acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

48 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
of creating In Central Europe a great province of
Islam, which in a few years he hoped to weld into
a sultan ry for himself.
So for four months he besieged Vienna with an
army of 80,000 men, and went near to taking the
city. Its relief by John Sobieski, King of Poland,
and the Saxons under August of Saxony, is an old
story, now grown dim, though at the time the coffeehouses
of London had much to say about it. If
Chalons was the decisive struggle of Europe against
the advance of Islam from the west, not less so was
Vienna decisive against the advance from the east.
The greater danger, indeed, would seem to have
threatened from the Danube.
It is told that on the day of battle which settled so
much Black Mustapha gave a banquet to his son and
high officers, and in a spirit of oriental defiance had
the open banqueting tent pitched facing the Christian
armies at a little distance. And now in the Green
Vault of the Castle at Dresden you are shown Black
Mustapha's sword and this banqueting pavilion and
its trappings, all captured by the Saxons on that
afternoon of destiny outside Vienna.
Black Mustapha reached Belgrade with only fragments
of his great army, his schemes all gone to
nothing, his influence destroyed. As a beaten archconspirator,
particulars of his private ambitions were
not long in reaching the Sultan. In the citadel of
Belgrade, a year after the defeat at Vienna, Black
Mustapha's career was closed by the executioner's
bowstring. Although no disinterested patriot, yet
he had pushed Ottoman arms far into Europe, and
his memory has been invested with a certain halo by
his countrymen. An Armenian professsor at Marsovan
College, who took a detached interest in Turkish
history of the period, told me that in Stambul he
once had come upon Black Mustapha's tomb, and
that it seemed to have been carefully preserved.