Unchained

The Walls

A broad-shouldered man squinted tightly as he peered east from high upon a wall. His chest heaved with nervous emotion as he surveyed, once again, the nightmare spread upon the distant fields surrounding his adopted hometown of Vienna. Taking off his helmet, he placed it on the wall and then wiped off his sweating, clean shaven head as he looked from side to side. From every angle that he could view there were uncountable numbers of Turkish tents, campfires and enormous masses of soldiers and horses. Karl von Strasse tensely ground his teeth in abject disdain as he reviewed his own, as well as Vienna’s, recent turn of events. He had emigrated here five years earlierago from Bavaria just six months after the Black Plague had wiped out one third of the population of the city. Nearly 50,000 Viennese had perished in that dark time and the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold had cried out for people from far and wide to re-populate his fine capital. Now, in the face of an enemy more intent on their extermination than the plague itself, this same emperor had shamelessly taken his crown jewels, his personal bodyguard and 80,000 of the panicked population out the back gates before they were blocked. This gigantic group then scrambled for safety to the City of Linz. Von Strasse clenched his fists in disgust while he pondered the Emperor’s abandonment of the city.
In August of 1683 Anno Domini, all that occupied one of the oldest and grandest cities of Europe were 11,000 Austrian troops and 5,000 citizen volunteers. Karl von Strasse was one of the volunteers. He had seen plenty of military action in his youth but had left the Bavarian Army long beforeago to pursue other interests. He had made Vienna his home and he wasn’t about to move again. People who knew von Strasse understood that once he made a decision there was no changing things. Germans in general were stubborn and he was the most stubborn German of them all. Count Ernst Graf von Starhemberg had been assigned the defense of the city and it was no accident that the cCount had placed von Strasse in command of the outer walls as well as the LÖbel Bastion, which was a key fortification along the city’s primary defensive wall. Karl von Strasse had a notable reputation for his intractable tenaciousness and hethis was exactly the kind of leader that the cCount needed at the epicenter of the Muslim attack.
Theis tiny Christian force faced more than 150,000 Ottoman Turks outside the city walls and another 70,000 Tatars and conscripted soldiers that were further out in the countryside protecting the Turkish rear as well as the bridges and passes throughout the surrounding mountains. The entire Muslim force was under the direct command of Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha who, in turn, answered to no one on earth other than Sultan Muhammad IV. As a child, Mustafa had been adopted into Albanian nobility and then had demonstrated significant military skill by defeating the Romanian army early in his career. He had also been commander of the Ottoman navy and had led several successful attacks on Sicily and southern Italy. It had taken him twenty five years of scheming and slaughter to gain his lofty title.
The Grand Vizier, who was nearly fifty years old when he arrived outside of the walls of Vienna, Austria, wore a long, heavy beard and was the living image of arrogance and greed. Even his name “Kara” meant “black.”. He had dreamed of cleansing all of Europe of the Christian infidels and now his moment had finally come. Where Rakhman had failed at Tours, he would succeed; where the mighty Mehmet II the Conqueror washad been turned back at Belgrade, he would prevail; where even Suleiman the Magnificent was forced tohad to retreat from these very same Viennese walls in 1529 -- he, Kara Mustafa Pasha, Grand Vizier of the largest empire in the world, would indeed claim glorious victory and begin his unbridled liquidation of these Catholic fools.
It had taken more than three years to convince the sSultan of the value of this undertaking. YetBut as reluctant as he was, the sSultan secretly wished to make his own mark on history. Through the past 300 years, his Ottoman ancestors had accomplished an amazing tally of devastating military and geopolitical victories. His distant and famous ancestor, Sultan Muhammad II, sacked had overrun Constantinople which had stood as the Christian capital for 1,000 years after the fall of Rome and washad been the the primary obstacle to the Muslim encroachment into Eastern Europe at that time. In that protracted two month siege and battle in 1453, Emperor Constantine XI, in a final act of defiance, led a charge of his last horsemen directly into the Janissaries whothat had swarmed into the city. The Byzantine soldiers were slain to a man; and, subsequently, tens of thousands of civilians were butchered or sold into slavery in a three day blood-fest committed by the Muslims. The Hagia Sophia, perhaps the most amazing church in the world at that time, was promptly converted into a mosque. Ever since 1453 that city has been called Istanbul.
After the fall of Constantinople, the Ottomans proceeded to devastate, and then occupy, all the countries or regions we now know as Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Transylvania and Wallachia as well as sections of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Ukraine. However,But after several centuries of unchecked murder and bloodshed, the Turks had been stopped cold at Vienna. Just as the Muslims had been checked at Tours in 732 from invading the Western Europe from the south, Vienna had checked Suleiman from invading Central Europe from the east more than a century earlier.