Vienna 1683: The History and Consequences of the Defeat of the Turks before Vienna, September 12, 1683, by John Sobieski, King of Poland, and Charles Leopold, Duke of Lorraine

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.