Yesterday we saw how September 11 was not always a day of defeat, but victory over jihad when a small band of knights delivered the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta from Islamic oppression on September 11, 1565.
As a reflection of the nonstop jihad against the West, it just so happens that another major Christian victory — much more famous than the siege of Malta — also took place around the now ominous date of 9/11: the delivery of Vienna from the largest Muslim army that ever invaded European territory. That instructive story follows.
In July 1683, some 200,000 Ottoman combatants invaded Austria. By July 14, they had surrounded the walls of Vienna, where Ottoman grand vizier Kara Mustafa was following the protocol laid out by the prophet Muhammad in 628: “Aslam taslam” — “submit [to Islam] and have peace” — that had by that time been in use for a thousand years, resulting in the older and richer portions of the then-Christian world — including Greater Syria, Egypt, all of North Africa, and Spain — being conquered.
Although Starhemberg, the Viennese commander in charge, did not bother to respond to the summons, graffiti inside the city — including “Muhammad, you dog, go home!” — captured its mood.
Don’t Mess with Vienna
The next day, Mustafa unleashed all hell against the city’s walls. For two months, the holed-up and vastly outnumbered Viennese suffered plague, dysentery, starvation, and many casualties as their walls rocked day and night to thunderous bombardment.
Then, sometime around September 11, as the Muslims were about to burst through the walls, the desperate commander fired distress rockets into the night sky to give “notice to the Christian army” — that is, the relief force Vienna had beyond all hope been counting on — “of the extremity whereto the city was reduced.”
Understanding exactly what these rockets signified, cries of “Allahu Akbar!” followed, as the Ottomans implored their deity to “obliterate the infidels utterly from the face of the earth!”
And then it happened: “After a siege of sixty days,” wrote an anonymous eyewitness,
accompanied with a thousand difficulties, sicknesses, want of provisions, and great effusion of blood, after a million of cannon and musquet shot, bombs, granadoes, and all sorts of fireworks, which has changed the face of the fairest and most flourishing city in the world, disfigured and ruined [it], after, a vigorous defense and a resistance without parallel, heaven favorably heard the prayers and tears of a cast down and mournful people.
To the city’s great joy, Starhemberg’s distress rockets were answered by a hail of fireworks that lit the night sky. The Holy League, consisting of some 65,000 heavily armed Poles, Austrians, and Germans, all hot to avenge the beleaguered city, had come. Even worse for the Ottomans, they were under the overall command of the formidable king of Poland, John Sobieski, who firmly believed, “It is not a city alone that we have to save, but the whole of Christianity, of which the city of Vienna is the bulwark.”
Poles to the Rescue
Battle commenced in the early morning hours of September 12 with several exchanges of artillery fire amid the rocky crags and slopes of Kahlenberg Hill, where the Europeans had camped the night before. The Austro-Germans, out to avenge the atrocities to which Vienna had been subjected, fought fiercely — but no matter how many Turks and Tatars they hewed, more appeared. After noon, the wearied would-be liberators paused.
Suddenly a large white banner emblazoned with a red cross appeared on the opposite slope: the Poles — loudly calling on divine aid and appearing to the Turks like “a flood of black pitch coming down the mountain consuming everything it touched” — had finally appeared, fighting manfully and encouraging their Austro-German counterparts. An uncoordinated mass of horses, men, steel, and gunfire clashed and boomed around the ravines and rubble of the Kahlenberg, even as the Muslim noose continued to tighten around Vienna.
Fierce but indecisive fighting continued for hours until Sobieski spied a weakness in the Muslim line. He instantly ordered history’s largest cavalry charge straight through it toward the grand vizier’s tent.
At the head of some 20,000 Polish, German, and Austrian horsemen and with his young son by his side, Sobieski crashed with thunderous violence into the Ottoman line. Wearing heavy armor with eagles’ wings, carrying large lances, and astride even larger and heavily armored steeds of war, three thousand hussars — the elite cavalry of the Polish army that surrounded its king — were a special sight to behold. To the besieged Viennese, many of whom were now sallying forth to join the fray, they looked like winged liberators; to the increasingly demoralized Muslims, they looked like avenging angels who “struck fear in the hearts of the Turks and their Tartar allies.”
“By Allah, the King is really among us?” blurted Murad Giray, the dismayed khan of Crimea, on seeing Sobieski present and fighting. When Mustafa ordered him to redouble his efforts, “the Tatar Prince replied that he knew the King of Poland by more than one proof, and that the Vizier would be very happy if he could save himself by flight, as having no other way for his security, and that he was going to show him example.” And with that, off scurried the khan with his hordes.
‘Vienna’s Ground Zero’
By sunset, some fifteen thousand Muslims lay dead. The rest, including Mustafa himself, fled as best they could back to Ottoman territory. (That Christmas Day, 1683, as all of Christendom rejoiced, Mustafa — this man “who thought to have invaded the Western Empire, and carried everywhere fear and terror” — was beheaded by Ottoman command, his head sent to Sultan Muhammad IV.)
Although a spectacular victory, the aftermath was gory: Before engaging the European army, the Muslims had ritually slaughtered some 30,000 Christian captives collected during their march to Vienna, assiduously raping the women and children beforehand. On entering the relieved city, the liberators encountered piles of corpses, sewage, and rubble everywhere — Vienna’s “Ground Zero.”
The Holy League of Polish, German, and Austrian forces remained intact and went on the offensive against the Turks. Two years later, Orthodox Russia joined the Catholic league. Between 1683 and 1697, fifteen more major battles between the Turks and Christians were waged, with the Christians winning 12 of them.
By 1699, the Ottoman Empire, which had been terrorizing Christendom for 300 years, was reduced to signing the humiliating Treaty of Karlowitz, which required it to cede large territories back to its infidel enemies. This marked the beginning of the end of Islamic power. As the late Bernard Lewis put it: “The last great Muslim assault on Europe, that of the Ottoman Turks, ended with the second unsuccessful siege of Vienna in 1683. With that failure and the Turkish retreat that followed, a thousand years of Muslim threat to Europe came to an end.”
Until recent times, that is, when Vienna was finally turned into an Islamic city — not by Muslim force but Austrian passivity.
Raymond Ibrahim is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum. Portions of this article were excerpted from his book, Sword and Scimitar.