In 1529, a 70-year-old count stood in the breach at Vienna, while a Christian king had been writing secret letters to the other side.
This is the true story of the first time the gates held, and of the prisoner in Madrid who asked the last man on earth you’d expect for help.
In the baptistery of Vienna’s Votivkirche there is a stone tomb almost five hundred years old. Carved on it, soldiers in turbans storm a city wall, and cut into the stone is one Latin line about the man inside: he was struck by a stone. In the autumn of 1529 Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent brought more than a hundred thousand men to Vienna’s old walls. Count Niklas Salm, seventy years old, burned his own suburbs, blocked the gates, and went into the gap himself. Then the rain came, and the story turned. Part 3 of the Road to Lepanto series.
CHAPTERS
00:00 The tomb most tourists walk past
00:44 A Sultan, an old soldier, a prisoner, and the rain
01:21 Vienna’s old walls and the man defending them
01:52 The Sultan’s mail
02:28 Mohács, 1526
03:22 The rain
04:40 The Sultan’s breakfast (a legend)
05:09 Under the walls
06:04 October 14, 1529
06:54 The retreat
08:04 The old man’s wound
08:43 What the tomb says
09:39 Who was the prisoner in Madrid?
10:52 “I sought among them for a man”
SCRIPTURE (Douay-Rheims)
Ezechiel 22:30: “And I sought among them for a man that might set up a hedge, and stand in the gap before Me in favour of the land, that I might not destroy it: and I found none.”
And that’s their Catholic story.
SOURCES
Britannica, “Siege of Vienna (1529)”: https://www.britannica.com/event/Sieg…
Wien Geschichte Wiki, “Niklas Salm”: https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at…
Deutsche Biographie (ADB/NDB), “Salm, Niklas Graf von”
The tomb of Niklas Salm by Loy Hering, Votivkirche, Vienna (inscription)
The Sultan’s breakfast on Michaelmas is a legend, and it’s told as one.
