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| Siege of Vienna 1529 |
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| The Siege of Vienna in 1529, as distinct from the
Battle of Vienna in 1683, was the first attempt of the Ottoman
Empire, led by Sultan Suleiman I (the magnificent), to capture the
city of Vienna, Austria. The siege signaled the Ottoman Empire's
highwater mark and signalling the end of Ottoman expansion in
central Europe, though 150 years of tension and incursions followed,
culminating in the Battle of Vienna in 1683. |
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| Some historians believe that Suleiman's main
objective in 1529 was to re-establish Ottoman control over Hungary,
and that the decision to attack Vienna so late in the season was
opportunistic. |
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| Background |
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In August 1526, Sultan Suleiman I, also known as
Suleiman the Lawgiver and Suleiman the Magnificent, had defeated the
forces of King Louis II of Hungary at the Battle of Mohács. As a
result, the Ottomans gained control of southern Hungary, while the
Archduke of Austria, Ferdinand I of Habsburg, brother of the Holy
Roman Emperor Charles V, claimed the vacant Hungarian throne in
right of his wife, Anna Jagellonica, sister of the childless Louis
II. Ferdinand, however, won recognition only in western Hungary; a
noble called John Zápolya, from a power-base in Transylvania,
north-eastern Hungary, challenged him for the crown and was
recognised as king by Suleiman in return for accepting vassal status
within the Ottoman Empire.
Following the Diet of Bratislava on 26 October, Ferdinand was
declared King of Hungary due to his mariage to Louis' sister and his
own sister being the widow of Louis. Ferdinand set out to enforce
his claim on Hungary and captured Buda. These gains were short-lived
and by 1529, an Ottoman counter-attack swiftly negated all of the
gains by Ferdinand in his campaigns in 1527 and 1528 . |
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| Ottoman army |
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| In spring 1529, Suleiman mustered a great army in
Ottoman Bulgaria, with the aim of securing control of Hungary and
reducing the threat posed at his new borders by Ferdinand and the
Holy Roman Empire. Various historians have estimated Suleiman's
troop strength at anything from 120,000 to more than 300,000 men. As
well as units of sipahi, or light cavalry, and elite janissary
infantry, the Ottoman army incorporated a contingent of Christian
Hungarians fighting for their new Turkish ruler. Suleiman acted as
the commander-in-chief, and in April he appointed his grand vizier,
a former Greek slave called Ibrahim Pasha, as serasker, a commander
with powers to give orders in the sultan's name. |
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Suleiman launched his campaign on 10 May 1529 and
faced obstacles from the outset. The spring rains characteristic of
south-eastern Europe were particularly heavy that year, causing
flooding in Bulgaria and rendering parts of the route barely
passable. Many large-calibre guns became hoplessly mired and had to
be left behind, and camels were lost in large numbers.
Suleiman arrived in Osijek on 6 August. On 18 August, on the Mohács
plain, he met up with a substantial cavalry force led by John
Zápolya, who paid him homage and helped him recapture several
fortresses lost since the Battle of Mohács to the Austrians,
including Buda, which fell on 8 September. The only resistance came
at Bratislava, where the Turkish fleet was bombarded as it sailed up
the Danube. |
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| Defensive measures |
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| As the Ottomans advanced, those inside Vienna
prepared to resist, their determination stiffened by news of the
massacre of the Buda garrison in early September. Ferdinand I had
withdrawn to the safety of Habsburg Bohemia following pleas for
assistance to his brother, Emperor Charles V, who was too stretched
by his war with France to spare more than a few Spanish infantry to
the cause. |
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| A. Ortelius, 1601 |
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| The able Marshall of Austria, Wilhelm von
Roggendorf, assumed charge of the garrison, with operational command
entrusted to a seventy-year-old German mercenary named Niklas Graf
Salm, who had distinguished himself at the Battle of Pavia in 1525.
Salm arrived in Vienna at the head of a relief force which included
German Landsknechte mercenary pikemen and Spanish musketmen and set
about shoring up the three-hundred-year-old walls surrounding St.
Stephen's Cathedral, near which he established his headquarters. To
make sure the city could withstand a lengthy siege, he blocked the
four city gates and reinforced the walls, which in some places were
no more than six feet thick, and erected earthen bastions and an
inner earthen rampart, levelling buildings where necessary. |
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| Siege |
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| The Ottoman army which arrived in late September
had been depleted during the long advance into Austrian territory,
leaving Suleiman short of camels and heavy equipment. Many of his
troops arrived at Vienna in a poor state of health after the
privations of the long march, and of those fit to fight, a third
were light cavalry, or sipahis, ill-suited for siege warfare. The
sultan despatched emissaries who were 3 richly dressed austrian
prisnors to negotiate the city's surrender; Salm sent 3 richly
dressed muslims back without a response. Suleiman's artillery then
began pounding the city's walls, but it failed to significantly
damage the Austrian defensive earthworks; his archers fared little
better, achieving nuisance value at best. |
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| St. Stephen’s Cathedral around
1530 |
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As the Ottoman army settled into position, the
garrison launched sorties to disrupt the digging of sap trenches and
mines, in one case almost capturing Ibrahim Pasha. The Austrians
detected and blew up several mineheads, and on 6 October they sent
out 8,000 troops to attack the Ottoman mining operations, destroying
many of the mines but sustaining serious losses when congestion
hindered their retreat into the city.
More rain fell on October 11, and with the failure of the mining
strategy, the chances of a quick Ottoman victory were receding by
the hour. In addition, the Turks were running out of fodder for
their horses, and casualties, sickness, and desertions began taking
a toll on their ranks. Even the elite janissaries now voiced
discontent at the state of affairs. In view of these factors,
Suleiman had no alternative but to contemplate retreat. He held a
council of war on 12 October which decided on one last attack, with
extra rewards offered to the troops. However, this assault, too, was
repulsed, as once again the arquebuses and long pikes of the
defenders prevailed in keeping out the Turks. On the night of 14
October, screams were heard from the opposing camp, the sound of the
Ottomans killing their prisoners prior to moving out. Some defenders
who had foreseen only surrender interpreted their deliverance as a
miracle. |
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| Aftermath |
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Some historians speculate that Suleiman's final
assault wasn't necessarily intended to take the city but to cause as
much damage as possible and weaken it for a later attack, a tactic
he had employed at Buda in 1526. He led his next campaign in 1532
but was held up too long reducing the western Hungarian fort of
Kőszeg, by which time winter was close and Charles V, now awakened
to Vienna's vulnerability, assembled 80,000 troops. So instead of
carrying out the planned siege, the invading troops retreated
through and laid waste to Styria. The two campaigns proved that
Vienna was situated at the extreme limit of Ottoman logistical
capability. The army needed to winter at Constantinople so that its
troops could attend to their fiefs and recruit for the next year's
campaigning.
Suleiman's retreat did not mark a complete failure. The campaign
underlined Ottoman control of southern Hungary and left behind
enough destruction in Habsburg Hungary and in those Austrian lands
it had ravaged to impair Ferdinand's capacity to mount a sustained
counterattack. Suleiman's achievement was to consolidate the gains
of 1526 and establish the puppet kingdom of John Zápolya as a buffer
against the Holy Roman Empire.
The invasion and its climactic siege, however, exacted a heavy price
from both sides, with tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians
dead and thousands more sold into slavery. It marked the end of the
Ottomans' expansion towards the centre of Europe and arguably the
beginning of their long decline as the dominant power of the
Renaissance world. "The delivery of Vienna by a brave garrison under
Count Niklas Salm in 1529," suggested historian Rolf Adolf Kahn,
"was probably a greater though less spectacular achievement than the
liberation five generations later brought about primarily by the
efforts of a rather large army of combined imperial and Polish
forces".
Ferdinand I set up a funeral monument for Niklas Graf Salm — who had
been injured during the last Ottoman assault and died on 4 May 1530
— to express his gratitude to the defender of Vienna. This
Renaissance sarcophagus is now on display in the baptistry of the
Votivkirche in Vienna. Ferdinand's son, Maximilian II, later built
the summer palace of Neugebaeude on the spot where Suleiman is said
to have pitched his tent. |
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