A History of War in 100 Battles. Richard Overy
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Название: A History of War in 100 Battles
Автор: Richard Overy
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007452521
isbn:
On 23 April 1526, Suleiman and Ibrahim left Constantinople with 100,000 men and 300 guns. It took almost three months before the cavalcade reached Belgrade. Torrential rain had swollen all the rivers, but Ibrahim pushed ahead to make sure they were bridged. Ibrahim was also trusted to sweep aside the few Hungarian troops still found on the road to the Danube. The fortress of Peterwardein was stormed and the garrison of 500 decapitated on Ibrahim’s orders. The Hungarian forces in the path of the Ottoman army, led by Pál Tömöri, the martial Archbishop of Kalosca, retreated back to the Hungarian plain. Here a waterlogged steppe 10 kilometres (6 miles) wide reached south from the small village of Mohács, ending in a line of tree-covered hills. It was there, on the edge of the plain nearest the village, that the Hungarian King Louis and the cream of Hungarian nobility set up their camp. The final number in the Hungarian force is open to conjecture, but is generally thought to be between 25,000 and 30,000, though reinforcements were arriving from Bohemia, Croatia and Transylvania, totalling perhaps 30,000 more.
As Suleiman’s army drew up among the hills and woods on the far side of the plain of Mohács, the Hungarian nobles pressured the king to fight the battle there and then rather than wait for help. They were confident that the heavy cavalry, armoured man and horse from head to toe, would be able to smash the advancing Turks by a combination of sheer weight and their fiery élan.
The Hungarian tactic was unsophisticated. Suleiman by contrast thought out how best to be certain of victory. The general of the akinci, the light troops and skirmishers, advised the sultan to let his front line bend inwards as the Hungarian heavy cavalry attacked. This would allow strong forces on either side of the curved line to attack the Hungarians on both flanks and eventually to encircle them. Estimates suggest that there were perhaps 45,000 fighting troops with the sultan, both cavalry and foot soldiers, and an unknown number of guns, a balance less uneven than the later Christian accounts suggested. Both armies took time to reach battle stations and the Hungarians, determined to take the offensive, finally charged the Ottoman line in the middle of the afternoon, commanded by the redoubtable Archbishop Tömöri in his golden armour.
© The Art Archive/Alamy
A 1588 illustration from an Ottoman manuscript shows the Ottoman cavalry at the Battle of Mohács on 29 August 1526. They pursued and butchered thousands of the fleeing Hungarians as the battle drew to a close.
The battle details vary among contemporary accounts, but the general picture confirms that the Ottoman plan worked almost like clockwork. The Hungarian cavalry charged the first line, commanded by Ibrahim Pasha himself. The Turkish account of the battle, written by the contemporary historian Kemal Pashazade, attributed the victory to the prowess of the vizier, ‘whose lance was like the beak of the falcon in vigour and whose sword, thirsty for blood, was like the claws of the lion of bravery’. Embroidered though the account was, Ibrahim organized the fall-back that created the fatal crescent shape. When King Louis and the reserve saw the Turkish line bend, they eagerly attacked across the plain, expecting victory. They arrived just as the first Hungarian charge, which almost reached Suleiman himself, was spent. The Ottoman cannon opened a murderous fire while the Hungarian horsemen were assailed from both flanks by the light infantry and cavalry clustered around them. The doomed army fought, according to the accounts, bravely but vainly. By evening it was destroyed. Among the slain were three archbishops, five bishops, 500 Hungarian nobles and the king himself, drowned when he tried to escape across the marshy ground. His body was found a month later buried in the mud.
© Neoneo 13
A monument in the Hungarian town of Mohács commemorates the comprehensive defeat of the Hungarian king and army in the Battle on 29 August 1526.
The defeat was comprehensive. Ottoman soldiers took no prisoners, meaning that more than 20,000 Hungarians died that day, tearing the heart out of the Hungarian nation. Ibrahim’s generalship so impressed Suleiman, who had also bravely stood his ground while lances and arrows struck his breastplate, that he presented his vizier with a heron’s feather covered with diamonds as a token of his esteem. On 31 August, Suleiman noted only the following in his diary: ‘The Sultan seated on a throne of gold receives the salutations of the viziers and officers; massacre of two thousand prisoners. Rain falls in torrents.’ The Ottomans proceeded to the Hungarian capital of Buda. Suleiman had not intended it to be sacked, since the citizens had prudently sent him the keys to the city as a sign of supplication, but his troops were eager for booty and hard to control. Buda and Pest, the twin towns of the Hungarian capital, were both burned down and their treasure ransacked. Hungary was left temporarily to its own ruined devices, but three years later southern Hungary came under indirect Ottoman authority. Once again, Ibrahim and Suleiman proved an irresistible partnership, whose leadership inspired and disciplined an army that was otherwise motley, hard to control and greedy for loot.
| No. 9 | SIEGE OF VIENNA 12 September 1683 |
The battle that took place outside the Austrian capital of Vienna on 12 September 1683 marked a turning point in the history of European warfare. The victory by a Christian ‘Holy League’ composed of Poles, Germans and Austrians against a huge Ottoman army marked the end of the centuries-long expansion of Ottoman Turkish power in southeastern Europe and saved central European Christianity. After Vienna, the Ottoman sultanate did not inflict serious defeat on Western enemies again, and the Turkish Empire began a long decline.
The Ottomans had long harboured ambitions to capture Vienna and dominate the trade routes of eastern Europe. Buda, in Hungary, was an Ottoman city and to the south the Ottomans ruled as far as present-day Bosnia and Croatia. A restless frontier between the Austrian Habsburg and Ottoman empires ran through northern Hungary. The Ottoman sultan, Mehmed IV, decided on the advice of his grand vizier, Kara Mustafa Pasha, that it was time to launch a major campaign against the Habsburgs and to extend Ottoman suzerainty over the whole area of central Europe. Plans were made to strengthen roads, repair bridges and gather together a large army from among the vassal states of the empire. On 6 August 1682, war was declared on Austria, but the late season postponed the advance of the Ottoman army until the following March. The Habsburgs had plenty of time to prepare defences and seek allies. Emperor Leopold I reached an agreement with the King of Poland-Lithuania, John III Sobieski, for mutual aid in the defence of Christian Europe. This was to prove an inspired choice.
In the early summer, the huge Ottoman army, followed by herds of cattle, flocks of sheep, wagon trains of supplies and thousands of camp followers, moved north from Thrace, reaching Belgrade in May (where the sultan stayed to await results). The army was commanded by the grand vizier himself, who moved northwards to encircle Vienna by 14 July 1683. Leopold and 80,000 Viennese fled westward to Linz to avoid Ottoman conquest, leaving Count Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg with 16,000 soldiers and militia and 370 cannons to defend Vienna against the siege. For two months, the defenders endured disease, hunger and the constant threat that Turkish engineers would succeed in mining under the walls and blowing a gap in the defences. Kara Mustafa Pasha did nothing to rush the capture of Vienna. Short of heavy artillery, and confident that there was no prospect of relief, he waited until his miners had breached the walls. This long delay allowed the Christian Holy League to СКАЧАТЬ