The Devil's Cup by Stewart Lee Allen

Author:Stewart Lee Allen [Allen, Stewart Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781847677518
Publisher: Canongate
Published: 2009-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

THAT WAS PRETTY MUCH THE SITUATION BY THE SECOND MONTH of the Ottoman siege. Everybody who could, including King Leopold, had fled. Vienna’s population had dwindled to seventeen thousand. There was nothing to eat. Plague broke out. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turks were digging a series of secret tunnels and planting explosives under the city walls.

What the Turkish leaders did not know was that an army of about fifty thousand mainly Polish soldiers was approaching the city. They also were unaware that the Viennese knew all about the tunnels, thanks in part to a spy named Franz Kolschitzky. Kolschitzky had lived in Istanbul and could pass for a Turkish soldier. After the Viennese learned when the Turks planned to blow up the walls, he managed to get through the Turkish lines and inform the Polish generals.

On September 8, the Turks blew up their tunnels, breaching Vienna’s walls in four separate spots. In poured the Turks. The Viennese held out until evening, when, during a final attack by the Turkish elite troops, the Poles set off a huge fireworks display from a nearby hill and attacked. The fact that they were outnumbered six to one did not matter as much as it might have, because the sultan had focused all his resources on the city, leaving his rear unguarded. The Poles rushed in and spread havoc. Night fell. When they woke up, considerably worried that once the surprise was over, they’d get massacred, the Poles found the Turks had fled. Three hundred years of Islamic expansionism had come to a screeching halt.

It was a historical turning point, although not for the obvious reason. Among the twenty-five thousand camels the Turks had left behind, the Viennese found dozens of bags of mysterious green beans. Everyone thought they were camel food. But the spy Kolschitzky recognized them as coffee beans and, when asked to name his reward for his role in saving the city, he asked for nothing more than said bags of coffee, with which he intended to open Vienna’s first coffeehouse. Later he decided the city should also give him a building in which to house his café. Later still, he requested some start-up money. Some indentured servants to work as waiters? The keys to the queen’s chastity belt?

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