THE ENEMY AT THE GATE

His steady rise did nothing to satisfy his fierce ambition. For Kara Mustafa, the ultimate prize lay to the West. More than a century before, in 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent had besieged Vienna, but the onset of winter forced him to abandon the assault. To succeed where Suleiman had failed represented the pinnacle of imperial glory.

As Andrew Wheatcroft brilliantly shows in “The Enemy at the Gate,” the skirmishes and the pitched battles that raged for centuries between Habsburgs and Ottomans, and their numerous vassals on both sides, represented not so much a “clash of civilizations” as a collision of empires. For all the pious sloganeering that accompanied it, the struggle was only incidentally one between Islam and Christendom. Territory was the aim, along with something less tangible but equally compelling: the right to claim the legacy of the Roman Empire. Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor, took it as given that the legacy belonged rightfully to the Habsburgs, but the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV believed just as fervently that the title of Roman Caesar was his. Had not his ancestor, Mehmed the Conqueror, toppled the Byzantines and seized Constantinople two centuries before? Far from wishing to obliterate the Byzantine past, the Ottomans meant to assume it as their own, and Vienna, the seat of the Habsburg empire, was the final prize.

Kara Mustafa is only one of many bold and complex characters Wheatcroft brings swaggering to the stage in his scholarly but fast-paced narrative. He is especially attuned to the hidden contradictions of his personages. Leopold I is seen as simultaneously rigid and dithering, a disastrous combination, while Mehmed IV, though bookish and retiring, reveled in martial exploits; he would lead his vast army as far as Belgrade before transferring command to Kara Mustafa. Wheatcroft relies on such adroit contrasts to depict these distant figures. Thus, Prince Eugene of Savoy, the “noble knight” of Habsburg legend, was not only the greatest general of the age but an impassioned bibliophile, a discerning connoisseur who managed his private life so discreetly that it remains a mystery to this day. Beside him, Charles V, Duke of Lorraine, another Habsburg hero, emerges as all raw courage and bristling audacity, a man most alive in the saddle amid the thick of battle.

Charles once remarked, “He that feareth not an enemy knows not what war is.” That observation is central to Wheatcroft’s account. His theme isn’t merely “Europe’s fear of the Turks” but “fear itself.” (As he notes in his coda, that fear is still rampant, camouflaged beneath recent — especially Austrian — dismay over Turkey’s continuing campaign to join the European Union.) Despite his best intentions, Wheatcroft’s narrative isn’t likely to allay such fears. Describing an attack by Ottoman cavalry and infantry — the dreadedsipahis and janissaries — he writes, “To face a howling tide of janissaries racing towards you, to watch the heads and limbs of your companions spin off the sharp edge of a sipahisabre required exceptional courage.” He conveys the spooky sense of stifled panic the besieged Viennese experienced as Turkish attackers began tunneling beneath the city’s defenses and the populace had to prick up its ears day and night for the telltale “noises of picks and shovels below the streets.”

Wheatcroft, the author of several earlier books on both Habs burgs and Ottomans, states that he set out here to portray the Ottoman “face of battle,” borrowing a phrase from the classic work by John Keegan, and in this he succeeds; his narrative is thrilling as well as thoughtful, a rare combination. Even so, a subtle imbalance prevails. The Ottomans inspired dread in their enemies; fear was part of their arsenal. But, as Wheatcroft repeatedly demonstrates, the Habsburgs were fearsome too, and perhaps even crueler than their opponents, engaging not only in full-scale massacres but in flayings, beheadings and impalements.

Perhaps because Wheatcroft hasn’t drawn on Ottoman Turkish sources, his Ottomans, for all his skill at depicting them, appear oddly imperturbable. After Kara Mustafa’s debacle before the walls of Vienna, he retreated to Belgrade; there, on Christmas Day 1683, he greeted the sultan’s executioners, kneeling with “stoic Ottoman calm,” and even courteously lifting his beard to expose his throat to the silk garrote. The story is legendary, and Wheatcroft recounts it well. Still, here as elsewhere, we’d like to hear the fierce heart beating beneath the legend.