I

In the early 1670s, the Habsburg emperor Leopold I sought to impose absolutist and Catholic rule on the Habsburg-controlled areas of Hungary. The accompanying military occupation and religious persecution of Protestants led to the exodus of a large number of Hungarian nobles and peasants to Turkish-held areas of Hungary and Transylvania, where they formed a military revolt with Transylvanian and French support. In 1682, the rebel leader Imre Thököly was crowned king of Upper Hungary with Ottoman military support. Habsburg incursions against Thököly provided the Ottomans with a pretext to mobilize their forces for an invasion. On 14 September 1682, the London Gazette reported from Frankfurt:

However, due to the approaching winter, a full-scale invasion was not launched until the next year. In the meantime, the Habsburgs were able to sign a mutual defence treaty with the formerly pro-French Jan Sobieski III, king of Poland. Throughout the winter months of 1682 and early 1683, the London Gazette continued to report on Ottoman mobilization, Habsburg diplomatic and material preparations for war, and the dwindling hopes for peace.

It was not until the summer of 1683, with war fully underway, that English news accounts began to appear in large numbers, reporting events with a heady mix of anxiety and eagerness. In July 1683, the Ottoman army, commanded by Grand Vizier Merzifonlu Kara Mustapha (grand vizier 1676–83), besieged Vienna, ‘the Bulwark against the Turks, the Key of Germany, and of the Christian World’.Footnote ¹⁰ The Habsburg emperor Leopold I (1640–1705) fled the city to Linz, and the defending forces, led by Count Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg (1638–1701), held out for two months, withstanding eighteen assaults. Just as it seemed inevitable to many contemporary European observers that the city would fall, allied forces under the overall command of Jan Sobieski III, with a contingent led by Charles V duke of Lorraine (1643–90), relieved the city, routing the Ottoman army at the battle of Vienna on 11 and 12 September.

The siege of Vienna was only the first in a series of military calamities for the Ottoman empire. At the initiative of Pope Innocent XI, a ‘Holy League’ was formed in 1684 between the Holy Roman Empire, Poland, and Venice, joined by Russia in 1686. The consequences of fighting prolonged military campaigns on several fronts proved catastrophic for the Ottomans. The conflict ended with the treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, which relinquished Ottoman control over Hungary and the Morea, together with other frontier regions. Though some of this territory was recovered in the following decades, the scale of the defeat was unprecedented in Ottoman history, and was viewed as a decisive turning point in Ottoman power by many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European observers.

Printed accounts of the siege appeared in great numbers depicting the epic scale and dramatic twists of these events with relish. The invasion of the ‘Turks falling with their formidable Forces like a Torrent into Hungary’Footnote ¹¹ was described with trepidation. The desperate plight of the defenders of Vienna, who ‘had reason to fear we could not have resisted their nixt Assault’ was vividly narrated.Footnote ¹² News of the eventual ‘Christian’ victory was relayed with ‘joy’ and ‘solemn thanks … to Almighty God for the relief of the city of Vienna’.Footnote ¹³

The immediate aftermath of the siege saw the anxious tone of earlier news reports replaced by a bombastic Christian triumphalism. A true and exact relation of the raising of the siege of Vienna began: ‘Heaven favourably heard the Prayers and Tears of a Cast-Down and Mournful People, and retorted the Terror of a powerful Enemy, and drove him from the Walls of Vienna.’Footnote ¹⁴ Many accounts, such as A true copy of a letter sent from Vienna September, gave this kind of posturing a more explicitly Christian tone:

The characterization of the ‘Turk’ in opposition to Christendom as an ‘implacable and universal Enemy’ was common in early modern English, and European, writing on the Ottoman empire.Footnote ¹⁶ The tendency to revert to black and white contrasts was especially notable in periods of conflict, for example the Ottoman–Habsburg war of 1593–1606.

The opposition of Christendom and the ‘Turk’ was not the limit of English interest in these events. In common with other European news, the siege was seen to reflect a range of broader issues which dominated English political discourse of the late seventeenth century. This perceived resonance and topicality meant that news of the Ottomans, and the ‘Turk’ as a trope or figure, played a significant role in political pamphleteering and the populist political discourse associated with it. Drawing parallels between English political concerns and the Ottoman world was nothing new.Footnote ¹⁷ What was new in the 1680s, was the combination of the proliferation of pamphlet writing in the exclusion crisis and its aftermath, the willingness of the authorities and loyalists to engage in a widespread attempt to sway public opinion,Footnote ¹⁸ and the perceived degree of synchronicity of the events surrounding the siege of Vienna with the concurrent English political context.

However, although the topicality of the Ottomans reached an apogee during the exclusion crisis, the resonance of the ‘Turk’ with English political concerns was already well established. Steven Pincus has described a ‘lively’ debate connecting English and European affairs in late seventeenth-century England, which turned upon the application of the concept of ‘universal monarchy’ to Dutch domination of trade, and French territorial ambition and intrigue.Footnote ¹⁹ Pincus does not address the ‘Turk’ as a figure in this debate, perhaps because he wishes to emphasize the importance of a rhetoric of trade and political economy, and downplay religious and confessional language.Footnote ²⁰ However, the Ottomans had long been seen as aspirants to universal monarchy; a contemporary history comments ‘When Mahomet had taken possession of the Ottoman Empire, after the death of Amurath his Father, he was presently for an universal monarchy.’Footnote ²¹ Further, the association of the ‘Turk’ with both ‘Popery’ and tyranny, to which we shall return, made the ‘Turk’ a potent figure in this debate. A second consultation between the Pope and the Turk (1679) has the pope declare:

Pincus himself cites two sources comparing the Dutch to the ‘Turk’, to emphasize their expansionism and tyranny of trade.Footnote ²³ Additionally, the long-standing Franco-Ottoman entente cordiale,Footnote ²⁴ threat of a French invasion of Lorraine while the Habsburgs fought the Ottomans, and the association of French absolutism with Ottoman tyranny gave the pairing of the French with the ‘Turk’ a purchase in this debate. News of the siege of Vienna resonated heavily with fears of universal monarchy, absolutist government, ‘Popery’, and French machinations, both in court and on the international stage. Stephen Taylor argues that Puritan Whig author Roger Morrice interpreted news of Thököly's rebellion and Ottoman–Habsburg conflict as part of a ‘crisis of European Protestantism’, reflecting his fear of French influence as a powerful and aggressive agent of the counter-reformation.Footnote ²⁵ The established associations of the figure of the ‘Turk’, combined with the concurrence of continental and English events, lent analogies comparing the two a special force.

II

While Habsburg–Ottoman conflict unfolded in Europe, a political crisis was reaching its conclusion in England. Since the late 1670s, England had been riven by a succession crisis, which brought to the fore a number of issues of religious conscience and the relative powers of king and parliament, unresolved from the civil conflicts earlier in the century. In 1673, the Catholicism of James duke of York, the heir to the throne, had become public knowledge. In 1678, fear of a Catholic successor, and widespread concerns of a drift towards absolutist government on the French model, condensed around allegations by Titus Oates of a supposed ‘Popish Plot’ to murder Charles II and massacre Protestants. By 1679 a parliamentary ‘exclusion crisis’ had developed, which pitted ‘Whigs’, who wished to exclude the duke of York from the succession, against ‘Tories’, who upheld the right of the king to decide succession. Parliament passed an Exclusion Bill, and Charles II responded by dissolving parliament. The crisis came to a head in 1681, when Charles II called parliament in the royalist stronghold of Oxford, before dissolving it eight days later, and refusing to call another for the rest of his reign. In the subsequent ‘Tory reaction’ the Whig movement was crushed through intense legal persecution of non-conformists, the appointment of a Tory lord mayor and sheriffs to London government, the arrest and execution of prominent Whig figures, a tightening of control over Whig publishers and the press more generally, and the concerted courting of public opinion through propaganda.Footnote ²⁶ Throughout the Popish Plot, exclusion crisis, and the Tory reaction which followed it, a war of words was fought through pamphlets, at that time the pre-eminent mode of speaking in print.Footnote ²⁷

In June 1683, the month before the Ottomans besieged Vienna, an alleged plot to assassinate King Charles II and the duke of York was discovered, as a consequence of which the Whig leaders, Lord William Russell and Algernon Sidney, were executed (on 21 July and 7 December 1683 respectively).Footnote ²⁸ An outpouring of loyalist publications decried the ‘Rye House Plot’, while Tory propaganda sought to convince public opinion of the strength of the somewhat dubious evidence on which Russell had been executed. Russell's execution marked a turning point in the press campaign between Tories and their Whig opponents. Joad Raymond asserts that by ‘1683 the Tories had gained the upper hand, and managed to keep Whig ideologues and pamphleteers at bay until 1687’.Footnote ²⁹ The Rye House Plot and siege of Vienna were contemporary events in news terms. The London Gazette reported in detail on the plot, alongside news of the escalating Habsburg-Ottoman conflict; throughout the siege itself war news was preceded by copious ‘Addresses’ to the king from loyal subjects on the occasion ‘of that late horrid and damnable Plot and Conspiracy’.Footnote ³⁰

The political context shaped English news in fundamental ways. The Printing Act lapsed in 1679, as a consequence of the king's conflict with parliament. Due to the resulting breakdown in pre-publication censorship, and the political upheavals of the exclusion crisis, the years 1679 to 1681 had seen an exceptional blossoming of newspaper and pamphlet publication.Footnote ³¹ However, with the defeat of the Whig challenge by late 1682, the authorities clamped down heavily upon both the Whig and Tory press.Footnote ³² The Whig paper the True Protestant Mercury, published by Langley Curtis and his wife, was suppressed with Jane Curtis arrested and imprisoned in October 1682. The Tory papers the Domestick Intelligence, produced by Nathaniel Thompson and Thomas Benskin; George Croom's the Loyal London Mercury; and Elizabeth Brooks's the Loyal Impartial Mercury were also suppressed on 16 November 1682.Footnote ³³ As a result, the majority of the accounts of the siege which appeared, including those examined above, were one-off pamphlets rather than true ‘newspapers’.Footnote ³⁴ The remaining newspapers were the London Gazette, licensed by royal authority,Footnote ³⁵ and the virulently anti-Whig the Observator, published by Joanna Brome and written by the arch Tory propagandist Roger L'Estrange, the former press regulator who had lost his position with the lapse of the Printing Act.Footnote ³⁶ Despite these restrictions, news of Vienna saturated the market in London and beyond.

III

Widespread interest in news of Vienna was also reflected in the ballad market, and the siege was the topic of numerous items, many of which reflected contemporary political concerns. However, before we turn to a closer examination of some of these ballads, it is necessary to discuss the generic forms which they took and the market in which they were produced. Although it has become axiomatic to note that the ‘printed broadside was the cheapest and most accessible form of print’,Footnote ³⁷ the work of Angela McShane has shown the importance of carefully identifying formats for specific ‘ballad products’ if we wish to understand the markets and audiences to which they were addressed.Footnote ³⁸

At a basic level, we must differentiate between ‘black-letter’ and ‘white-letter’ ballads, designations from Samuel Pepys's ballad collection. The black-letter ballad was printed on a single side of cheap paper in gothic (‘black-letter’) type, oriented ‘landscape’, generally composed in two parts, with four columns of text and illustrated with woodcuts (see Figure 1). White-letter ballads show a greater variation in format and typography. In general, they were printed in roman or italic type, oriented ‘portrait’, shorter than their black-letter counterparts, in two rather than four columns, and far less often illustrated (see Figure 2). In the late seventeenth-century, printers began to experiment with new forms of white-letter ballad, for example introducing ‘notation ballads’, with an illustration of musical ‘notation’ under the title (see Figure 3).Footnote ³⁹

Fig. 1.

T he Christian conquest ([1683]), black-letter ballad, by kind permission of the British Library Board, Rox.iv.34.

Fig. 2.

O n the relief of Vienna (1683), white-letter ballad, by permission of The National Library of Scotland.

Fig. 3.

V ienna's triumph (1683), notation ballad, by kind permission of the British Library Board, Rox.iii.912.

Typographical and visual formats related strongly to the character and content of these ‘ballad products’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The black-letter ballad was printed to appeal to the widest audience and sold for profit. Until the 1670s, the white-letter format had been reserved for political satires, an association which continued until the liberalization of printing with the final lapse of the Printing Acts in 1695.Footnote ⁴¹ Often, the writing, commissioning, and selling (or free distribution) of white-letter ballads was connected with an attempt to sway or mobilize opinion. Further, these ballads targeted a more specific audience and alluded to contemporary individuals, events, controversies, and other pamphlets, often in deliberately opaque terms. McShane proposes that this ‘suggests that both the authors and their target group were familiar with the political world of London and especially courtiers, lawyers and parliamentarians’.Footnote ⁴² Black-letter ballads could also be political, though they tended to ‘complain, comment or moralise generally’, in contrast to the direct scurrilous lampoons common to white-letter ballads.Footnote ⁴³ Although by the 1680s this typographical division was breaking down, established formats still retained some force and white-letter ‘political notation ballads played a large part in campaigns against the Whigs, Monmouth, and Presbyterians, orchestrated by Tory publishers and writers’.Footnote ⁴⁴

An example of a black-letter Vienna ballad is The Christian conquest, printed for the noted ballad partners J. Wright, J. Clark, W. Thackery, and T. Passinger (Figure 1).Footnote ⁴⁵ The ballad is in black-letter, though the title and some places and names are in roman type for emphasis, in landscape orientation, with four columns and three garish woodcuts. The woodcuts refer generically to the ballad's military theme, but not its specific topic. Wright, Clark, Thackery, and Passinger, who specialized in black-letter ballads, would have owned a range of woodcuts suited to illustrating common sub-genres such as military or drinking songs. Two of the three featured woodcut images also appear on earlier ballads in the Bodleian Library.Footnote ⁴⁶

Unlike the white-letter On the relief of Vienna, the events of the siege are not interpreted in light of contemporary English politics. The plodding verse emphasizes traditional themes such as martial virtue:

Christian triumphalism and divine providence are also major themes:

The Christian conquest, with its topical content, Christian moralizing, praise of martial virtue, and lack of political sub-context, is a fairly typical black-letter ballad, produced by ballad specialists, written to profit from a contemporary news event by appealing to the widest possible audience.

The majority of extant Vienna ballads are white-letter, often by printers with known political convictions. The bloody siege of Vienna was produced by ‘Tory printer/publisher’Footnote ⁴⁷ James Dean, as was the notation ballad The granadiers loyal health. The notation ballad Vienna's triumph was printed by Jonah Deacon, an established ballad printer.Footnote ⁴⁸ A further notation ballad, An excellent new song on the late victories over the Turks, was published by arch Tory propagandist Nathaniel Thompson. Thompson's 120 loyal songs (1684) also contained two Vienna ballads, including The Tories tryumph, which had been printed as a white-letter broadside by ‘J. D.’ (James Dean) in 1682.Footnote ⁴⁹On the relief of Vienna, with which this article began, was a white-letter ballad, as was Algernoon Sidneys farewel, which will be discussed later. These ballads were not simply a commercial proposition but also had a political motivation and were printed by a mix of committed Tory printers such as Dean and Thompson, and established printers of ballads willing to move with the political tide.

White-letter items frequently used familiar ballading tropes. For example, ballads on the siege often drew on the language of military ballads, evoking the sounds, sights, and smells of battle and framing martial virtue within traditional, and broadly classical, reference points.Footnote ⁵⁰The bloody siege of Vienna invokes the gods Mars and Jove in council as a prelude to the conflict, before depicting the battle itself:

Both the use of classical deities to depict the conflict in terms of heroic martial virtue, and the use of the sounds, sights, smells, and instruments of battle to suggest fighting were common elements of contemporary military ballads.

Many of the Vienna ballads were sung to popular tunes, some originating in the theatre, or associated with other political ballads. The notation which appears on The bloody siege of Vienna appeared, slightly modified, in 180 loyal songs (1685) as ‘The devil assist the plotting Whigs’.Footnote ⁵²A carrouse to the emperor, An excellent new song on the late victories over the Turks, Rejoyce in tryumph, and A song upon the randizvous on Hounsley-Heath (1685) were all sung to the tune ‘Hark the thundering cannons roar’. Claude Simpson attributes this tune to Christopher Fishburn, and notes that more than three dozen ballads were sung to it, including numerous political broadsides in the early 1680s. Several other Vienna ballads were linked to tunes associated with political songs. The Tories tryumph was sung to the tune of ‘Hey, boys, up go we’, a royalist song from 1641, which had been reworked by D'Urfey for his play The royalist in 1682.Footnote ⁵³ Simpson suggests that more than fifty ballads were sung to this tune ‘and most of these pieces were on political subjects’, while Christopher Marsh identifies this melody with royalist and Tory ballads.Footnote ⁵⁴Vienna's triumph was sung to ‘Now, now the fights done’, a theatre tune by Purcell from Theodosius (1680). This is another melody to which more than fifty ballads were written, many of which were strongly political.Footnote ⁵⁵ While it is difficult to interpret the meaning of the music to which ballads were set with any degree of certainty, it is likely that many of these ‘bouncy’ and ‘militaristic’ melodies carried what Marsh has called a ‘meaning by association’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Most of the Vienna ballads were written to melodies which were both popular and political, which must have lent their lyrics a stronger hue as well as enhancing their appeal.

White-letter balladry often drew upon the conventions, language, music, and form of black-letter ballads. Specific items might also cross-over and be issued in both black- and white-letter. A carrouse to the emperor, printed by P. Brooksby (a major producer of black-letter ballads), was modified and reissued shortly after as the white-letter notation ballad An excellent new song on the late victories over the Turks, printed by Thompson. Both ballads strike an anti-Whig tone, though the latter does so in considerably stronger terms.

IV

We shall now turn to a close reading of a number of Vienna ballads, focusing upon the more numerous white-letter items, several of which are heavily political. This section argues that these are best understood in the context of the Tory propaganda and anti-Whig pamphlets of the Tory reaction. They exploited not only the timing and events of the siege of Vienna, but also commonplace associations clustered around the figure of the ‘Turk’.

The topic of the ‘Turk’ as a reoccurring figure in early modern English writing is complex. Englishmen wrote about the ‘Turk’ in a broad range of texts across many genres including history, geography, politic discourses, travel accounts, news sheets, letters, captivity accounts, plays, sermons, and religious and political polemics, not to mention ballads, while isolated references might occur in virtually any context. While these disparate sources were shaped as much by their specific contexts, and the constraints and idioms of genre and form, as any overarching discourse of the ‘Turk’, it is worth making some general remarks on the ‘Turk’ as a figure in English writing.

As we have seen, the opposition of the ‘Turk’ to ‘Christendom’ was a staple of many English and European accounts of the Ottomans. The foundation of this opposition was religious difference; seventeenth-century Englishmen associated the Ottoman Turks with Islam so heavily that the latter was frequently referred to as ‘The Turkish Religion’Footnote ⁵⁷ or even ‘Turcism’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Islam, and therefore often the Ottomans, were viewed through the lens of a long standing Christian polemical tradition. This tradition depicted Islam as a heresy, and thereby a diabolically inspired perversion of Christianity, or ‘true religion’, linking its character and doctrines to the supposed moral infirmities of its false prophet. Although this tradition had a long history, it was reworked and revitalized during the early Reformation, which coincided with dramatic Ottoman expansion into Europe, notably victories at Belgrade (1521), Mohács (1526), and Buda (1541). In this context, reformers such as Luther and Bibliander deployed elements of the medieval Christian polemical tradition on Islam as a tool to critique the Church of Rome and spiritual malaise of Christendom while giving a theological response to the advance of the Ottomans.Footnote ⁵⁹ Drawing on such European precedents, the ‘Turk’ featured heavily in English Reformation debates.Footnote ⁶⁰

As the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries progressed, a new ‘type’ developed, that of the ‘renegade’ or apostate, who had ‘turned Turk’, or converted to Islam. By the restoration, this ‘renegade’ was a familiar figure in England from histories, travel accounts, captivity narratives, stage plays, ballads, and political polemics.Footnote ⁶¹ The ‘Turk’ and ‘renegade’ became reoccurring figures in religious and political controversy and a number of overlapping polemical strategies evolved. These included comparing one's opponents to the ‘Turk’; accusing them of behaving in a ‘Turkish’ manner; or claiming they had ‘turned Turk’. The latter could refer to supposed or spurious conversion to Islam, or simply imply faithless and treacherous behaviour in a more abstract sense.Footnote ⁶² As Nabil Matar, Matthew Birchwood, and Humberto Garcia have explored, the ‘Turk’ was a flexible enough figure to be adapted to any number of contexts, and was drawn on by individuals writing across the political and religious spectrum throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ⁶³

English writing on the Ottomans was not limited to figurative depictions of the ‘Turk’. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a large and sophisticated, if often pejorative, body of English (and continental) works had developed on the topics of the Ottomans, their origins, dynasty, history, lands, polity, religion, laws, subject peoples, and manners. While English scholarly accounts were often shaped by continental sources, a somewhat more pragmatic body of writing developed from a century of Anglo-Ottoman economic and diplomatic contact, and the travel which trade routes facilitated. The Levant trade also brought luxury goods from the Ottoman world, such as carpets and coffee. The cultural impact of English material and intellectual engagement with the Ottoman empire was reflected on the early modern stage.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Vienna ballads were written in a cultural milieu which had a vivid impression of the Ottomans, embodied in a language of images and ideas, from tyranny to the turban, which resonated heavily with a set of moral, religious, and political associations. Given the widespread interest in news of Vienna, the concurrent English political crisis, and polemical associations of the ‘Turk’ and Islam, it is not surprising that the events of the siege were used by English polemical authors to attack their political opponents by comparing them to the ‘Turk’ or painting them as ‘renegades’. However, while the Vienna ballads drew on familiar commonplace images of the ‘Turk’ they are also unusual amongst other English writing on the Ottomans in their number, their concentration over a very short period, and the consistently Tory or Loyalist perspective of the political items.

The ballad Vienna's triumph; with the Whigg's lamentation for the overthrow of the Turks, printed by Jonah Deacon, appropriates the events and personages of the siege to attack the Whigs. It contrasts the loyalty and bravery of the Imperial commander, Charles V duke of Lorraine, to the Whigs, accusing them of faithlessness by undermining the authority of the crown, and highlighting the danger of civil discord:

Note that at this time the colour blue was associated with Whigs, having earlier been adopted by Scottish Presbyterians in contrast to royalist red (blue as a Tory colour is an eighteenth-century phenomenon). The ballad continues by explicitly painting the Whigs as renegades and apostates:

The final line here is a reference to the arrest and eventual execution of prominent Whigs following the uncovering of the supposed ‘Rye House Plot’. The build up and aftermath of the siege of Vienna overlapped to a great extent with the Rye House Plot, and the executions which followed it, and analogies were easily drawn between the two. The ballad Algernoon Sidneys farewel, written on his execution (7 December 1683), alludes heavily to the Hungarian rebellion which preceded the siege of Vienna and makes an explicit comparison between the rebellion of Thököly and the Whigs, painting both as renegades and apostates:

The alleged Whig conspirator Sidney, and by implication every other ‘True Protestant’, is like ‘Teckley’ an antichristian renegade, who, in rebelling against the king, has abandoned the ‘Bible’ and ‘Christendom’ for ‘Mahomet’ (Muhammad) and the ‘Alcoran’ (Koran).

The rebellion of Protestant Hungarians under Thököly seemed a tailor-made cudgel with which Tory polemicists might beat the Whigs and non-conformists. The analogy was strengthened by the fact that some Whigs, like Roger Morrice, interpreted Thököly's rebellion as part of a wider Protestant struggle against the counter-reformation. The anti-Whig ballad, A new song, being the Tories tryumph dated 25 September 1682 by Luttrell, compares ‘Bleu Protestants’, to Hungarian rebels:

While this ballad only mentions ‘Hungary’ tangentially, the analogy between Hungarian rebels and Whigs is common in Vienna ballads and contemporary pamphleteering.Footnote ⁶⁸The bloody siege of Vienna makes a play of calling Protestant rebels in Hungary ‘German Whiggs’:

Notably, both of these ballads associate Whigs with religious non-conformity, and allege that calls for liberty of conscience in religion are tantamount to rebellion and ‘turning Turk’. Tory propagandists such as L'Estrange identified the Whigs with Presbyterians and non-conformists and depicted them as the disturbers of the social and religious order, introducers of dangerous innovations, and underminers of authority and the law. The portrayal of Whigs/non-conformists as ‘Turks’, and therefore as arch traitors, apostates, and malignants who threatened to overturn the social order, fitted well within this rhetorical strategy.

The type of the ‘renegade’ was not the only part of the Christian polemical tradition regarding Islam open to exploitation. Details of this tradition, especially polemical lives of the prophet or parodied versions of Islamic religious practice, also provided ammunition for witticisms and barbs. The black-letter A carrouse to the emperor and its white-letter version, An excellent new song on the late victories over the Turks, both combine a play on the Islamic prohibition of wine with the common ballad themes of toast drinking and drunkenness for polemical effect.

McShane has described how an imagery opposing royalist wine and ‘popular’ ale and beer had developed by the mid-century. By the 1670s and 1680s, this gave way to a ‘politicisation of drink and drunkenness’, where sobriety and the refusal to drink loyal healths had become associated with sedition, disloyalty, and disturbing the social order.Footnote ⁷⁰An excellent new song on the late victories over the Turks quips on the identification of wine with loyalty, and beer, specifically ‘small beer’ with Whiggism.Footnote ⁷¹ Through this conceit, the Ottomans are painted as Whigs (and vice versa):

The ballad continues by contrasting loyal wine with coffee, which was identified with both the ‘Turk’ and the seditious political debates of the coffee house. It ascribes the Christian victory to wine, and the Ottoman defeat to Islamic prohibition of wine and Turkish use of coffee (perhaps also indulging in a terrible pun on the word ‘ground’):

Through this typology of drinking the events of the siege of Vienna are again made to sing to the tune of English politics. ‘Valiant Poles’ drink royalist wine, while the ‘Turk’ drinks only ‘coffee’ or ‘dull tea’, and ‘Mahomet’ drinks Whiggish ‘Small Beer’. The final verse picks up on a further powerful theme in contemporary English political discourse: fear of French intrigue.

The ‘most Christian Turk’ is a reference to Louis XIV and puns on both ‘the most Christian King’ title of the kings of France, and the association of the Ottomans and French with arbitrary government.Footnote ⁷² The defeat of the ‘Turk’ at Vienna is presented as a blow to the French interest. The verse ends by rejecting perceived French influence on the Stuart court by suggesting an invasion (while in reality Charles II dismissed parliament in 1681 and avoided recalling it with French financial assistance). The black-letter version of this ballad shares an anti-Whig orientation though it is less nakedly political. ‘A Small Beer drouzy senseless rouge’ is ‘A Coffe-drinking drousie rogue’, while ‘France’ of the white-letter version is a coy ‘Fra---’.

The intensity of English interest in the siege of Vienna is explained not only by its intrinsic drama and importance, but also by the extent to which these events and commonplaces of the ‘Turk’ resonated with contemporary political discourse. Amongst these commonplaces was a heavy association of the ‘Turk’ with the pope and the devil on the one hand, and ‘tyranny’ on the other. These struck a chord with the central political fears of the 1680s, famously summed up by Andrew Marvell as ‘Popery and arbitrary government’.Footnote ⁷³

Commonplace depictions of the ‘Turk’ and pope as the two heads of the Antichrist had a long history going back to the polemics of the early Reformation. However, the association of the ‘Turk’, pope, and devil was still very much current in late seventeenth-century England. In the Popish Plot trials, when the accused monk William Marshall claimed that his accuser Titus Oates could not have seen him say mass at the Savoy meeting house as only known friends were admitted there, Lord Chief Justice Scroggs could assert: ‘If the great Turk had come there with a pair of Beads and a Crucifix, you would have let him come in.’Footnote ⁷⁴ A few years later, in the Tory reaction, similar associations were drawn on by propagandists. In October 1682, the loyalist Sir William Pritchard was elected lord mayor, as part of Charles II's campaign to regain control of London from a Whig mayor and sheriffs. The white-letter ballad, The contented subjects, or the citizens joy (to the tune of ‘Now, now the fight is done’) printed by Peter Brooksby on the election of Pritchard, declares: ‘Let the Turk and the Pope, both of him stand in fear.’Footnote ⁷⁵

A further commonplace association with the ‘Turk’ which struck a chord with the politics of the exclusion crisis was tyranny. ‘Tyranny’ was a term with its roots in Aristotelian political categories, as well as a broader set of commonplace images, associations, and characteristics.Footnote ⁷⁶ In a political sense, a tyranny, as opposed to a legitimate monarchy, was a polity ruled by force or fear rather than law. In the same way that a just and lawful monarch ensured the healthy spiritual and temporal life of his people, the domination of a tyrant debased them, making them servile. To early modern Englishmen, the Ottoman empire was the axiom of tyranny and arbitrary government. Most lengthy and detailed seventeenth-century English accounts of the Ottoman empire, such as those of Richard Knolles, Paul Rycaut, George Sandys, and Fynes Moryson, depicted its polity as a ‘tyranny’, or a state founded and sustained on the principle of slavery, where the persons, property, liberty, and life of the subjects belonged directly to the ruler. This characterization was not limited to learned accounts of Ottoman history, geography, and political philosophy. Images of Ottoman tyranny were also common to the early modern stage and ballad. The commonplace of the Ottoman sultan as a tyrant, unrestrained by law in either his actions or passions, permeates news and pamphlet accounts of the siege of Vienna:

‘Tyranny’ as a generic category of political philosophy was also habitually applied to other polities, as it had been to Muscovy in the sixteenth century, or used as a device to critique a monarch's methods, character, and manner of rule. The generality of the category of tyranny and its long classical pedigree made it a useful rhetorical tool, while its association with the Ottoman empire meant that by comparing a specific ruler or state to the ‘Turk’ a writer could imply that it or they were tyranical, as we have seen in contemporary writing on Dutch ‘universal monarchy’.

Images and rhetoric of tyranny were drawn upon frequently in the 1680s by polemicists on either side. One of the key issues at stake during the exclusion crisis was the relative powers and lawful limits of the king and parliament; in raising troops to defend the English outpost at Tangier, Charles II found himself accused of trying to create a standing army, which might serve as an instrument of tyranny. Later, in dismissing parliament, the king was accused of arbitrary government and exercising a tyrannical power over his people. Tory polemicists responded that by questioning the king's right to decide the succession, the Whigs undermined the law, and thereby acted tyrannically themselves. Tory polemicist and pamphleteer John Northleigh compared the Whigs to the ‘Turk’ to emphasize this danger: ‘But with what Face then can such Wretches talk of his Majesty's assuming an Arbitrary Power, when all the while they endeavour to make their petty Kings in Representative [i.e. parliament] more absolute then the Turk himself?’Footnote ⁷⁸ The notion of parliamentary tyranny was not new. It drew on royalist polemic which claimed that Interregnum parliaments had ruled illegally and arbitrarily, through the use of a standing army, following the judicial murder of Charles I. Northleigh himself drew parallels between the Whigs and the rebels of the Civil War, and he was not the only author to make this association. For example, the ballad No protestant plot, or, the Whigs loyalty (1683) warned:

In the wake of Vienna, several Tory polemicists combined images of Turkish and Interregnum tyranny to attack the Whigs, and added these to the familiar association of Whigs and non-conformists with the ‘Turk’. In the Observator, the Tory propagandist L'Estrange compared Islam and dissenting religion in order to associate Hungarian rebels (‘Tekelites’) with the Whigs:

This passage draws upon Rycaut's Present state of the Ottoman Empire (1668), which compared Islamic legal schools and ‘sects’ to the English ‘Sectaries’, ‘puritans’, and ‘fanaticks’ on whom Rycaut blamed the Civil War.Footnote ⁸¹ L'Estrange goes on to conflate the tyranny of the Interregnum with that of the ‘Turk’ as an extended attack on the Whigs:

L'Estrange compares the Ottoman Janissary corps (a standing army which formed the sultan's household troops) with the parliamentarian army of the Civil War and Interregnum as an instrument of tyranny. He depicts the Ottoman invasion of Christendom as a warning of the danger the Whigs present to England. By comparing Whigs and dissenters with the tyrannical rebels of the Civil War on the one hand, and the Hungarian ‘Teckelites’ on the other, he compounds the Whig menace. As the Civil War parliamentarians had ushered in the chaos of the Civil War in the name of liberty of conscience, and the ‘Teckelites’ welcomed the Turk into Hungary in the name of Protestantism, the Whigs (‘our Tekelites’) would reintroduce parliamentary tyranny into Britain. All three could be depicted through an archetype of rebellion: the apostate ‘renegade’. This logic is also evident in the ballad The bloody siege of Vienna, from which we have already noted a reference to ‘German Whiggs’:

The ‘Rump Parliament’, which had ordered the trial and eventual execution of Charles I for treason, is cast as a paradigm of infidelity which has ‘taught all Nations to Rebel’ and is thereby complicit in the revolt of Thököly. Commonplace associations of the ‘Turk’ with both the ‘renegade’ and ‘tyranny’ allow the ballad to move from the siege of Vienna to the Whigs, and then to the Rump Parliament without incongruity.

The Vienna ballads varied in their form, content, and audience. They ranged from the topical black-letter ballad The Christian conquest, with no discernible political stance, through the ballads of Brooksby (who McShane speculates had Tory leanings) and Jonah Deacon who were willing to move with the tide and produce political material when there was a market. At the other extreme were ballads by James Dean, C. W., and Thompson, the last of whom explicitly described his ballad output as part of a wider effort to sway public opinion against the Whigs:

Despite Thompson's campaign, he had no official status and in fact found himself in trouble with the authorities frequently throughout the years 1681 to 1685.Footnote ⁸⁷ The Tory reaction was characterized by a government crackdown on the licentiousness of the press, as much as an increased willingness to engage in political discourse to convince the public of the necessity of these measures. Pamphleteering of the period reflected complex factors such as public reaction to the Rye House Plot, a large market for political pamphlets responding to recent events, fear of recrimination on the part of publishers, as well as the political motivations of loyalists such as Thompson and L'Estrange. Nonetheless, the political Vienna ballads are overwhelmingly anti-Whig in character. While the figure of the ‘Turk’ had been used by writers across the religious and political spectrum throughout the century, the specific historical moment in which the Vienna ballads appeared led to a much narrower range of depictions.

In common with much pamphlet culture, the Vienna ballads are heavy with allusions to contemporary political controversies. They often include oblique references to individuals, events, scandals, and debates which would only have been intelligible to those with knowledge of the news and personalities of the political world of London. On the relief of Vienna, quoted in the introduction, opens:

‘Holwel’ is John Holwell, astrologer and author of the controversial Catastrophe mundi (1682), which predicted that the ‘Turk’ would conquer ‘Germany, and France and Italy and part of Spain’, after which he would ‘turn Christian’ and ‘destroy the Dregs of the Church of Rome’. A further suggestion in the same work that the tyrannical behaviour of rulers would bring their subjects to rebellion led to Holwell's trial and fining for seditious libel in July 1683.Footnote ⁸⁹ The ballad continues

The ballad accuses the Whigs of apostasy (‘The Christian God defie!’) in the name of conscience. ‘Julian their old Friend’ is a reference to Samuel Johnson's (1649–1703) Julian the apostate (1682). This Whig tract drew a historical parallel between the fourth-century apostate Emperor Julian, and James duke of York, suggesting that as early Christians had resisted their pagan emperor, so the contemporary English should resist a Catholic successor.Footnote ⁹⁰

In a similar vein, The granadiers loyal health makes a number of allusions to contemporary figures:

‘Howard’ is William Howard, third Baron Howard of Escrick (c. 1630–94), a Rye House Plot conspirator turned informer, whose testimony was used in the trials of Russell, Sidney, and John Hampden.Footnote ⁹²

Thompson's ballads claimed to promote loyalty ‘in every street’, others were set to popular melodies, or punned on news and political and literary controversy. The degree to which the Vienna ballads allude to contemporary affairs is indicative of their place in a pamphlet literature which participated in populist political discourse and, like L'Estrange's the Observator, aimed at the London street.Footnote ⁹³ Though their degree of political commitment varies, all the white-letter Vienna ballads reflect the wider loyalist anti-Whig campaign of the Tory reaction, which Tim Harris has argued was generally successful in swaying public opinion in favour of the government.Footnote ⁹⁴

V

The Vienna ballads were unusual amongst the mass of early modern English writing on the Ottoman Turks. Although they were filled with familiar commonplace images of the ‘Turk’, and were certainly not the first publications to manipulate these tropes, they stand out for their large number, topicality, concentrated publication over a short period of time, and consistency of rhetoric and political perspective. While the figure of the ‘Turk’ had been used by polemicists and writers across the religious and political spectrum throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the specific historical moment of the Tory reaction to the exclusion crisis a far more limited range of representations appeared, and the Vienna ballads were overwhelmingly anti-Whig in character.

In late 1683, the importance and drama of the military events which were unfolding on the continent combined with the culmination of a major crisis in English politics to create a heightened moment of public political discourse, in which polemical strategies exploiting the resonances of the ‘Turk’ were ubiquitous. If the central issues at stake in the exclusion crisis were ‘Popery and arbitrary government’, associations of the ‘Turk’ with tyranny and the pope lent themselves easily to the articulation of these concerns, while the siege gave such comparisons a topical force. These ballads, and indeed the wider literature of pamphlets produced in England as a response to the siege, provided a lens through which to view English politics, but also a means to comment upon and participate in public political discourse.