FOOD FIGHT- The Siege of Vienna

I feel a little sorry for poor, old  Merzifonly Kara Mustafa Pasa (above). He was despised for his petty meanness and infamous for his avariciousness. But his greatest sin, historically, was having been born with the perfect skills to be a second in command. He was a brilliant organizer. His attention to detail and precision was legendary.  And he could calculate a bribe quick as greased lightning.

Unfortunately, Mustafa's sultan, Mehmed IV, had an ambition for war but found he didn’t like living in a tent. So in 1683 he went home from the war early. And that left Kara Mustafa (above) alone as the Grand Vizier of the army, with no limits on his fastidious obsession for detail,  hunger for wealth and a blind faith in violence as a negotiating position.

Sultan Mehmed IV (above) was always trying to convince people that he was who his titles said he was. He made his first entrance into history as an infant when his father, in a fit if temper, threw his baby son down a toilet. The servants rescued the boy, but Mehmed bore the scar from that experience, physically on his forehead (ala Harry Potter), and figuratively on his ego, his entire life. Instead of a cold simple diplomatic declaration of war - or more practically, a disarming surprise attack - on 31 March, 1683 Mehmed sent Austrian Hapsburg King Leopold I a letter dripping with adolescent bravado.

Mehmed IV informed Leopold (above), “…We will destroy your little country with our Army… Above all WE order you, to wait for us in your city…so WE can behead you…We will exterminate you and all of your followers, as you are the lowest creatures of God, as all unbelievers are, and erase you from the face of the earth. WE will expose the big and little to gruesome pains first and than give them to a vicious death. Your little Empire, I will take from you and its entire population I will sweep off the earth.”

In the realm of braggadocio Mehmed IV letter has to rank right up there with George Bush’s 2004 invitation to the Iraqi resistance to “Bring it on.” Still, it wasn’t as if either side needed a reason for this new war. The Christians and the Muslims had been butchering each other in the Balkans for 300 years, since the fall of Constantinople. In the first century of these wars Vlad the Impaler (Christian) made his reputation having 20,000 Ottoman P.O.W’s impaled on stakes. And then he had lunch. Things just got worse from there. 

As Andrew Wheatcroft explains in his book, “The Enemy at the Gate”, “Many of the horror stories of these wars are true: the massacres and the atrocities, the endless lines of newly enslaved Hungarians in Sarajevo on their road of tears to Istanbul….The Hapsburg armies also flailed men alive, impaled prisoners, took slaves, raped captives. Savagery was a weapon of war used by both sides.” This was ethnic cleansing practiced by experts. And it was no more successful in 1683 than it proved to be in 2004, or, under Putin's terror war of 2022 in Urkrain.

During the winter of 1682-83 Kara Mustafa prepared the way to war. He oversaw the building and repairing of roads and bridges up to the border between Austria and Ottoman Hungry. Supply depots were established and stocked with ammunition and food. And then, in early May of 1683, an Ottoman army of 150,000 men under the direct command of Mehmed IV marched easily from Istanbul to Belgrade, just 300 miles from the Austrian capital of Vienna.

But after reaching the border between war and peace the Sultan handed over command to Kara Mustafa and returned to his hunting parties in Istanbul. And from that moment things started to go wrong with the expedition.

A month later, now under Kara Mustafa’s command, an advance guard of 40,000 Tartar cavalry reached the outskirts of Vienna. Remembering the note from Mehmed, King Leopold gathered up 80,000 of the residents of Vienna and ran to the west, to Linz, leaving just 5,000 citizens behind in the Austrian capital, defended by 11,000 soldiers and 370 cannon.

Kara Mustafa felt he had to offer the commander of Vienna a lesson in Ottoman diplomacy. The lesson was proffered in the little village of Perchtoldsdorf, 6 miles east of Vienna, where King Leopold had a summer estate. Not that he was there, at the time, He was in Linz, remember.

On 16 July, 1683, called upon by Mustafa to surrender, the citizens first tried to defend their town, and only when that proved hopeless did they surrender. By then it was too late. Mustafa released his troops who “…massacred the surrendered garrison with their sabers, slaughtered noncombatant civilians, and then incinerated a church and tower packed with women and children.” (World History of Warfare; Archer & Ferris)

However this bravado did not have the intended effect of destroying the enemies’ will to fight. “The Viennese responded by impaling severed Turkish heads in full view of Ottoman trenches and later flayed live captives.” (ibid) Mustafa had no choice now but to lay siege to Vienna.

And here technology was on the side of the defenders, thanks to the invention of the “trace Italienne”, also known as the Star Fort. This design replaced vertical masonry walls which had defended Constantinople and which were easily knocked down by sold artillery shot.

Instead, as Wikipedia explains, “forts became both lower and larger in area…” Low brick curtain walls filled with earth absorbed enemy shells. Cannon embrasures allowed defenders to safely target any enemy artillery positions. An exterior ditch or moat kept enemy cavalry and troops at a distance." Mustafa would either have to accept the massive causalities of a direct assault or take the time to undermine the forts. With odds in his favor of 800 to 1 the direct assault might well have worked. But Kara Mustafa instead ordered his men to begin digging.

All through August the Ottoman engineers tunneled, hollowing massive galleries underneath Vienna’s outer defenses. In early September, with the defenders almost out of food, the tunnels were packed with gunpowder. 

When they exploded an almost 12 mile line of outer fortifications simply collapsed; the fall of Vienna was only a matter of time. Then, on 6 September, 1683, as the Austrians prepared for the literal last ditch defense of their city, out of the muddy waters of the mighty Danube River, arose a hero; Jan Sobieski, King of Poland.

Sobieski’s original not-so-heroic plan had been for an alliance between himself, France and the Ottomans against Leopold’s Austria. But finding Mehmed IV was not interested in sharing the booty from Vienna , Sobieski joined up the Austrians instead. 

The newly christened “Holy League” had about 80,000 men outside of Vienna, still giving Mustafa a numerical advantage of almost 2 to 1. But the Ottoman army was divided between fending off Sobieski and attacking Vienna, because Mustafa refused to delay his assault. The last fortress of Vienna had already been undermined, the charges planted and the fuses set. Whatever happened with Sobieski’s army, the final act of the siege would be played out on 12 September, 1683.

The Polish King chose as his battle ground a hill (Kahlen Berg) rising 1,500 feet above the Danube flood plain just outside the walls of Vienna. On this hill a large part of the Ottoman army was camped, including Mustafa’s own red tent. But anticipating Sobieski’s plan, at four that morning, Mustafa launched a spoiling attack against the Holy League’s troops.

As the armies threw themselves against each other all morning long on the hill, the Ottoman engineers were finishing their preparations underground. At about one that afternoon they lit the fuses and sealed the mine from their end. But an Austrian counter-mining operation then broke into the underground gallery and at almost the last second cut the fuses. Vienna would not fall this way. Kara Mustafa had run out of time.

Sensing the Ottoman forces were exhausted, at about five o’clock Sobieski launched a massed cavalry attack (20,000 men and horses), led by his distinctive “winged angels”. The Polish riders slammed into the Ottoman troops, and swept them from the hill.

By 5:30 that afternoon Sobieski was entering Mustafa’s personal tent and the Ottoman army was in full retreat toward the twin cities of Buda and Pest. Kara Mustafa had lost 15,000 dead and wounded and 5,000 captured, while the “League” had 5,000 dead. As history tells the tale, Sobieski got the glory while the Hapsburgs got the empire back.

To celebrate the miracle of victory the bakers of Vienna invented a new pastry, twisted into a crescent in remembrance of the Ottoman crescent flags. In Austria the pastry is called a “Vienniuserie”. When Marie Antoinette introduced the treat to France in 1770, it was given the name by which the rest of the world knows it; the “croissant”. 

A more suspect legend says Sobieski introduced the bagel to commemorate the stirrups of his victorious cavalry, and that Europe’s first taste of cappuccino was in bags of coffee left behind by the fleeing Ottoman troops, or perhaps what was left behind was some tasty “Vienna Roast” coffee. There may be an element of truth in some or all of these stories, but true or not, they are legendary.

Mustafa regrouped his forces at Belgrade, and put them into defense positions, in case the Austrians tried to quickly follow up their victory. But Sobieski and Leopold’s armies were as exhausted as the Ottoman troops, and the Hapsburg prince was not interested in taking undue risks. Leopold knew that time was on his side, now.

The final casualty of the battle of Vienna was Kara Mustafa himself. On 25 December, 1683, a date with little meaning to a Muslim, the soldiers came for him. He waited for them with his collar open, and stretched his neck so they might wrap the traditional silk rope around his throat. Ever attentive to details, his last words to the assassins were, “Be certain to tie the knot correctly.”

Then several men pulled the knot tight until the life was squeezed out of him. His decapitated head was carried to Istanbul and presented to Mehmed IV in a velvet bag.

His grave was disgraced and lost by conquering Hapsburg armies a generation later, and his headstone now rests along the Bugarian/Turkish border town of Edirne, as either a warning or a promise, depending on which side of the border you are standing on.

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FLIGHT OF FANCY - "The Most Beautiful Suicide"

I doubt Galileo ever considered the human implications of his experiments, but the formula he came up with reduces the problem to startling simplicity. Six and one half seconds after she threw herself off the 86th floor Observatory of the Empire State Building (above), Evelyn McHale landed on the roof of a limousine parked on West 33rd Street, 1,050 feet below. The science was brutally simple. The humanity - not so simple. Just consider the recent history of that particular spot the unhappy lady landed on. 

The block between 5th and 6th Avenues, and 33rd and 34th streets had once been occupied by the mansion (above, foreground)  of real estate mogul William Backhouse Astor and his wife Caroline Webster "Lina" Schermerhorn Astor.  She was the leader of the vaunted "Four Hundred", the cream of Manhattan upper crust society. The number supposedly represented how many could have comfortably fit in Mrs. Astor's  ballroom. 

Then, in 1893 her son, John Jacob Astor IV, had her mansion torn down and replaced by, first, the 400 room Waldorf Hotel...

...and then in 1897, immediately adjacent, by the 550 room Astoria Hotel (above). Joining the two hotels ran a marble Corinthian column lined corridor, connecting five star restaurants in each hotel, and dubbed "Peacock Alley".

It was the place for elegantly dressed wives and mistresses to be seen strolling on Saturday afternoons and the original location of the famous New York Easter Parade.  Then, in 1929 the parades came to an end when the hotel management company sold both properties for $13.5 million to the Empire State Corporation. 

And the instant the sale was finalized, the president of Empire State, John Jacob Raskob, led his contractors through the front doors. He was intent upon capturing for his Connecticut estate the peacock alley marble columns (above, left) he had often admired. To his disappointment, those symbols of Gilded Age luxury and extravagance proved to have been plaster impostors.

Construction began on the Empire State Building on 17 March, 1930. The frame rose at the astounding rate of 4 ½ floors a week. Midway into the construction, one of the steelworkers was  fired in the middle of his shift. He threw himself down an open elevator shaft, becoming the first person to commit suicide on the new premises.

John Jacob Raskob may have thought about joining him, because 410 days later, a month and a half ahead of schedule, the building opened. The final cost was $5 million under budget, mostly because the depression had devalued the dollar. And because of that, on opening day, May Day, 1931, the Empire State Building was well over half empty.  It remained so for years. A decade later the press was still referring to The Empire State Building as  the "empty State Building" - a financial disaster.

The building barely survived financially into World War Two, when,  at 9:40am on a foggy Saturday, 28 July, 1945, a twin engine B-25 Mitchell Bomber slammed into the Empire State Building between the 78th and 80th floors (above). Fourteen people were killed.,

Nineteen year old elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver  was working on the 80th floor when the collision happened, and suffered severer burns. Worse, when firemen put her on an adjacent elevator, to get her to the ground floor so she could be transported to the hospital, those damaged cables broke and dropped her 75 stories into the basement.  

Amazingly, Betty Lou (above) survived with a broken pelvis, back and neck.  That remains the world's longest survivable elevator fall in history.  After five months of recovery she was released from the hospital.

In 1947 Evelyn McHale (above) was a 20 year old bookkeeper at the Kitab engraving company, in the Long Island community of Baldwin, New York. 

Over the weekend of 19 April of that year she traveled by rail the 67 miles to the little town of Easton, Pennsylvania. It was known as the “City of Churches”, with the highest ratio of houses of Christian worship to overall population in the United States.

But during prohibition it had also been known as “The Little Apple” where police protected the speakeasies, which every weekend were filled with New York City tourists looking to get drunk. On the hill overlooking Easton was the (then) all male Lafayette College, a military school of higher learning. And one of the 2,000 students attending Lafayette College in 1947 was Evelyn McHale’s fiancé

Evelyn McHale's 1947 visit to Pennsylvania proved to be a disaster. Her fiance broke off their engagement. In some ways this kind of thing was to be expected. So many lives had been placed on hold during the Second World War, and so many lives had changed during the war, and were still changing once the war had ended.

The divorce rate, which pre-war had been two out of every one thousand marriages, had doubled in 1946. But those were statistics, and human beings are not.  When Evelyn returned broken hearted to her bookkeeping job on Monday morning, the numbers she oversaw brought her no comfort. And in the weeks that followed she obsessed on her disappointment.

People do not commit suicide (from the Latin “sui caedere”; to kill yourself) because they are depressed. But add depression to alcohol or other drugs, and the risk of suicide increases by 90%. Add easy access to a fire arm and they become a certainty.  And so do the odds if the individual has access to tall buildings or bridges.

If there is a family history of suicide, a history of physical or sexual abuse, or if friends or family have recently committed suicide, the risk grows even greater. And finally, if the person at risk is a Christian the risk is greater still. Protestants and Catholics kill themselves much more often than do Jews, or Buddhists or Muslims. Nobody seems to know why.

In the first fifteen years after its opening, 16 people threw themselves to their deaths from the Empire State Building.  But 1947 was a very bad year. In January a suicide injured an innocent pedestrian on the street below, and a lawsuit was threatened. The Empire State Corporation, which still owned the building, began to slowly consider alternatives, looking for a solution which did not disturb the esthetics of the 86th floor Observation Deck.

Still, at about 10:30 on the morning of Thursday May 1st, 1947, when Evelyn McHale stepped from the elevator on the 86th floor observatory, there was nothing between her and eternity, except the impulse to clamber atop the chest high wall (above)  and take the step.  First she took off her grey (or perhaps green) cloth coat and draped it over the wall near the south west corner of the observation deck. 

Then she laid her purse on the floor. She removed her shoes. Then she deliberately let her scarf float from her fingers into the void. She watched it swirl and float in the wind eddies. And when she saw it begin to slip downward, she pulled herself up atop the lip of the wall, stood and after a brief moment, threw herself into space.

Six seconds is long enough to think, and if Evelyn McHale was not radically different than those who attempted suicide from San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and lived, then we know what she was thinking as she plummeted weightless toward the pavement. Universally these failed California suicides report that their first thought after jumping was, “This is the worst mistake of my life.” After that first second, however, the sensory overload would likely have not left her with the ability to even think of a prayer.

In the first second of the end of her life Evelyn McHale dropped 32 feet, or about three stories. Over the next second she fell an additional 64 feet. Over the third second she traveled another 128 feet. Over the fourth second she fell 238 feet. By the fifth second she was traveling over 60 miles an hour, and the sensation of falling would have caused her body to release massive amounts of adrenalin. But she would never feel its effects. 

She might have felt an eerily calm, which I suspect would have surprised her. She might have realized she was falling away from the building, driven by the wind and by her effort to avoid the abutments and ledges which jutted from the sides of the building (above).  And if she had felt the regret for her decision to jump, it was now too late. At the speed of about 100 miles an hour, her body slammed onto the sheet steel roof of a Cadillac limousine parked 200 feet up 34th Street from 5th Avenue.

Something caught traffic cop John Morrissey’s eye. He was working at the corner of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue. When he looked up he saw a white cloth, dancing lightly about the upper floors of the Empire State Building. It was just 10:40 A.M. and suddenly there was a loud crash, and the wrenching sound of bending metal and shattered glass tinkling on concrete. Officer Morrissey ran west on 34th Street.

He found a crowd gathered around the big black limo, with United Nations’ license plates, parked on the north side of the street. All of the windows were shattered, and the roof had been caved in. There, embraced by the folded steel, Officer Morrissey saw the body of a young woman.

Her white gloved left hand seemed to be playing with the pearls strung around her neck, almost as if counting a rosary. Her white gloved right hand was cautiously raised as if seeking permission to interrupt. She was barefooted. One stocking was bunched about her crossed ankles, as if she had been caught in the act of undressing. There was no visible blood, no dismemberment. She was a sleeping beauty. But images can be deceiving, as the workers from the medical examiners office could have testified.

When they picked her up, her once firm body must have behaved more like Jell-O. Every bone would have been fractured and splintered, and her internal organs turned to mush by the violence of her death.

Those who contemplate suicide should consider the impact of their actions on the innocent who must clean up after them. Suicide is the rudest way to exit this world.

A few moments after her death, Robert Wiles, a young photography student, approached the scene. He had been eating breakfast across the street, at the same lunch counter as the limo’s driver. Now he approached the scene and snapped a single photo. He immortalized Evelyn McHale. He sold the photo to Life Magazine, which published it a week later, on page 43. The caption (above) read; “At the bottom of the Empire State Building the body of Evelyn McHale reposes calmly in the grotesque bier her body punched into the top of a car.” Robert Wiles never took another professional photograph. Each suicide, it is figured, shatters the lives of at ;east six other people. I suspect, Robert Wiles was one of the first shattered by Evelyn McHale's suicide.

The New York Times headlined the story, “Empire State Leap Ends Life of Girl, 20”. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said, “Doubting Woman Dives to Death”, and the Chicago Tribune claimed, “Afraid to Wed, Girl Plunges to Death from Empire State.” (above)  The photograph, now labeled as "The Most Beautiful Suicide”, may have been at least partly responsible for the 14 July, 1947 fatal leap of a 22 year old man from the same observation deck. Guards were now stationed to stop any more copycats.  And during October and November, they managed to avert five more deaths.

Finally the management was forced to admit this was not a temporary trend, and in December the now iconic inwardly curving fencing was installed to discourage those possessed by the impulse to end their lives.

Over time other sad people making "The greatest mistake of their lives", have realizing lower floors and windows installed before the advent of air conditioning can still provide enough height to assure death upon impact after jumping from the Empire State Building.

You might not know it to read the headlines but every year twice as many Americans kill themselves as kill each other. There is another suicide in the United States every 17 minutes. And although it is only the 11th leading cause of death ( 7th leading cause of death in males, 16th in females), suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death for all humans between the ages of 15 and 24 years of age, and the second leading cause of death in college students. The working theory seems to be that if we just don't talk about it, it will go away. But honestly, that simply does not seem to be working.  If you think someone might be suicidal, then they are. Do not leave them alone. Immediately remove their access to firearms and all drugs, and call 911. Death can be a release, but it is never beautiful. Never.

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DO YOUR COWS POINT NORTH

 

I am certain that some will think this story is much a moo about nothing. But I think it behooves us to consider the implications of what at first blush seems like a simply grazy observation. Back in 2008 a pair of zoologists at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany made the startling discovery that at any given instant on any given day, two out of every three cows standing in fields all over the earth have steered themselves along North-South magnetic lines, as if they were over sized leather covered compass needles. 

We don’t yet know for certain if they are headed for the North Star or aiming their dairy-airs south, but we now know that those of us with frontal mental lobes, single chambered stomachs and just two teats apiece have been missing the meat of this story for the last 10,000 years.

The word “cow” derives from the Latin word ”caput”, meaning the head, which is the ancient way of counting cows, as in “Me and Tex are driving five hundred head to Abilene”. Clearly it was the head of the living cow that Gandi was thinking of when he wrote, “The cow is a poem of pity…She is the second mother to millions of mankind.” She is also, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the source of 18% of the world’s methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. And almost one third of the world’s oversupply of cow burps (the primary source of bovine methane) comes from India’s 280 million sacred cows. Holy or not, cows belch so much because they re-chew their cuds, regurgitating and re-digesting the cellulose over and over again. So the first secret of cows is that every cow is bull-limic.

The emotional life of the average Daisy or Bessie has been described as comparable to a potato on sedatives. But complexity was always hidden just beneath the hide. The American Humane Society has taken note that if one herd member is shocked by an electric fence, the entire herd avoids the wire. English linguistic bull artists have noted that cows moo in local dialects and inflections. And it has long been common knowledge that ungulates form their own bovine breakfast clubs. Three or four females establish lifelong bonds, a cow herd within the herd, or a “curd” if you will. Daisy actually enjoys a rich emotional life, nurturing animosities against her fellows, developing friendships and even mulling over the bovine equivalent of the Stephen Sondheim conundrum, “Is grass all there is?"

This shared arrogance of our two species matches the obsession of Bessie with a subject familiar to many obsessive humans; sex. Eric Idle has described cows as the “…librarians of the animal world; mild by day, wild by night." And John Webster, a professor of animal husbandry at Bristol University in England, describes cows as “gay nymphomaniacs”. The “curds” constantly cowlick one another. And a single Bessie in “heat” can set off a Daisy chain of cow girls “mounting” herd mates in a riot of bovine dominatrix behavior. Unseen by inattentive humans, a pasture of grazing Gurneys is in reality a seething mass of bored libidos on steroids. Literally  It gives a whole new meaning to the term “pasteurization”.

Few have ever denied that individually cows process a certain personal magnetism. Their sheer bulk demands respect, if not religious devotion. These are not cuddly creatures. The one point three billion cows alive at this moment are ponderous moovers and shakers, and udderly unimpressed with humanities’ crème-de-la-crème, logic. Every dairyman has herd that cattle tend to face uphill, into strong winds or turn their flank steak to the sunny side on a cold morning; and that all seems plausible. But the idea that these cow hides might be sharing some kind of mystical, new-age ferris sensitivity seemed until 2008 to be an oxymoron. But scientists seeking out the magnetic orientation of hills created by the European ground mole (Talpa europaea), stumbled over the realization that perhaps larger mammals might also be influenced by something other than human magnetism.  And this seemed confirmed by further study.

German researchers examined Google Earth photographs taken at the same local time of day, observing some 8,510 individual cows in 308 separate herds on five different continents, at essentially the same moment.  And the humans stumbled upon this udderly amazing fact; cows got magnetism. Generally, at any given moment, 70 % of the cows in any herd are standing about five degrees off of true North-South orientation. In Oregon State, closer to the North Pole, the deviation of cows is all of 17.5 degrees. In the southern hemisphere (Africa and South America) the alignment was slightly more north-eastern, south-western. Still, adjusted for latitude, 70% of all cows point toward the magnetic pole, and this is much too large a percentage to be a mere homogenized coincidence. The next question is, of course, why have cows got magnetism?

Cows are not migratory, but they once may have been. Cows share a common ancestor with whales, the “Pakictids”, which 53 million years ago had a whale’s ear and a cow’s teeth in a really ugly little dog’s body -  sort of a Mexican hairless meth addict with hair.  Could this ancient mongrel have been the source of the current magnetic deju moo?  It could, if it milked its genes for all they were worth.

So it seems, upon rumination, that we owe cows an apology, that to err might be human but to forgive could be bovine. But stop the stampede for animal rights. My guess is we could be apologizing to Daisy and Bessie “auf die Ewigkeit warten”, as they say in Germany, and it would make no difference because Daisy and Bessie are not particularly interested in our moo-tivations, because cows are just as conceited as we humans are. And in the final rendering the squeaky veal always gets the cud. Holy, cow!

P.S. Photographs are from “The Secret Life of Cows” by Glen Wexler.

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