The Fracture Zone

by Simon Winchester

  The greater part of the force were massed just a few hundred feet from where we sat that April lunchtime: A siege gun’s shell could easily reach the Kohlmarkt, and doubtless many did. By chance the city was on one level well-defended, surrounded by a newly built stone girdle of embrasures, barbicans, ravelins, and bulwarks; but on another it was frighteningly vulnerable, since there were only two thousand soldiers in the garrison. Emperor Leopold I, fearing “that the whole might of Turkey is pressing upon me and this good city,” decided two weeks beforehand to run away with his family, for what he assured his citizens would be only “a few hours.” He was to sneak away undetected between the Tatar campfires, and would not return for another sixty-nine days.

  The eight weeks of the siege itself caused privation and misery for thousands of the Viennese who remained. Shellfire, sniping, exploding mines, and fires caused untold damage. There was an epidemic of dysentery. Food ran out—with the result that the Viennese, normally fastidious diners, had to fall upon horses, mules, and occasionally the local cats: These they called “roof rabbits,” claiming that when larded with smoked bacon and taken with a glass or two of muscatel, they tasted quite acceptable.

  The siege did, however, come to a satisfactory end. It was raised in mid-September, when, quite unexpectedly, two armies of friendly foreign troops—Germans under Charles V, duke of Lorraine, and Poles under the man who was to become a Viennese folk hero, King John III Sobieski—stormed down from the north and routed the Turks in what was to be called the Battle of Kahlenberg on the twelfth of the month. The Turks had a mighty force—their encampment, wrote Sobieski to his wife back home, was every bit as big as Warsaw. But their soldiery had no stomach for the kind of battle that the Germans and Poles could wage, and Kahlenberg was quickly over.

  From the Turks’ perspective the action, both battle and siege, was a humiliating failure. The first failure, some would say, of many. The Ottoman equivalent of the Battle of Midway. The first stage of the long and unyielding Ottoman decline, a decline that would only end two and a half centuries years later when the final sultan, demoted now to caliph, stood homeless and humiliated on the arrival platform of the Gare de Lyon.

  There are many reasons for the Turks’ defeat at Vienna—the principal one, from a strictly military perspective, being the combined strength of the force that was eventually sent against them. But there was more to it than that: Underlying the Turks’ inability to fight back as properly as their huge numbers suggested they should was their studied indolence, their posturing and misbehavior, and the decadent luxury of their army’s leadership, most especially that of the drunken and demented Kara Mustafa himself.

  The grand vizier’s force was prodigious—a hundred thousand infantrymen who were lodged in twenty-five thousand tents, with a tremendous array of camp followers, who included, besides a sizable army of prostitutes, any number of jugglers, clowns, and singers to keep the soldiers more politely amused. There were flocks of sheep, buffaloes, mules, camels, and cattle. Food caravans swept in from Hungary at regular intervals, bringing honey and corn, sugar and fat—and coffee. The Armenian cooks kept up the army’s grand traditions of corruption, however, by baking bread and selling it to the besieged Viennese, or swapping it for favors.

  In the middle of the great crescent-shaped arrangement of his troops—the shape owing more to practical coincidence rather artful arrangement, students of war believe—stood the tent of Kara Mustafa himself. It was a structure of almost impossible beauty with, as one Austrian observer noted, “the appearance of a magnificent palace, surrounded by several country houses, the tents being of different colors, all of which made for a very agreeable diversity.”

  Parts of the camp are still on display in the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna, and they look fine enough for the sultan’s prime minister,* with delicate embroidery and a patchwork of gaily colored fabrics. The Ottomans were prodigious users and makers of tents—the influence, no doubt, of their past as nomads. Topkapi Serai, the palace on the Bosporus from which all orders came and all demands emanated, and from which all imperial Turks drew power and sustenance, was regarded by all within and without as no more or less than a tent fashioned from stone—and down the subtle gradations of the Ottoman bureaucracy, everyone else in the empire was due a tent appropriate to his station. The grand vizier’s was by custom purple, the interiors tricked out in gold-embroidered silk.

  What cannot be seen today, but is only known from contemporary accounts, are the Turkish encampments, with their enclosed gardens, mechanical fountains, the streams of perfumed water, the priceless carpets, the chandeliers, and the menageries with their exotic animals and birds (the soon-to-be decapitated ostrich among them) from which the old vizier was to take pleasure and relief.

  Both of these last were provided also by the vast personal traveling harem that Kara Mustafa brought to Vienna with him. Fifteen hundred compliant Turkish women, guarded by the usual elite corps of black eunuchs, were there to serve him day and night—their numbers topped up frequently with fresh supplies of captured Christian girls (who, according to the siege historian Thomas Barker, much preferred to stay with their captor than be returned to the miseries of the besieged city). When it was apparent that he had been defeated, and had to flee south and west back to friendlier lands, the vizier was said to be troubled by the possible fate of the woman he regarded as the harem’s most beautiful. To prevent her falling into the hands of the infidels he meted out the same fate as for his beloved ostrich, and had her head cut off as well.

  When the Germans and then the Poles bore down on his troops at Kahlenberg, Kara Mustafa took off, heading fast down the Danube Valley for Belgrade, which had been more or less safely in Ottoman hands for a century and a half. He hoped to be able to see his sultan, to explain the reasons for the debacle—not that too many of them were explicable. But Mehmet had himself moved on, and was in Edirne, en route back to the Porte, when the message came that his vizier had wanted to see him.

  What comes next has all the dignified inevitability of classical Turkish kismet. Kara Mustafa Pasha, more widely loathed than any grand vizier in memory, was to die by the bowstring—that was a certainty for any military leader who had allowed the defeat of the sultan’s armies. A series of pleading messages were sent from Belgrade to Constantinople throughout the rest of that Balkan autumn, but to no purpose. The sultanate had no option but to bring the affair to its proper conclusion.

  It was while the infidels were celebrating Christmas Day that the high chamberlain and the court-martial arrived from Topkapi at Belgrade’s imperial palace, and demanded the return of the three most important signs of Kara Mustafa’s tokens of office—the imperial seal, the holy banner, and the key to the Kaaba, the building containing the black stone at the Great Mosque in Mecca. The emissaries then delivered their sentence to the vizier, who was beginning midday prayers. The formula is archaic, and rather charming: “Whereas for the Defeat of Our Armies at the City of Vienna Thou deservest to Die, it is Our Pleasure that Thou entrust Thy Soul to the Ever Merciful Lord, and that Thou allow to be Delivered Thy Head to these our Messengers.”

  “Then I must die?” asked the ghastly old man. “So be it.” He lifted his beard and allowed the court strangler to fasten the bowstring around his neck. Such throttling had been practiced many times, and was all over in three minutes. The executioner then sliced the head from the body, skinned it, and stuffed it, and then—well, then the trail runs a little cold. Some say the head was placed in a velvet bag and sent down to the Porte for the sultan to see. Others say it was buried in the grounds of the Belgrade palace. Still others say the sultan saw it and then ordered it to be reunited with the body—presumably back in Belgrade. Yet others claim that by then the body had been buried in Kara Mustafa’s home village in Anatolia. It is an unsatisfactory puzzlement with which to end the vizier’s otherwise well-chronicled if decidedly unlovely life.

  Whatever did happen to the head in the immediate aftermat
h of his execution, it is long supposed to have been eventually brought back to Vienna. This happened because the Austrians, who were suddenly energized by having lifted the siege of their capital, raced down the Danube in pursuit of the fleeing Ottoman armies. They fought them several times, winning each time: they took Buda (which was to merge with its sister city across the river to become Pest-Buda, and only later Budapest) in 1686, kicking the Turks out of the hammam they had created from the local hot springs, and they were in Belgrade by 1688.

  And it was there that the local Society of Jesus dug up the grand vizier’s head, placed it in a vitrine, and presented it to the Government of the City of Vienna. It was brought back to the city in triumph, given first into the custody of the Catholic cardinal-archbishop of Vienna, and then placed on permanent display for the delight of the people, at the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien. Or at least that’s what was supposed to happen. In fact, sometime in the 1970s, during a fit of self-examination and political correctness—a symptom of what one writer called “our lily-livered age”—the museum curators ordered the head to be removed and locked away in a basement.

  The Turks seemed to have had a global sense-of-humor failure: they had just complained to the Japanese about a certain type of brothel being named Toruku—for “Turkish bath”—and demanded that it be renamed, as it is today, “soapland,” Soperanda. Having scored that small victory in the East, the Turkish government then turned its attention to the gruesome relic held in Vienna. Diplomats asked either that it be returned to Turkey or given a decent burial. To have it on public display, they said, was undignified and, moreover, potentially damaging to relations between two sovereign states that were now otherwise filled with mutual amity.

  That final veiled threat was enough. The Austrian government sent out a warning to the Vienna city fathers, and the head of Kara Mustafa promptly vanished from public view. Disappointed visitors were told it had been removed to a warehouse. It was still very much in Austrian custody—that would not change under any circumstances—but where it had stood in the museum, there was a picture of the vizier, and that would have to do. It now hasn’t been seen for a quarter of a century. Even at the great exhibition staged in 1983 to mark the three-hundredth anniversary of the siege, Kara Mustafa remained locked away, invisible.

  But I was curious. The vizier’s head was not only powerfully symbolic of the long and troubled relationship between Hapsburg and Ottoman, which had for so long dominated the Balkans; it was also, it seemed to me without unduly stretching the point, symbolic of the whole process of violence and separation that lay at the heart of the Balkans’ eternal problem. And actual decapitation is still a feature of Balkan violence: Scores of severed heads seemed always to stand at the gateways of palaces and on the buttresses of bridges; and in reports from Bosnia and Croatia, and now from Kosovo too, the act of taking a sword to a man’s neck seemed almost a casual matter. Besides, keeping so important a relic out of public view but yet hanging on to it seemed rather absurd. I thought I might try to see it.

  The curator of armaments at the museum turned out to be scholarly woman, Frau Doktor Sylvie Mattl, who, when I first approached her, said it would be utterly out of the question to see the vizier’s head. She happily showed me around her other charges—all manner of large Turkish tents, horsehair-trimmed spears and staves, cannons, rifles, flags, and a massive chart of the action around the beleaguered city, painted in extraordinary detail at the beginning of the eighteenth century. There was the painting of the grand vizier, too, which showed him bearded and turbaned, but it was not the ugly, fire-ravaged face of the drunken bully that he was known to be. And it was not, more to the point, his head. Might it not be possible to see him, just this once?

  The Frau Doktor suggested that I get in touch with the museum’s eminent Direktor, Dr. Günter Düriegl, stating just why I wanted to see the relic. I duly did this and received a reply a day or so later saying, to my surprise, that yes, in this one particular case an exception to the general rule could be made, and Kara Mustafa would be brought out of his faraway warehouse and shown to me, shortly after breakfast a couple of days later. I was—though more than a little squeamish, and well aware of the morbid nature of the object—delighted.

  It was pouring with rain when we arrived on the appointed Friday, and I was not altogether surprised to find that there was a problem. Dr. Mattl, who met us as she was shaking out her umbrella in the hall, looked grim. The Direktor, she explained, had had some communication—she could not say whether it was diplomatic, Turkish, academic—and had apparently changed his mind. He was waiting in his office and would see me immediately, to explain.

  Dr. Düriegl inhabited the kind of comfortably untidy book-lined room that I remember from Oxford. Indeed, with his tweeds and his pipe and his air of studied calm, he looked just like a professor, wearily receiving a student to whose essay he would shortly be forced to listen. He was courtesy itself, explaining that it was with great regret that because a certain approach had lately been made, it would not be altogether—how to say?—prudent to show the grand vizier’s head at this time.

  I must have looked more than expectedly crestfallen. The Direktor looked at me over his half-glasses, put his hands together as though in prayer, and asked me simply: “Why don’t you tell me exactly why it is you want to see the object.”

  At this point I must have looked even more crestfallen, because he said, with measured amusement, “Don’t worry—this is not Oxford. This is not a tutorial. Just a brief explanation will do.”

  And so I spluttered my way through what I felt was the symbolism of the article, that it was a powerful reminder of the kind of appalling carnage that was going on even at this moment, that my interest in it was not, as he might suspect, purely voyeuristic, and that seeing the head was a historically appropriate way to start a geographic progress through the Balkans, especially if I could find out where in Turkey his body might be buried—and then in an instant, like a weathervane in a squall, Dr. Düriegl changed his mind and agreed. “Very well, very well,” he said, with a sudden genial display of impatience. “Dr. Mattl? Will you take this gentleman down to meet—the other gentleman?”

  Dr. Mattl took Rose and me down in the museum elevator. “As a precaution, and because I thought the Direktor might well eventually agree,” she whispered, “I took the decision to bring the grand vizier here from the warehouse last night. So he is downstairs. I’ll take you to him directly.”

  And a moment later we were standing inside a locked room filled with the detritus—bottles, paints, knives, brushes, frames—of restoration and picture cleaning, looking down at a small cardboard box decorated with the logo of a furniture removal company, sealed with plastic tape. Marked in ballpoint pen on its lid, and in a handwriting that was more casual than perhaps the chief minister of the Ottoman court might have deserved, were the words Herr K. Mustafa. A large and gloomy assistant who had been on sentry duty outside the door, and who had followed us in to ensure that proper security procedures were observed, took an Exacto blade and carefully slit the tape. Dr. Mattl opened the box, took out some wrapping paper, then reached in, and gently lifted out into the light the vitrine that contained one of the most famous skulls in all Balkan history.

  He had probably not been a handsome man. His skull was brown and mottled. The eye and nose sockets were large and deep, the eyes compressed into what must have been a permanent frown. There were five long teeth in the upper jaw, yellowed and rotten and widely spaced. The entire lower jaw was missing. A length of finely made burgundy cord had been wrapped tight around his neck, or the post upon which his skull was mounted. It had a tassel on one end. Might this have been the cord with which the court strangler choked the life out of him?

  Sylvie Mattl grinned and shook her head. “They are not even a hundred percent sure this is his head,” she said. “Ach! There are so many questions. How did this come from Constantinople to Belgrade, and then to here? Where is his jaw? Should he be s
ent back? Should we give him a decent burial? Is this really him? Oh—you cause us so much trouble,” she added, patting the top of the glass case.

  “I like to think it is him. But you never know. I think back then we Viennese were happy to have any symbol, anything, that showed us having beaten back the Turks. This, I suppose, could be any skull. But I hope not. I haven’t seen him for a long while—and I must say I’m glad to see he’s all right.”

  We gazed at the relic for a while. Outside the rain had cleared, and shafts of sunlight illuminated the vitrine and its macabre inhabitant.

  “Shall we?” ventured Dr. Mattl, gesturing toward the door. And so, with the guard helping, we gingerly lifted Kara Mustafa back into his cardboard box and stuffed back the wrapping paper and sealed him up with fresh tape, then set him down on the floor by the exit. And then the door was locked, and we walked out into the sunshine. Dr. Mattl thanked us for coming. “And for letting me see the old man. It is many years since I had the opportunity. He’s rather like an old friend.”

  Sometime later I uncovered the existence of a small academic industry devoted to the life and times and controversies surrounding Kara Mustafa Pasha. His headless body still exists, buried in northern Turkey. As I was about to leave Vienna I heard that preparations being made for an international symposium to be staged close to his shrine. Most of those due to present papers were, as might be expected, from Austria.

  There has long been friendly disagreement over exactly what Prince Metternich had said—that the East begins at the Ringstrasse, or the Landstrasse, or that Asia begins at one or the other—but it matters not. The point is that the Viennese have long regarded themselves as living at the outer reaches of Europe, the ultima Thule of properly European civilization.* Beyond and to the east lie the Slavs, a wild mix of peoples and creeds and customs with whom the Germanic Austrians have had the most complicated of relationships—a series of political marriages (and all too often, actual ones) that reached a Hapsburg imperial apogee that James Joyce once described as comprising “a hundred races and a thousand languages.”