{"id":13101,"date":"2009-06-14T05:32:53","date_gmt":"2009-06-14T03:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=13101"},"modified":"2017-11-28T17:20:33","modified_gmt":"2017-11-28T14:20:33","slug":"the-enemy-at-the-gate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2009\/06\/14\/the-enemy-at-the-gate\/","title":{"rendered":"THE ENEMY AT THE GATE"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Empires in Collision<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
By ERIC ORMSBY<\/div>\n
\n
\"Painting
Painting by Johann Peter Krafft from \u201cThe Enemy at the Gate\u201d (Bridgeman Art Library)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n

\n

THE ENEMY AT THE GATE<\/p>\n<\/h4>\n

\n

Habsburgs, Ottomans and the Battle for Europe<\/p>\n<\/h5>\n

By Andrew Wheatcroft<\/p>\n

Illustrated. 339 pp. Basic Books. $27.50<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

By 1683, Kara Mustafa, grand vizier of the Ottomans, was still a pasha with something to prove. He had been raised in the household of the illustrious Koprulu family, which would supply an unbroken succession of brilliant \u2014 if often ill-fated \u2014 grand viziers to the Ottoman court. Described by a contemporary as \u201ccorrupt, cruel and unjust,\u201d Kara Mustafa had risen to become admiral of the Aegean galley fleet but had also succeeded in navigating the treacherous cross currents of palace intrigue; by 1675, the sultan had offered him his daughter\u2019s hand.<\/div>\n

His steady rise did nothing to satisfy his fierce ambition. For Kara Mustafa, the ultimate prize lay to the West. More than a century before, in 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent had besieged Vienna, but the onset of winter forced him to abandon the assault. To succeed where Suleiman had failed represented the pinnacle of imperial glory.<\/p>\n

As Andrew Wheatcroft brilliantly shows in \u201cThe Enemy at the Gate,\u201d the skirmishes and the pitched battles that raged for centuries between Habsburgs and Ottomans, and their numerous vassals on both sides, represented not so much a \u201cclash of civilizations\u201d as a collision of empires. For all the pious sloganeering that accompanied it, the struggle was only incidentally one between Islam and Christendom. Territory was the aim, along with something less tangible but equally compelling: the right to claim the legacy of the Roman Empire. Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor, took it as given that the legacy belonged rightfully to the Habsburgs, but the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV believed just as fervently that the title of Roman Caesar was his. Had not his ancestor, Mehmed the Conqueror, toppled the Byzantines and seized Constantinople two centuries before? Far from wishing to obliterate the Byzantine past, the Ottomans meant to assume it as their own, and Vienna, the seat of the Habsburg empire, was the final prize.<\/p>\n

Kara Mustafa is only one of many bold and complex characters Wheatcroft brings swaggering to the stage in his scholarly but fast-paced narrative. He is especially attuned to the hidden contradictions of his personages. Leopold I is seen as simultaneously rigid and dithering, a disastrous combination, while Mehmed IV, though bookish and retiring, reveled in martial exploits; he would lead his vast army as far as Belgrade before transferring command to Kara Mustafa. Wheatcroft relies on such adroit contrasts to depict these distant figures. Thus, Prince Eugene of Savoy, the \u201cnoble knight\u201d of Habsburg legend, was not only the greatest general of the age but an impassioned bibliophile, a discerning connoisseur who managed his private life so discreetly that it remains a mystery to this day. Beside him, Charles V, Duke of Lorraine, another Habsburg hero, emerges as all raw courage and bristling audacity, a man most alive in the saddle amid the thick of battle.<\/p>\n

Charles once remarked, \u201cHe that feareth not an enemy knows not what war is.\u201d That observation is central to Wheatcroft\u2019s account. His theme isn\u2019t merely \u201cEurope\u2019s fear of the Turks\u201d but \u201cfear itself.\u201d (As he notes in his coda, that fear is still rampant, camouflaged beneath recent \u2014 especially Austrian \u2014 dismay over Turkey\u2019s continuing campaign to join the\u00a0European Union.) Despite his best intentions, Wheatcroft\u2019s narrative isn\u2019t likely to allay such fears. Describing an attack by Ottoman cavalry and infantry \u2014 the dreadedsipahis<\/span> and janissaries \u2014 he writes, \u201cTo face a howling tide of janissaries racing towards you, to watch the heads and limbs of your companions spin off the sharp edge of a\u00a0sipahi<\/span>sabre required exceptional courage.\u201d He conveys the spooky sense of stifled panic the besieged Viennese experienced as Turkish attackers began tunneling beneath the city\u2019s defenses and the populace had to prick up its ears day and night for the telltale \u201cnoises of picks and shovels below the streets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wheatcroft, the author of several earlier books on both Habs burgs and Ottomans, states that he set out here to portray the Ottoman \u201cface of battle,\u201d borrowing a phrase from the classic work by John Keegan, and in this he succeeds; his narrative is thrilling as well as thoughtful, a rare combination. Even so, a subtle imbalance prevails. The Ottomans inspired dread in their enemies; fear was part of their arsenal. But, as Wheatcroft repeatedly demonstrates, the Habsburgs were fearsome too, and perhaps even crueler than their opponents, engaging not only in full-scale massacres but in flayings, beheadings and impalements.<\/p>\n

Perhaps because Wheatcroft hasn\u2019t drawn on Ottoman Turkish sources, his Ottomans, for all his skill at depicting them, appear oddly imperturbable. After Kara Mustafa\u2019s debacle before the walls of Vienna, he retreated to Belgrade; there, on Christmas Day 1683, he greeted the sultan\u2019s executioners, kneeling with \u201cstoic Ottoman calm,\u201d and even courteously lifting his beard to expose his throat to the silk garrote. The story is legendary, and Wheatcroft recounts it well. Still, here as elsewhere, we\u2019d like to hear the fierce heart beating beneath the legend.<\/p>\n

\n

Eric Ormsby\u2019s latest book is \u201cGhazali: The Revival of Islam.\u201d<\/p>\n

Source: \u00a0www.nytimes.com<\/span>, June 12, 2009<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Empires in Collision By ERIC ORMSBY THE ENEMY AT THE GATE Habsburgs, Ottomans and the Battle for Europe By Andrew Wheatcroft Illustrated. 339 pp. Basic Books. $27.50 By 1683, Kara Mustafa, grand vizier of the Ottomans, was still a pasha with something to prove. He had been raised in the household of the illustrious Koprulu […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":13102,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1335,835],"tags":[2101],"class_list":["post-13101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-austria","category-europe","tag-ottoman-empire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}