Battle of Saint Gotthard, 1664: Montecuccoli stops the Grand Vizier on the Rába

The war began in Transylvania. When its prince, George II Rákóczi, invaded Poland in 1657 without the sultan's leave, the Ottomans deposed him and tightened their grip on the principality. Emperor Leopold I could not accept Transylvania under direct Ottoman control, and by 1663 the two empires were at war. That year the Grand Vizier Köprülü Fazıl Ahmed Pasha took Érsekújvár (Nové Zámky), the key fortress of Upper Hungary, and his raiders reached Moravia and Silesia.²

Leopold asked the princes of the Empire for help, and even his rival Louis XIV sent a corps of 6,000 men under Count Jean de Coligny-Saligny, of whom about 5,250 were present on the day. Theatrum Belli notes that it was the only time in the Turkish wars of the century that France sent a regular corps to fight alongside the Habsburgs.³

Two armies along the Rába

In the spring of 1664 the Grand Vizier relieved Kanizsa and on 30 June took the new fortress of Zrínyi-Újvár. He then marched north towards the Rába, the road to Graz and Vienna. At Körmend Hungarian troops stopped him from crossing, so he moved upstream to the west, and the two armies marched side by side along opposite banks. Montecuccoli's men reached the heights by Szentgotthárd first, on 28 July. July had been unusually wet, the roads had turned to mud, and both armies were short of supplies.⁴

Montecuccoli's army was small and divided. Hungarianottomanwars.com gives it 24,500 men and 24 guns; Theatrum Belli cites the British historian Peter H. Wilson for 24,450, and mentions other estimates of 26,000 to 28,000 and even 40,000. It was made up of Habsburg regulars, the newly raised and poorly trained contingents of the Imperial Army of the Reich under Margrave Leopold William of Baden, troops of the League of the Rhine, and the French, each under its own commander.⁵

The Ottoman army was far larger, though nobody knows by how much. Hungarianottomanwars.com puts it at 120,000 to 130,000 men. Theatrum Belli gives 100,000 to 150,000 with the camp and its followers, of whom about 60,000 were the sultan's paid troops, janissaries and household cavalry, and notes Wilson's view that some 30,000 Ottomans never came into action.⁶

The bridgehead in the loop of the river

The allied commanders thought the steep bank inside a loop of the Rába west of Szentgotthárd was safe and left it lightly guarded. On 31 July the Ottomans brought up timber in secret, drove off the pickets with musket fire covered by guns on both sides of the loop, and by evening held a bridgehead on the north bank. Through the night they kept crossing, began a bridge and dug lines of trenches. The Ottoman council had decided not to give battle on Friday, 1 August, a day of prayer, and to make the general attack on Saturday; many of their troops spread out across the country to forage.⁷

Rout in the center

The allies were slow to react. Leopold William of Baden, whose Imperial troops faced the bridgehead, treated it as a feint, and in the morning his regiments went forward into broken, wooded ground in confusion. Near the village of Nagyfalu (today Mogersdorf) the Ottomans fell on them as they came out of the trees, while guns and muskets from the bridgehead swept their flank. The center broke. Hungarianottomanwars.com says 1,000 to 1,500 men were killed and that the panic reached as far as Styria.⁸

The Ottomans did not exploit the gap. On the wings, General Julius von Hohenlohe and Montecuccoli counterattacked, Coligny sent about a thousand French infantry and four squadrons under the Duke of La Feuillade, and Count Waldeck rallied the fugitives. The fighting for Nagyfalu was bitter, and Theatrum Belli writes that janissaries in the houses let themselves be burned rather than surrender. Montecuccoli himself later admitted how close the army had come to total defeat.⁹

The afternoon attack

Around 11 a.m. the allied generals held a council of war and swore to act together. Hohenlohe persuaded a reluctant Montecuccoli that the bridgehead had to be destroyed before the whole Ottoman army came across. In the afternoon they attacked at once: the French from the north against the eight lines of trenches, the Imperial regiments of the right wing from the west, all under heavy fire from Ottoman guns across the river. EBSCO's account credits the victory to Montecuccoli's decision to bring the separate commands into one simultaneous, massed attack.¹⁰

The Ottoman line was rolled up. According to hungarianottomanwars.com, the Grand Vizier ordered the janissaries back to his last and shortest line of trenches, and the men in front, seeing them go, panicked. The bridge broke, and the fugitives were driven into the rising river. Hungarianottomanwars.com counts more than 7,000 to 8,000 Ottoman dead, many of them drowned, and 5,000 to 6,000 allied losses; Theatrum Belli gives allied estimates from 2,000 to 6,000, falling hardest on the Reich regiments of the center. Darkness and the flooding Rába ruled out a pursuit.¹¹

A victory and a disappointing peace

Nine days later, on 10 August, the emperor's envoy signed the Peace of Vasvár in the Grand Vizier's own camp. It left the Ottomans almost all they had taken since 1660, including Érsekújvár and Nagyvárad, and caused a scandal in Hungary and the Empire when its terms became known. Leopold's eyes were on France and the Spanish succession, and he had little wish to see Louis XIV celebrated as the victor over the Turks.¹²

Even so, the battle mattered. Theatrum Belli calls it the first large Ottoman defeat in a pitched battle against a Western army in the early modern era, and EBSCO notes that it exposed weaknesses in Ottoman organization and tactics against improved European arms. Hungarianottomanwars.com adds that it convinced contemporaries that the Turks were not invincible.¹³