Sobieski and the Relief of Vienna

Extract

It was the misty dawn of a Sunday morning, September 12th, in the year 1683. From the height of the Kahlenberg, where the last wooded escarpment of the Alps dominated a landscape of hillocks and ravines, a man was gazing towards Vienna, some three miles eastwards. As the light strengthened he could pick out the spires and steeples of the city, and the broken ravelins and splintered bastions which marked the line of the fortifications. He could also see, between him and the city, a vast town of tents, where the besieging Turkish army had encamped in a crescent outside the ramparts of Vienna. A wind arose, and dissipated the mist, and the watcher, sitting his bay horse, could hear the trumpeting of elephants, the beating of little war-drums, and strains of eastern music. The horseman, though only fifty-four years of age, had grown corpulent, and his face was already heavy. But the large dark eyes, with their direct gaze, were accustomed to command, and indeed, those about him at this hour, Princes of the great houses of Europe, deferred to him. For he was a King as well as a renowned Captain. When he had surveyed the ground over which the coming action was to be contested, he again looked towards the city, clear now in the early sunlight. And from the ramparts the sentries of the depleted and exhausted garrison, who had seen the rockets of the relieving force dufing the hours of darkness, strained their eyes for some glimpse of their deliverers. They saw that the defiles and gorges leading out pf the hills were blocked by Turkish troops, and it was not known whether John Sobieski himself was with the allied forces. But the horseman on the Kahlenberg was Sobieski, the hope of Europe in that hour of destiny.