Roger Crowley
TAKING ON THE TURK
The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans and the Battle for Europe
By Andrew Wheatcroft (Bodley Head 338pp £20)

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Andrew Wheatcroft opens his book with an arresting image that takes the reader straight into the rich world of Ottoman ceremonial:

In the evening of 6 August 1682 the Sultan's gardeners dug a narrow trench beside the Imperial Gate of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. At intervals they planted seven long crimson poles, each as thick as a man's arm; the top section was elaborately carved and gilded, and from the golden globe at the apex hung a cascade of black and coloured horse tails.

These curious artefacts were the Ottoman equivalent of battle standards unfurled as a declaration of war. Mehmed's gardeners were firing the symbolic opening shot in the Ottoman campaign to capture Habsburg Vienna and storm the frontiers of Christian Europe. It would prove to be the Stalingrad of the age, unequalled in scale and intensity in a whole century of bitter wars.

The centrepiece of the book is the siege of Vienna but it is set within the long story of the rise of the Ottoman Empire and the centuries of struggle with the jostling Habsburgs along the Danube and across the plains of Hungary. Wheatcroft lightly sketches the back history, beginning with the very first shattering Turkish defeat of the Byzantines at Manzikert in Asia Minor in 1071 - experienced, according to a chronicler, 'like an earthquake: the shouting, the sweat, the swift rushes of fear, the clouds of dust, and not least the hordes of Turks riding all around us'. This early catastrophe was seminal - it set the tone for Christian perceptions of the Turks - and it points up the bifocal purpose of this book. Wheatcroft aims not just to write a narrative history of the battle for Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but also to show how these events created an archetypal terror of 'The Turk'. This fear was manufactured over long periods of time by highly prejudicial, negative portrayals in printed accounts and illustrations that were widely disseminated across Europe. Wheatcroft is deeply knowledgeable on this subject and he deploys a fascinating range of examples. The Ottomans were never seen objectively as a rival power with imperial ambitions - they lost the propaganda battle early to the European descendants of Gutenberg - and the consequences of this lopsided perspective still resonate in Europe's dealings with Turkey today. So runs the subtext of his book.

But at its centre is a story. With loops and eddies, and fascinating digressions to discuss Ottoman war preparations, tents, motivations, previous campaigns and military tactics, Wheatcroft draws a huge Ottoman army up the road towards Vienna. We meet the principal protagonists on either side: Sultan Mehmed IV (who dreamed of military glory from reading too many books in the palace library) and his inflexible general Kara Mustafa, and then the Emperor Leopold I and the Duke of Lorraine, who, in the words of a contemporary, wore boots with cork heels and a rotten wig. At times the digressions become distracting, but as the Ottomans prepare to invest Vienna, the focus tightens and the contest draws us completely in. Wheatcroft's account of the siege is sober but impressively researched: he has a forensic grasp of the terrain and the tactics, produces excellent miniatures of the front line generals and deploys extraordinary eyewitness accounts with great skill to conjure up the ferocity of 'the pit of hell', as he puts it. The result is a compact but intensely gripping central narrative, which ends with the routing of the Ottoman army by John Sobieski's Polish cavalry.

The victory would lure the Habsburgs into intoxicating dreams of glory - sixteen years of reconquest, followed by a long straggle of increasingly pointless wars that would last a century. The two empires were still contesting the European frontier during the French Revolution. Wheatcroft follows the later stages of this contest and its aftermath in diminishing degrees of detail, so that the ending is somewhat foreshortened. It's as if a longer book was waiting to get out, while the present one never quite determines its real focus. The Enemy at the Gate is rich and multilayered, but not fully successful in tying together the narrative account of the Ottoman-Habsburg wars and deeper explorations of racial stereotyping, national mythologies and historical process.

Despite this, Wheatcroft has done us all a service by bringing another part of the story of Ottoman-European interaction to the attention of English-speaking readers. Understanding the Ottoman past is not easy, for reasons that this book makes partially clear. Printing came late to Turkey and there was no tradition of writing personal accounts in the Ottoman world, so while we have to make do with laconic third-person campaign diaries from the Turks, the Europeans permit us more recognisable human insights into the ghastly business of war: 'While I was holding a soldier by his scarf, his head was knocked off by a cannonball. Blood and brains were splattered onto my nose and right into my mouth, which was open because of the day's great heat ... This incident caused me great suffering afterwards.'

Faced with such disparities, Andrew Wheatcroft does sterling work in rescuing the Turks from their demonic stereotype. He demonstrates how the two potentates behind the 1683 siege of Vienna and their generals were driven by very similar motives: Kara Mustafa was simply as hungry for glory as any ostrich-plumed Habsburg aristocrat. However, he paid for his failure in a ceremony that was uniquely Ottoman. Literally bowing to the inevitable, the general was strangled in his own tent with a silken cord, and his stuffed head, stripped of skin and tenderly wrapped in a silk cloth, was dispatched to the Sultan. Such accounts linger in the mind for a long time: there is no more startling and haunting image of the ferocity of the battle for Europe's frontier than the aftermath of the Battle of Grocka in 1739. A year later, a traveller could report: 'Today one cannot go ten steps without stepping on human corpses piled one on top of another ... In the surrounding countryside, peasants use skulls as scarecrows; many wear hats, and one even wears a wig.'

Roger Crowley is the author of 'Empires of the Sea: The Final Battle for the Mediterranean', published by Faber & Faber.