Poland by James A. Michener
Fortunately, this grand historical record passed into the hands of people who appreciated and protected it. Items of significance were catalogued, so that in subsequent years, anyone wanting to study Polish history could go to Swedish museums and libraries.
The golden necklace bearing the six amber droplets was not lost. In its paper folder, wrapped inside the canvas cloth, it remained in Wagon 307 of the Krzyztopor hoard till it reached Sweden, and may now be seen—in all the beauty it possessed back in 1409 when it was first assembled and in 1655 when it was taken from the corpse of Barbara Ossolinska—as it sleeps in its velvet case in a Stockholm museum.
V
From the South
Seldom in the long history of human effort did any nation recover so swiftly from disaster. In 1658, Poland lay prostrate following the terrible destruction visited upon her by the Swedes, the Germans and the Transylvanians, but in January of 1683 representatives of five European governments convened in Warsaw, begging for Polish help to protect Christianity from a dark cloud of terror which threatened from the south.
Germany, France, the Papal States, Hungary and, most of all, Austria pleaded with the Poles for help: ‘Without your assistance, and soon, Europe will be overrun by the most terrible menace that has ever threatened it. Please, please, spring to our assistance. Lead the great crusade which alone can save us.’
The danger was real, and of quite a new dimension: Turkey was on the march, having already consumed Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania and much of Hungary, and wherever the Sultan’s victorious army triumphed, the losers who were lucky enough to survive faced a harsh choice: convert to Islam or suffer vast disabilities. Only rarely did the Muslims massacre whole populations for religious reasons; they preferred to keep them alive as slaves, producing Janissaries for the army and trade goods for taxation, but life for a Christian under Muslim rule was harsh.
Europe trembled, for it saw that unless unprecedented action was taken, the key city of Vienna must fall to the Turks before the year was out, and whereas the Germans and the Austrians were willing to resist with what armed force they had, they realized that they would be ineffective without Polish strength and leadership. So the very nations which only a short while before had been endeavoring to destroy Poland now came to her begging for assistance.
What had ignited this transformation? And more important, how could a nation with almost no army suddenly find itself with one of the best?
Four factors explained the miracle. First, the good-hearted but confused Swede serving as King of Poland, the bumbling Jan Kazimir, had the good sense to quit; finding himself hamstrung by venal magnates and frustrated by the liberum veto, he abdicated. Second, after a painful gap without any king, and a furious struggle by various foreign powers to elect men favorable to them, the Seym chose a pathetic Polish incompetent, who had the good sense to die rather promptly. Third, after another perilous interregnum and a brutal fight between French and Austrian aspirants, much the better man won, and he happened to be from the French camp. Fourth, and most significant of all, the victor, Jan Sobieski, was in the process of proving that he was one of the most active kings Poland would have.
He was an extraordinary man, fifty-four years old and most curiously shaped, with a large head, an enormous belly and small feet. ‘He is,’ reported a French observer, ‘a perfect oval which from a distance looks like a very large egg stood on the small end.’ A man of gargantuan appetites, explosive rages and piercing perceptions, he might have ended poorly had he not had the great good fortune to marry a brilliant Frenchwoman who had one of the most cupidinous natures in history. Rumored to be the illegitimate daughter of Louis XIV’s queen, she believed that no married couple ever had enough money and that any king was worth double what the state allowed him. Repeatedly this Marysienka, always calculating possible advantages, warned her husband: ‘Look at what happened to the two before you. Jan Kazimir kicked out. The other one persecuted to his grave by the magnates who would give him nothing. Take advantage of things while you have the chance.’
Together Sobieski and his queen sold every office in the land; if a clergyman threatened to give trouble, they arranged to have him made a cardinal, then charged him for the favor. Nothing was granted without cash in advance, and before long these two had estates, palaces and jewels worth fifty million in modern currency, and the queen had her own secret security fund in cash of more than five million.
But they gave good value. With the lithe quickness of a leopard Jan Sobieski sprang from one corner of his nation to another, driving back this attacker or that, and in doing so, had four times faced large Turkish armies, winning thrice. During that time he put together a formidable army, spearheaded by a cavalry unit unlike any that Europe had ever seen before.
To begin with: the hussars were excellent horsemen, and they backed this up by first-class work with the long lance, the short sword and, if necessary, the dagger. Pride of unit made them especially fearsome when they charged into a battle line from a distance, for they rode with terrible precision, their lances evenly leveled and inescapable. But what made them unique was that as they charged they wore riveted to the back of their armor a curious lyre-shaped metal-and-leather construction, which seemed to come out of their backs and rise two or three feet higher than their heads. To it was attached in a beautiful fanlike design some three dozen large turkey or eagle feathers whose purpose was mysterious. Wrote one German knight who had faced their charge at a battle near Szczecin, which he referred to as Stettin, its German spelling:
Like all my fellows, I had heard of the fierce Polish hussars, and like them I supposed that their quality lay in the discipline of their charge and the uniformity of their work with the long lance, but when I first saw them approaching in battle array, coming at me from the crest of a hill, I was astounded by their appearance. Each man seemed to come with a halo about his head, like a Madonna in some Italian painting. The feathers made a wonderful sight, but I asked as we prepared for battle: ‘What are the feathers for?’ Because they obviously were real feathers, and feathers cannot serve as armor, not in any way possible.
Then, as they drew near, galloping in the wind, the feathers began to mourn, or to chant like old women at a funeral or like witches at a false Sabbath, and then to shriek as the wind tore through them. I got frightened by the weird sound and the hellish echoes, but my horse became terrified. He reared and whinnied and I could not control him, and the effect on the other German horses was the same, so that by the time the Polish hussars reached our battle line, all was in confusion.
I can state without fear or apology: The Polish cavalry did not defeat us in fair battle. They sang us to death with those damned feathers.
It was these hussars that Europe now wanted for its protection against Islam, and no plea was too undignified for the other nations to make: ‘Sire, without your aid the Star and Crescent will fly over Paris,’ and there was much truth to this, because the Turks already controlled the Danube, occupied Budapest, and were on the march to Vienna, which would surely capitulate long before autumn unless Poland sprang to the rescue.
But Poland’s insane way of choosing its kings had created a difficult problem. France spent huge sums to bribe magnates in favor of Sobieski—Germany, Austria and Russia doing the same to support a Habsburg—and the contest had become quite ugly, with hardly a magnate uncontaminated by foreign gold. In the end, Sobieski had won, but he and everyone else knew that he did so as a lackey of the French.
Where did the complications arise? In European politics France always supported Turkey against her mortal enemy Austria, and Germany supported Austria against her mortal enemy the Turks. It was preposterous, in many ways, for these nations now to ask Sobieski to ignore his patron France and ally himself with his enemy Austria, and the pleas would not have succeeded without the presence of a very old cardinal of the Catholic church, dispatched personally by the Pope.
He was Cardinal Pentucci, the papal legate who had watched so cl
‘Jan, child of God, if you do not help us, the church will suffer and perhaps even vanish, but you already know that. I must remind you that Poland also will vanish, and most cruelly. If you think the Turkish occupation of Hungary is brutal, with the mass slayings and the appropriations, think of what it will be like if Turkey invades Poland.
‘They will remember the humiliating defeats you have visited upon them, at Podhajce in 1667 before you were king, at Chocim in 1673, which qualified you to become king, and at Zurawno in 1676 after you were king. Sultan Muhammad IV remembers every one of those defeats, and he will be avenged in strange and terrible ways.
‘Jan, child of God, you are like a hunter deep in the woods who has attacked a bear but not slain him. You may wish to retire from further battle, but the bear will not allow it. You have aroused him and he will fight with you until one of you perishes. You have aroused Turkey and you are not free to stop the battle now. If you do, and if Vienna falls, Krakow will be next, and then Warsaw, and we shall never see Poland again.’
This was sage counsel, for when Vienna fell, say, at the middle of August, the Turks would surely bring their Tatar subsidiaries across the Carpathians and into the flatlands of Poland, where they would be encouraged to desolate the country one final time. If Germany and France were threatened by the vast Turkish sweep, Poland had cause to fear that she would be eliminated permanently.
Sobieski, much sobered by the hard advice of the old cardinal, met with the military men who had accompanied the diplomats to Warsaw, and they told him a doleful story:
‘Sultan Muhammad has given his Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa the green cord, and you know what that means. Capture Vienna or strangle yourself. So it will be a siege to the death, ours or his.
‘Hungarian spies who have watched the Turks marching through that country report that Kara Mustafa wears the green cord about his neck day and night, so that all subordinates who speak with him will know the gravity of the undertaking.
‘He brings with him an army of three hundred thousand, including the best engineers, the best cannoneers, and what is most important, the very best sappers in the world. Vienna is a walled city now, but when those Turkish sappers finish digging tunnels under the walls and into the heart of the city itself, and then explode enormous charges of gunpowder, Vienna will be blown apart.
‘Our job is simple, Sobieski. We must rush to Vienna to neutralize Kara Mustafa’s three hundred thousand, and we must do it before his engineers break down the walls, or his cannoneers knock down all the buildings, or his sappers blow the whole place to hell. And only you can lead us, for our Germans and Austrians have never defeated the Turks, and you have done so, three times.’
When Sobieski asked whether the other forces would accept him as their general, he was assured that the Duke of Lorraine, who would be in charge of the Austrian forces, was most eager to cooperate, and that Prince Waldeck, who would be leading the German contingents, had told Emperor Leopold of Austria: ‘Without Sobieski and his hussars, we have no hope.’
Assured on this delicate point, because fighting a battle as part of a coalition had to be one of the most difficult of all military operations and not to be attempted if even one of the partners was disgruntled, he then asked about the relative strengths of the contending armies, and received a more balanced report: ‘It is true that Kara Mustafa did leave Turkey with about three hundred thousand men, but at least half of them were not fighting soldiers. Did you know he brings whole tents filled with houris? Our soldiers could have some pleasure with them if we win.’
‘We shall win,’ Sobieski said. ‘What are our strengths?’
‘Austria can provide twenty-three thousand. We Germans will have at least twenty-eight thousand. They tell me you might bring as many as thirty-four thousand.’ When Sobieski frowned at the disparity of his troops compared to the Turk’s, his informant reassured him: ‘Sire, by the time Kara Mustafa gets his horde to Vienna, it will have diminished to half the size. We have a chance.’
‘That leaves an army of a hundred and fifty thousand, roughly twice our size,’ Sobieski said. ‘But of the real army, two-thirds are forced conscripts from captured lands, and who knows how they will fight when they have to face our hussars and the German pikemen? And twenty thousand will be the Tatars on one of the wings, and not even Kara Mustafa himself can predict what they will do. So it comes down to eighty-five thousand of our proved troops, and about the same number of theirs.’ He broke into a robust laugh. ‘Gentlemen, I have never faced the Turks when their army was not three times the size of mine.’
‘How did you win?’ the emissary of the Duke of Lorraine asked, and Sobieski replied: ‘Speed. Those blessed hussars of mine, singing across the battlefield. And one thing more. Although the Turks always outnumbered us, I never permitted all their force to congregate at one time. They are a terrible foe, one of the worst ever to be let loose on Europe, but they can be defeated.’
‘And you think we can save Vienna?’
‘We must save it, and we shall, to preserve Christianity in the world.’
At the end of the meeting he learned one thing which pleased him: ‘You know, Sobieski, that you already have a Polish army in Vienna.’
‘I did not know.’
‘Yes. Lubomirski is inside the walls there with three thousand of the best. And he promises that when you attack from the outside, he will attack from inside and there will be a happy reunion.’
‘I would always be proud to cooperate with Lubomirski. His family knows how to fight.’
Those meetings with the papal legate and the Austro-German generals took place in January 1683, and during the next three months, while Kara Mustafa and his Islamic warriors crept closer and closer to Vienna, details of the treaty that would govern the coalition were painfully hammered out. When Gyor in Hungary fell to the Turks, and Petronell in Austria, death rattles could be heard issuing from Vienna, and the allies speeded negotiations.
On the last day of March 1683 a grand defensive alliance was agreed upon by Austria and Poland, with King Jan Sobieski promising to march at the proper time to the rescue of Vienna. On the first day of April, with Cardinal Pentucci blessing the holy occasion, formal papers were signed in Warsaw by which Poland, a devastated land only twenty-five years earlier, volunteered to stand forth as the champion of Christian Europe. It was a resurgence that no one would have dared predict.
When the convocation broke up, with each group of emissaries about to head for its own beleaguered country and with Cardinal Pentucci in tears of gratitude for what had been accomplished, Sobieski told his allies: ‘It will take me till mid-August to assemble my army. But I will do it. You, in the meantime, must assure that Vienna withstands the siege. I will send a messenger to Lubomirski to encourage him with a promise that I shall soon be at his side.’
But even when faced with this dire predicament, with the fate of European civilization in the balance, the Polish Seym was incapable of behaving in a responsible manner. Only two years before, when Poland itself was threatened by a Turkish invasion, one deputy, a man named Przyjemski, who had accepted one thousand pieces of gold from the Hohenzollerns, who wanted to disadvantage the French, stood in the Seym and cried ‘I object!’ and the entire defense structure had been destroyed. When one of Sobieski’s men asked: ‘Why didn’t someone shoot him?’ he was told: ‘The magnates insist upon their Golden Freedom, which is far more important to them than what the king wants.’
Now Sobieski encountered more of the same opposition, with the danger that at any moment some magnate in the pay of some foreign government wit
He encountered major opposition from a source which surprised him. Count Lubonski of Gorka, now a slim, austere patriarch in his seventies, with his protruding belly long gone but his golden sash still in view, was reluctant to follow Sobieski’s leadership. Always faithful to Austrian interests, and always dreaming of a Habsburg on the throne of Poland, Lubonski had opposed Sobieski’s election move vigorously and in the years 1674–1683 had worked consistently against the king and his French advisers in support of any move that would strengthen Austria. As one of the richest men in Poland, he never accepted outright money bribes from the Habsburgs, and they never offered them because they knew they didn’t need to, but he did accept other favors, like excessive honors at the Habsburg court when he visited Vienna and vague promises that a position of enormous power would be his whenever an Austrian was elected king.
Magnates like Lubonski had already precipitated the abdication of one king, the Swede Jan Kazimir, and had been on the verge of doing the same with his pitiful successor, when the latter died, so it was natural that after a taste of Sobieski they decided to depose him, and in this struggle Lubonski had taken the lead. The movement failed because Poland realized that Sobieski was the only man who could protect the nation, but the animosity between the two men continued.
Now, however, things were changed. Sobieski needed the support of Lubonski and his private army, and Lubonski found himself obligated to help Austria, whose interests he had always defended. It was a strange meeting that occurred in Krakow after Sobieski had sent a personal envoy to Gorka, imploring Lubonski to meet with him. They met as equals, a powerful king who already sensed the great things he might accomplish in building a stronger Poland and a better Europe, and a most powerful magnate who wanted no change except the union of Poland and Austria under a Habsburg king. Enemies the two men were, yet each knew he needed the other, and it was Sobieski’s brilliance which solved the dilemma.