Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Prof Wheatcroft has done thorough job of researching and recounting the events leading up to and beyond the epic Siege of Vienna. It becomes rapidly obvious that Wheatcroft has certain biases early on: The Ottomans were awesome (with the notable exceptions of Mehmed IV and Kara Mustafa) as an empire and a military power; the Habsburgs were middling mediocrities (with the exception of Eugene of Savoy). Wheatcroft does his best to establish that the Turks should have won the battle at Vienna; their siegecraft was near-flawless, their army a most potent weapon of conquest, while the Viennese were brittle and despondent, led by the hopelessly average duo of Starhemburg and Lorraine. I was especially struck by this last thread, as I have studied/practiced military leadership for the past 30 years, and these two commanders rose to the occasion under extremely trying circumstances. King Jan III Sobieski is reduced to a devil-may-care hussar, and his dramatic role on 12 September is frittered away by an author who evidently is at great pains to avoid the fact that the Turks lost. Just look at the relief operations on 11-12 September for a textbook example to wrongly dissipated tension: what should have been a cathartic moment for those of us happy Vienna held out is wrecked by Wheatcroft's strange dynamic of stating all of the great things the Turks did on those days while still losing the battle! The obstacles the allies had to face and overcome were significant, yet Wheatcroft does his best to still portray the Turk as the better on the field that day. The final few chapters rush past Vienna and through what was a remarkable series of campaigns against the supposedly not-weakening or dying Ottoman Empire, in which the Habsburgs established themselves as key players in the Balkans. Their weakness in Western Europe, and their soon to be deserved status as a second rate Power was gleefully noted by Wheatcroft, almost a schoolyard taunt that if the Ottomans were declining, so were the Austrians. No serious scholar has contended otherwise. Finally, the book which set out to prove how awesome the Ottomans were ends with what I believe was the driving motive behind the work: an attack against those who see open borders and unregulated Muslim migration as a threat to Europe. I suppose one could be an ivory-tower snob like Wheatcroft and call it irrational fear, or one could simply look at the population of Christians in (Muslim-majority) Turkey today, a region which gave the world Saint Paul and the Nicene Creed (among many other Christian things).