king, Louis, had died, before the hosts of the great Solyman, on the disastrous field of "The Destruction of Mohacs"—that battle which first opened Hungary and Austria to the invader.

But the 29th came and passed, with no general attack from the besiegers. A mine was sprung under the Burg ravelin, nearly completing the ruin of the work; and three or four hundred Turks attempted to establish themselves upon the remains, but were driven back again. Another mine was sprung by the Burg bastion, but no assault followed. From St. Stephen's considerable movement was noticed among the Turkish detachments on the left bank of the Danube, occasioned by the march of Lorraine's army.

In the camp murmurs and dissensions ran high. The Janissaries clamoured at their lengthy detention in the trenches. They openly accused the incapacity, or worse faults, of the Vizier. There seems little doubt but that he had it in his power to have overwhelmed the defenders by a general and prolonged assault, towards the end of August.

Ottoman leaders had known well how to avail themselves of the obedience and fatalist courage of their soldiers. Amurath IV., when he won back Baghdad from the Persians, Mahomet II., at the taking of Constantinople, had shown how cities could be won. Before the city of the Khalifs for three days, before the city of the CÆsars from a May sunrise till well nigh noon, had torrent after torrent of brave, devoted, undisciplined soldiers wearied the arms and exhausted the ammunition of the defenders, until the Janissaries arose, fresh and invincible for the decisive charge. Wave after wave of stormers, fed from inexhaustible multitudes, had rolled upon the besieged, and, like broken waves, had rolled back in ruin, until the last and greatest should burst in overwhelming force upon the breaches. Such an assault would have been surely successful against Vienna. But the Vizier, in vain security, pictured to himself the advantages of a surrender, which should preserve the city as a trophy of his conquest—the seat, perchance, of his sovereignty. The riches which he dreamed it to contain, he hoped to receive as his own spoil; not to yield as the booty of the army after a storm. So, while the decisive days passed, the signal for attack was delayed, except by small bodies upon single points, until the courage of his soldiers was dissipated and their confidence destroyed. On the contrary, the unexpected reprieve gave courage to the defenders. The Janissaries, on the other hand, impatiently invoked the appearance of the relieving army to end their sojourn in the trenches by the decisive event of a stricken field. Slowly, but at last, ere yet too late, that army was approaching.