“The infidels sprang up on the slopes with their divisions like storm clouds, covered in a blue metal … it was as if a torrent of black pitch was pouring down, choking and burning everything in its path”.
This is how the Turkish chronicler Mehmed Silahdar described the charge of the Polish knights that broke the siege of Vienna on 12 September 1683.

For over two months, the imperial capital had been besieged by an army of over 200,000 Turks and their minor vassals, perhaps the largest that had ever attempted to subjugate central Europe.
The day before, on 11 September, commander Kara Mustafa Pasha had ordered a final assault on the walls to capture the city before his small garrison received reinforcements. The Janissaries and other elite units had all been crammed into the front line.

But the small garrison held out. And at dawn the next day, from the heights of Kahlenberg, first the German regiments and then the deadly Polish cavalry of King Jan Sobieski descended on the rear of the Turkish army.

From celebration to censorship

45,000 Turks died in the clash and the rest dispersed. It was a day of celebration for the Catholic kingdoms of the ‘Holy League‘, who had been the authors of the feat and who hastened to spread all sorts of legends to increase its sacred aura.

Pope Innocent XI Odescalchi immediately attributed it to Mary’s miraculous intervention. It was told that the Polish king had served as a humble altar boy in the Mass that was sung on the eve of the battle. Furthermore, in honour of Marco d’Aviano, the Capuchin friar who had celebrated the rite, a drink was invented that is still popular today.

Jan Sobieski sends the news of the victory to the Pope:
Jan Matejko’s canvas in the Vatican Palace

The crusade rhetoric that surrounded the battle is one of the reasons why all memory of it has been lost today: in schools, in fact, it is not spoken of or is spoken of with embarrassment.

In addition to the anti-Catholic prejudice, there is also the Occidentalist one: when explaining the last part of the 17th century to pupils (assuming one explains it), teachers usually imagine that the universe was restricted to a tiny triangle between Paris, London and Amsterdam, where French absolutism, English parliamentarianism, Dutch republicanism and, in their shadow, the scientific academies were being born.

All beautiful, for goodness sake: but if the hordes of Kara Pasha had spread beyond Vienna there would have been little left.

Unfortunately, we have retained a mental Berlin Wall that we project back into the past, assuming that the struggles between feudal barbarians who lived further east than Gorizia had no impact on the evolution of “properly said Europe”.

Pros and cons of feeling invincible

Well, nothing proves the falsity of this prejudice as much as the consequences of the triumph of Vienna.

Those 17th-century Catholics, in the heat of their devotion, could not realise that for the first time in two millennia Europe had been freed from the terror of the ‘clash of civilisations’.
Europeans, in short, no longer had to fear being attacked by a non-European power promoting a foreign religion and a foreign law.

True, minor conflicts with the Ottomans continued to erupt, and the white slave trade continued to enrich Constantinople as much as the black slave trade.
But the technological and administrative superiority of the Europeans was no longer in question. The fear that Islam would annihilate Christendom gradually disappeared.

The values of peace, tolerance, humanity, economic cooperation and technological progress, which until the 17th century had been justified by the need to protect themselves from the Turks, finally enjoyed the luxury of evolving into universal values.

Freed from the fear of being annihilated from outside, European civilisation would from then on only worry about wars and internal revolutions.
In relations with other civilisations it would always be in a position of strength, it would become accustomed to this position of strength to the point of considering it natural, and an increasing number of Europeans (a fact unheard of in human history) would even feel guilty about this position of strength.

In the 20th century, the birth of the Soviet Union may have reproduced the climate of terror towards a despotic and anti-Christian eastern enemy, but the ideal roots of communism remained blatantly and typically European: typical, indeed, of that post-1683 Europe, that felt itself the sole arbiter of the world, where some could delude themselves that a workers’ uprising in three or four industrialised nations was enough to eliminate all injustice from mankind.

The victory of a divided Europe

Since the topic is hot, it is interesting to note that the Catholic front in Vienna was anything but united against the Islamic invaders.
Louis XIV, the ‘Roi Soleil’, had stick to the historical friendship between France and Turkey against the Germans, and had in fact remained neutral. The young and clever Eugene of Savoy, who lived at the court of Versailles as his vassal, had to escape disguised as a woman in order to take part in the battle.

The Poles, for their part, knew that they would not make any territorial gains from the feat and hesitated for a long time before diverting valuable troops from the borders with Russia and Sweden.
As for the German statelets of the Empire, they were as quarrelsome as usual, and moreover were still recovering from a plague epidemic.

Forming the ‘Holy League’, therefore, had been a long and nerve-racking undertaking for friar Marco d’Aviano and Pope Innocent.

The Europeans in Vienna did not win because they were united, but despite being divided.
The Roman Church propagandized the victory with liturgies of thanksgiving, incense smokings and ringing bells, but today historians know that Christendom was saved that day almost by chance and above all because of mistakes made by the Turks.

Turkey’s decline boosted by fanaticism

At that time, a dynasty of grand viziers of Albanian origin ruled Constantinople: the Köprülü, whose descendant Kara Pasha had married. Relying on their military prowess, the Köprülü had forced the sultans to resume their expansionist policy towards the heart of Europe.

The Ottoman Empire, however, like the Roman Empire in its time, recruited a substantial part of its soldiers from the peripheral regions: it therefore deployed Hungarian Protestants, Serbian and Moldavian Orthodox Christians, Armenians, Crimean Tatars and a constellation of other non-Turkish or non-Muslim ethnic groups.

Of course, for all of them it was ‘better the sultan’s turban than the pope’s tiara’, but their very lives were worth more than both.

Moreover, maintaining armies of 200,000 men required a staggering increase in taxes, and holy war inevitably provoked violence against internal minorities.

The Ottoman army, therefore, was even less motivated than the Catholic one.
After its defeat in Vienna, then, the less fanatical fringes of the Turkish elite (which also included the Janissaries, i.e. the Praetorians) rose up against the Köprülü and against the sultans themselves: from then on, the decline was irreversible for ‘the great sick man of Europe’.

Tolkien’s role

The Battle of Vienna marked a decisive turning point in our history, which partly justifies the epic tone with which it has long been recounted.

It is no coincidence that the episode, thrown out of the school door, has nevertheless re-entered popular culture through the window thanks to J.R.R. Tolkien, who modelled the battle of the Pelennor Fields on that of Vienna in his Lord of the Rings .

For millions of my peers, that “Horns, horns, horns, in dark Mindolluin’s sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the north wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last” was one of the most moving pages of literature, and, transposed to the big screen, it was perhaps the most exciting scene ever seen on film.
It is no mystery that references to Tolkien’s mythology are the order of the day in the Ukrainian army.

Admittedly, it is a bit sad that a real historical episode had to go the long way round, via a fantasy version of it, to inspire today’s Europeans.
But it is nonetheless proof that the need for epos and founding myths still burns, and very strongly, under the ashes of our bloodless official culture.