Giovanni Francesco Camocio - The City of Vienna, 1566
Osman of Timisoara’s seven years in Vienna, a period spent learning to make pastry, brawling in the street, and looking for a way to return home.
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Sources:
Osman Aga of Timisoara. Prisoner of the Infidels. Edited, translated, and introduced by Giancarlo Casale. University of California Press, 2021.
An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi. Translation and commentary by Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim. Eland, 2010.
Finkel, Caroline. Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire. Basic Books, 2005.
Robertson, Angus. The Crossroads of Civilization: A History of Vienna. Simon and Schuster, 2022.
Script:
Quote:
“The coach took me through a mountain pass to Schottwien,” wrote Osman. “We then entered Austria proper, arriving first at the city of Neustadt, and from there to Vienna via Baden. Here the man who was my escort brought me to a house belonging to my new master, where we stayed for a few days. Then my new master’s servant came for me, saying, ‘I have orders to take you somewhere else. Bring everything with you, because you’ll be staying there from now on.’ What could I say? I followed him, and he brought me to a place called Wollzeile Street.”
So begins the next chapter of Osman’s story, one, that in this edition, is titled “To the Capital,” and so went the journey there, smoothly enough it sounds like, for him to have so little to say of how it went. He’d gone about 150 kilometres in that paragraph, 60 of those from Kapfenberg to Schottwien, another 90 or so from there to Vienna, then to wind up on “Wool Line Street,” though Osman’s transcribed Ottoman Turkish gave the street name read literally, as “The One Who Questions Much.” As to whether that “one” referred to someone in particular, there are some things we must just be comfortable with not not knowing, shrugging our shoulders in acceptance, just as Osman did in following that servant to that place on Wollzeile.
“I had many adventures during my seven years in Vienna,” Osman reflected, “and to put down in writing all of the things I experienced, day by day, would be impossible. The best I can do is to record one experience in a thousand.”
That’s the material we’ll be spending time with today, those one-in-a-thousand experiences and the city Osman had them in.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that most often follows the stories of that world through those of its travellers, and it is, as I have certainly never said before at this stage in the episode, a podcast with a Patreon, one you can find at patreon.com/humancircus and one where generous folk such as yourself, maybe even already including yourself, enjoy listening that is extra, early, and absent of advertisement. Thank you, all of you who are already doing so.
And now, that being said, let’s get back to the story, back to the story of Osman of Timisoara, which we pick back up as he enters the city of Vienna.
When Osman reached that city, he did so some three decades after that more renowned 17th-century Ottoman traveller, Evliya Celebi. Evliya, who had come not in captivity but in the rather more pleasant circumstances of a 300-person diplomatic party, had written of Vienna’s “5,500 shops, neatly organized and uniformly built. So prosperous and well stocked … that each shop is worth an Egyptian treasure.”
Evliya referred to the 366 churches there as the, quote, “lairs of the stubborn and dirty priests,” and 66 of them as “great monasteries, each house of mis-worship the un-good work of a non-upright king,” but the cathedral of St Stephen, still quite a spectacle today, was a different matter.
Viewed from afar, its glass sparkled and dazzled like a Kurdistani gold mine, or “like a mountain of light.” More closely examined, its “paintings and gildings [were] strange and wondrous works of magic in the Frankish style,” its saintly icons and statues numerous enough to have him perhaps partly joking to the priests, “How many gods you have!” The “effect [of its organ could not] be described by words, either spoken or written,” he wrote. “One must hear it to understand it.” Still, Evliya would try, laying out in some detail the process by which the music was produced before summing up its “awesome, liver-piercing sound, like the voice of the Antichrist, that makes a [person’s] hair stand on end.”
The wonders of the cathedral aside, Evliya wrote of how the shops were “unequalled in the operation of wonderful objects and strange instruments,” and how they made “clocks in the form of various creatures, with moving eyes, hands, and feet, so the viewer thinks those animals are alive.” He wrote of the bronze elephant as large as a minaret that at noon raised its eyes, ears, and trunk in the city square, roared once, and then rang out the bell of its immense chest with a strike of its trunk. He wrote of the butting bronze rams covered in sheepskin, between which an unfortunate condemned person would occasionally be crushed. Evliya was, it should be noted, one who went in for a bit of invention, a man once described by Bernard Lewis as being “a great traveller but unfortunately also a great romancer. He does not hide from his readers that his purpose was to entertain rather than to instruct, and if a story was amusing [it] did not greatly matter whether it was true.”
There seems to have been something of that urge to entertain when it came time for his description of the emperor, Leopold I. “His face,” wrote Evliya, was “long and sharp like a fox, with ears as big as children’s slippers, and a big red nose that shines like an unripe grape and is as [large] as an eggplant … Whenever he speaks,” continued the relentless Evliya, “the spittle spurts and splashes over from his mouth … as if he had vomited.” And it went on, touching on nostrils large enough to fit three fingers, swollen camel lips, and a mouth that “could hold a whole loaf of bread at a time.” A little harsh, one can only say, particularly when you read Evliya’s musings that, quote, “One may almost doubt whether the Almighty really intended, in [Leopold], to create a man [at all].”
For what it’s worth, the emperor doesn’t seem to look especially alarming or wildly unattractive in the paintings, which I suppose he wouldn’t, but there is a little of that Habsburg jaw line to some of them and Evliya may really have found his person every bit as unexaggeratedly appalling as he made it out to be. But even so, Leopold, son of Ferdinand III, born in 1640 and since then collecting titles—that of Holy Roman Emperor among them—would be there for the Second Northern War, against Swedish expansion, and for frequent clashes with France that would at one point subside only flow back into the War of the Spanish Succession. He’d be there for the quote/unquote “Great Turkish War,” known by another name to the Ottomans, that we’ve seen a little of in this series. Astonishingly, that very same Leopold, however much Evliya may have mocked his mannerisms and his features, was still on the throne when our Osman arrived, well and solidly into the 46-year period of his time as Holy Roman Emperor but not yet finished.
Our traveller’s time in Leopold’s imperial city was a lengthy one, seven years as he tells us, so the narrative is different from that of the initial rush of capture, ransom, attempted escape, and movements with the army as a prisoner. Different, but peppered with interesting little anecdotes. He’ll tell us first of the man he was now attached to, no longer the unpleasant Lieutenant Fischer, or that nameless other officer who’d prevented his sale to the Venetians, or the deceased general, or even the countess, that dead general’s wife, but to Count Christoph Dietmar von Schallenberg, freshly “returned from Saxony, where he had been sent as an ambassador by the emperor,” Osman tells us, writing that von Schallenberg “served the emperor as head chamberlain or privy steward, and was a member of his war council … holding the rank and drawing the salary of a general.” Things with von Schallenberg did not at first go particularly well.
Osman found himself serving alongside a Serb from outside Timisoara who was known by the name of Ratz, both of them dressed in “a haiduk outfit of blood-red broadcloth” and together, he says, “ma[king] quite a pair.” In one of the first acts of Osman’s new employment, if that’s the right word, they would accompany von Schallenberg to the home of a Count Friedrich von Falckenhayn, a residence which can still be seen today at no. 8 Renngasse but which Osman places on “Arsenal Street,” where the imperial arsenal was kept until 1870. “Come back at 9 o’clock with my litter,” von Schallenberg told them, and as they went away, Ratz cautioned the new arrival. “My brother, you’re here with us now,” he said to Osman, “and I’m afraid that you will soon regret it. Do you think it’s easy to carry a man like our master around the streets of Vienna in a litter? Well, you’re about to find out.”
And indeed, find out, Osman did, first beneath the straps of the empty litter, which alone were enough to flay his shoulders and leave them numb from the pain and “shudder[ing] at the the thought of what it would be like once [his] master was sitting in it, for he was corpulent,” Osman grumbled, “in addition to being a very tall man.” To whatever degree the count was either tall or corpulent, it proved too much for Osman to heft his share. “All the bones in my back began to crack and pop,” he wrote, and soon his “legs were jiggling like chess pieces.” By the time that he was actually starting to fall, the count had already had enough, shouting for them to stop, demanding that he be let down, and promising that both of them would be tied up and whipped the following day.
Fortunately, that last part seems to have been either forgotten or forgiven, and only a couple of days later, von Schallenberg arranged for the litter to be taken away and gifted to a countess. Far from a whipping, Osman and Ratz received a tip for the delivery, and the two of them, quote, “rejoiced at [their] deliverance from that evil burden and celebrated by spending [their] windfall on food and drink.”
That initial stumble under the “evil burden” aside, Osman and Count von Schallenberg seem to have found each other agreeable enough. Though characterized in the text as being very strict and difficult to please, the count was apparently very pleased with Osman, entrusting him with ever more responsibilities, keeping him at his side when he sickened, and taking him away on trips, to see his mother and his sister, and to the cities of Bavaria and to Brescia and Milan, during which Osman “saw many wondrous and marvelous sights,” that he nonetheless does not deem worthy of sharing with us.
The count’s wife, when there was one, was also kind with Osman and on a number of occasions showed concern for his safety and wellbeing. A lady of the court named Charlotte Ursula, Osman would write of her marriage procession and of the customary trip to the castle of Laxenburg for the imperial banquet where she had the right to wear any of the empress’s jewels that she cared to, and as cakes, sweets, and ice creams followed meats to the table, she was, quote, “literally drowning with every sort of jewellery.” Charlotte would later tell Osman quite openly that he merely had to convert and they would make him their head of wardrobe and become his patrons, but he politely declined the conversion which that would have required.
As it happened, the count and countess would find another place for him, a new offer and one which wouldn’t need anything so extreme as a change of religion. Osman was to apprentice with a French master confectioner who, at least as our traveller has it, was the very best in all of Vienna. Maybe those frantic rounds of flatbreads had awoken some kind of culinary spark for Osman, or maybe more likely it’s what he says, that he only went along with the whole thing to hide his true intentions of finding a way back home, but whatever drove him, he went to that confectioner’s house every day “to assist him and to learn the art of making sweets. Sometimes,” writes Osman, “I would go with him to help decorate [some esteemed person’s] table with pastries and candied fruit, so that I could see and learn this art as well.”
For a full year, he studied with the French master, and then for a period after that learning to craft “confections with ice cream” at a shop opposite the ballhaus, the original ballhaus where tennis was played, since replaced by a square and the residence of the Austrian state chancellor. All told, in the learning and application of his craft, he says that he spent four or five years “in the service of a restaurateur and a pastry chef, and there,” he says, “[he] saw a great deal, both good and bad,” which I find amusing, and he also says that he saw a lot of money.
For one thing, there were the social events hosted at the residence, for which he would “prepare all the necessary ice creams, sherbets, chocolates, and other delicacies,” and from which he would collect a share of the money left at the card tables. For another, he was for a period entrusted with the handling of the storehouse accounts, and once the costs had been settled, he was allowed to keep whatever remained at the end of the month, which, along with what gets translated here as “tips,” amounted to quite a lot, though somehow still not enough for him to save anything. He was “incapable” of that, writing that, quote, “Mostly, I spent it eating and drinking at restaurants where I met with my countrymen for evenings on the town.” And there seem to have been a lot of those, or at least the ones he mentions were pretty significant.
It seems that Osman was perhaps often out on the town of an evening, and by his own account, a fair amount of trouble would result from those outings, though the fault, at least as he had it, would not always lie with him. We’ll get into that, all the barroom mayhem and the mayhem that found its way out of the bar, after this short break.
…
In reading Osman’s account of his time in the city, one gets narrative elements like the fellow Timisoaran who presented himself at the gates claiming to be Osman’s brother. The man brought him no end of trouble and continued questions over why this sibling of his was absolutely nothing like him until he finally admitted, probably with some relief, that they weren’t related at all. One gets a barge trip down the Danube and a near drowning, mostly interesting to me for the presence of a fellow passenger described as a, quote, “very famous woman ... who had cross-dressed as a dragoon and served in a military regiment for several years,” only found out after suffering an injury in battle. “For a woman dismissed from a military regiment,” Osman wrote, “she was quite beautiful, with a long white neck, although she was also,” he somewhat jarringly continued, “a love-sick whore.” She sounds like an intriguing character, really ripe for her own story of some kind.
One also gets the sense that a night out in Vienna could be quite a risky venture. The one moment you were simply enjoying a little food and wine with maybe a bit of dancing, and the next it was all Three Musketeers until someone was being jabbed in the throat with a halberd. Maybe Osman was stretching the truth a little here or there, maybe not. Maybe it didn’t actually have to be that way, depending on where you went, what you were up to, and who you were with. Osman does seem to deflect responsibility away a little here, and I notice that after that near-drowning incident which I mentioned, there’s a passage where he says he began to “take a good hard look at [himself]” writing, quote:
“Truly, whatever evil an individual finds in himself begins with the bad influence of mischievous companions. As the famous proverb states: ‘For man, the Devil is man himself.’ And so it is that a person never sees the Devil, but is rather led astray by misbehaving friends, who guide him away from the straight path. What’s more, youth makes men behave like sheep, such that whatever one does, the next will do the same. But praise be to Allah, I was spared the consequences of my foolishness.”
Maybe it was all down to being “led astray by [those] misbehaving friends” of his, or maybe Osman had a little more of that “good hard look” at himself still to be working on. But let’s get to those "mischievous companions,” those “misbehaving friends,” that “foolishness.”
“On one occasion,” wrote Osman, “when my master and his wife were invited out for the evening, one or two of the other house staff were eager for me to join them for a night of carousing in town, and would not leave me in peace. Under duress,” though one can wonder about just how much, “I finally agreed to join them, and we ended up at a tavern called ‘The Green Tree’ just inside the New City Gate,” and, if you’re familiar with Vienna or happen to have a map handy, that’s just a little east of Vienna State Opera.
There at The Green Tree, all went well for a while. The three of them had a table, with plenty to eat and drink. Then one of them got up to dance and was joined by some girls. It got later and, to quote our guide, “passions increased.” In the words of Giancarlo Casale’s translation, “We pulled some girls away from some other guys, and … a quarrel broke out.” Worse than a quarrel actually.
Soon, they were smashing guys over the head with wine goblets and throwing them out outside, the guys I mean, not the goblets. Soon after that, a pissed off tavern keeper was making bad noises about them having driven off all his customers and warning them that a company of soldiers was lodged upstairs and had already complained of not being able to sleep for the ruckus. Osman and his fellows cursed the tavern keeper and his soldiers, as you do, and tried to reignite the previous festivities, but the musicians didn’t want to play anymore, so they had to fight with them too, quote, “grabbing them and striking one or two with the butts of [their] pistols.” “At this point,” Osman acknowledged, “a general melee broke out,” and those soldiers were up, armed, and waiting for them at the door. Now that they actually wanted to leave, it wasn’t at all clear how they would be able to do that.
Ultimately, the solution was for them to rush at the door, swords out, in a great show of force and the willingness to do violence, and in the hope that the other side wouldn’t be willing to do the same. And it kind of worked. The soldiers at the entrance shrank back before them, and the tavern keeper—pleased at the prospect of seeing them off—shoved open the low door, letting them through one-by-one and exposing Osman, the last in line, to “one or two sword blows to the head” on the way through, though apparently not severe enough to draw blood.
Now the wild rumpus carried on into the street and through the city, the trio for friends pursued by some 30-40 soldiers here or rushing to outpace a group of intercepting pikemen there, forming up in an outward-facing triangle with swords, quote, striking “so fiercely that flames flew from [their] blades” and the wounds inflicted—to hands and, quote, “from below”—were enough to make their assailants pull back.
This rolling street fight wound its way right up to their gates, where the gatekeeper, hearing the noise and commotion along with pretty much everyone else, recognized them and quickly ushered them inside to safety. Complaints would be brought the next day by the city prefect and insistence that the men in question be punished, whether by their master or the authorities, but Osman would escape any such repercussions. “There were serious consequences,” he wrote, “although I got off easily by blaming the others for the mischief.”
It was not the only story of the sort, nor the only one in which the blame happened to fall on others.
The scene of the other such tale of misadventure on a night out in Vienna was what Osman referred to as a famous tavern named The Chicken Hole, and again he was part of a trio, this time one including the Serbian Ratz, who had been there with Osman for the stumble with the litter. The Chicken Hole was “never without musicians and dancers, both girls and boys. In short,” wrote Osman, “it was the kind of place for watching a touching alike.” There’s talk of eating and drinking with abandon, and of the wine taking its effect. There’s a sense of time passing long into the evening, the growing feeling that all was right in the world, and the late night disagreement between the unnamed third member of Osman’s trio and another man, a disagreement involving a girl which Osman doesn’t feel the need to further elaborate on.
What he does tell us is that the two parties were soon marching outside with rapiers out, and that his colleague’s blade quickly broke. He was left holding half a sword and unable to continue the fight, but that did not mean that the fight would not continue. Instead, while the man with the broken sword, who’d had at least a hand in starting it all, turned away and legged it down the road, Osman and Ratz leapt forward to take up his cause while some soldiers came out of the barracks across the road to oppose them.
As Osman has it, he and Ratz stood outside the tavern door facing down five or six soldiers, most armed with rapiers, one with a halberd. He has the two of them wounding a few of the soldiers and sending them scurrying back into their barracks and slamming the door. Osman reaches through a hole in the door with his rapier arm, waggling it around in an attempt to injure someone, which sounds like a terrible idea, only made to look a little less foolish by comparison when “Ratz, that idiot of haiduk” as Osman now calls him, then pokes his face up to the hole to look through and is promptly speared in the neck with a halberd.
With Ratz stumbling away down the street, bleeding badly from the wound, the trio was reduced to one, and where just moments before Osman and Ratz had been attempting—even if unwisely—to force their way through the barracks door, now, standing alone, he couldn’t hold it closed as the soldiers within eagerly rushed back out.
Once more, our protagonist was at the centre of a rolling street fight/chase through the city, and once more, against the apparent odds, he survived, turning to confront his pursuers by the palace of Count Jörger and seeing them fall back from his sword. Maybe, having taken a few cuts and stabs between them, they had lost the appetite for it and couldn’t now remember why they’d gotten involved in the first place. Maybe, our protagonist was making a bit more out of the whole thing than had really happened, scribbling away that there were 10 of them—no, he might swear, more like 20—and they’d all turned tail and ran from the ferocity in his face and the confident waggle of his rapier. Or something like that.
When he finally reached home, Osman found Ratz badly horizontal but still alive, and begging, if he died, to be forgiven, though it didn’t sound like he had started the whole thing. For his part, Osman wrote that he felt he’d rather have Ratz’s injury than deal with the trouble that was surely to come, but when that trouble came with the demand that punishment be meted out for those involved in the violent disorder, the house steward spoke up on Osman’s behalf. None of this was in keeping with Osman’s character, the man insisted, and that it must surely have been Ratz and that other fellow who’d dragged him into it. Someone, presumably von Schallenberg, must have listened. Though in the days that followed, the count would yell at Osman whenever he saw him, making dire promises of doing this or that to him, no punishment would actually be forthcoming.
As for why the steward would have spoken up for Osman, maybe it was just as he said, that the lady of the house had told him to do so and, if he could, to shield Osman from any violent repercussions. Maybe, though it does not appear to play out in this order in the narrative, the steward was already under Osman’s sway, something that could be important in securing his freedom but which would also come at a cost to his character, or certainly our perception of it.
Osman introduces the steward as the son of the burgermeister of Neustadt, south of Vienna, and also as a, quote, “shameless skirt chaser,” or however that was phrased in the original, untranslated text. We would say now that the steward was a predator, for the victim was a child, not yet 13, who had been captured along with her mother at the siege of Budapest. Our reaction, our assessment, here is not merely a case of judging past actions by modern standards.
We can tell this by the way the situation is treated in the text. When Osman approaches the steward the next day, the man is already uncomfortable. He’d gotten up early and Osman finds him staring out the window, “lost in thought.” He reddens and stumbles over his words when spoken to, reddens even further when he realizes that Osman knows exactly what happened, what he’d done. He’s unable to respond at all when Osman chastises him, saying, quote:
“If anyone finds out, you know what will happen. And to think, you are the one responsible for the entire household, charged with preventing others from doing this sort of thing! I certainly never would have expected something like this from you. Now,” he concluded, “what remedy do you propose?”
It would quickly become clear that Osman already had a clear idea what that “remedy” ought to be, at least as far as he was concerned. He had, in the first place, only known to confront the steward because the unnamed girl from Budapest had confided in him that morning, and he’d immediately responded to that confidence not with any real offer of aid but by using it to gain an advantage for himself. She should simply keep quiet, he had urged her, and then he promised the steward that same silence. “Don’t worry,” he told the man, having now drummed up his fears. “I can take care of this for you.”
Seeing a way out, the steward began to babble, making all manner of promises, and Osman gave him another nudge. A lowly fellow such as himself was in position to demand favours from someone such as the steward, he said, but then, just imagine what would happen if the truth were to become more widely known. Well, the steward’s dismissal from his position was assured within the hour—that much was obvious—but you couldn’t really rule out harsher punishment than that, could you? It was agreed that as long as Osman could handle the matter discreetly—essentially, he was to do nothing at all, which was of course doing something—then the steward promised him that, quote, “I swear that in the future I will help you in any way I can, no matter what it might be that you need of me.”
Osman already had his patrons there in the city of Vienna, in the persons of the lord and lady of the house who had spoken of the future he could have in the city if he would only convert and when he wouldn’t, had set him up in his Viennese pastry chef position, which I have to say does sound pretty appealing. But that wasn’t freedom, not quite, not the freedom to come and go as he pleased, and most relevantly not the freedom to go, to leave this land of those who’d captured him at the siege.
Now he had a secret ally too, one in a position of some responsibility who had promised to help him however he could and who was very likely highly motivated to see him gone. But hardly one who had been gained through honourable means. Osman had basically blackmailed his way to the man’s support, and more importantly had completely cast aside a fellow captive, and a child, in doing so. We can perhaps accept the explanation that Osman was not to be held responsible for any of those violent shenanigans in town, but in this episode of the steward and the girl from Budapest, we certainly do not see Osman of Timisoara at his best.
Next episode, we’ll see him make an end to those seven years in Vienna and make a break for home. Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you then.