In Our Time: the Siege of Vienna
May 14th, 2009
Remembering the Siege of Vienna
This week's In Our Time broadcast from BBC Radio 4 discussed the siege of Vienna. In 1683, Vienna was one of Europe's wealthiest cities. It was strategically important: the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, lying close to the boundaries of the neighbouring power to the East, the Ottoman Empire. As Kara Mustafa approached Vienna with an army and retinue of 150 000, Emperor Leopold I fled the city. Vienna's citizens were reduced to eating cats and rats during the forty days of the siege, and Europe's Christian states, which saw Vienna as their bulwark against enemies from the East, watched with growing anxiety.
Melvyn Bragg's guests were Jeremy Black, Claire Norton and Andrew Wheatcroft, author of the 2008 study of the siege, Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans and the Battle for Europe. A selection of podcasts from Wheatcroft's text is available here. They argued that contemporaries were wrong to see the advance of the Ottoman Army as evidence of a "clash of civilisations" - the Ottoman Empire had no intention of eradicating Christianity in Europe. Still, English Protestants offered prayers for the rescue of Catholic Vienna while Europe's princes mustered relief armies. Jan Sobieski, King of Poland, led the troops which lifted the siege - he had left Poland's borders unguarded in the hope of winning a glorious victory which would establish him as the equal of any European monarch. The relief of Vienna was celebrated all over Europe as a "victory for Christendom".
Jeremy Black claims that the siege was vital to the "deep history" of Central Europe - that "a collective memory of tension, hostility and antagonism" still influences attitudes to Turkey there. It's true that some aspects of the siege have been cherished in public memory. Reminders of the event are everywhere in Vienna today. Tour guides peddle the myth that croissants were invented to celebrate the relief of the city. Cannonballs fired by the Ottoman army have been left embedded in historic buildings. Leopold I features in one of the city's most extravagant monuments, the Pestsäule (top right), which celebrates Vienna's survival of siege and plague. But not everything is remembered. It's hard to find any trace of the victory of Jan Sobieski, who embarrassed Leopold by entering the city in triumph a day before the Emperor managed to return. Sobieski's memorial in the city's historical centre is a simple plaque (bottom right), mounted 300 years after the events of 1683.
In Our Time is broadcast every Thursday at 9 am and repeated at 9.30 pm. Visit the programme's online archive for expert accounts and debates on a wide range of historical topics.
Posted by jfinucan | Tagged with early modern history, jane finucane, memory, public history, war, war violence and society
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