Battle of Zenta

Background

The relief of Vienna in 1683 opened a long Habsburg counter-offensive in Hungary: Belgrade fell in 1688. Then the Nine Years' War drew Imperial troops west, a reinvigorated Ottoman army retook Belgrade in 1690, and the Habsburg failure before Belgrade in 1694 left the war stalled. Sultan Mustafa II, who led his armies in person, won at Lugos in 1695 and at Ulaş and Cenei in 1696.

In 1697 he marched again. The Ottoman army gathered at Edirne, moved by Sofia and Niš to Belgrade, and in August held a war council there that favoured a thrust into central Hungary and Transylvania. Emperor Leopold I had given command in Hungary to the young Prince Eugene of Savoy, who found an unpaid, scattered army and had to pledge his own credit to keep it supplied.

The Ottomans took and razed Titel at the mouth of the Tisza and threatened Peterwardein on the Danube. On 6 September Eugene threw his army into Peterwardein by an 18-hour flank march in battle order, harried by Ottoman cavalry in heat and without water. Blocked there, the sultan turned north up the right bank of the Tisza, burning villages as he went, aiming at weakly fortified Szeged; Eugene followed on 9 September. Learning that Szeged had been reinforced, Mustafa, urged on by the Hungarian rebel leader Imre Thököly, decided instead to cross the Tisza at Zenta and strike into Upper Hungary or Transylvania. His engineers bridged the river there, and on 10 September the sultan, his court and treasury crossed first. The rest of the army was still crossing the next day when Eugene's army arrived.

The armies

Eugene's army on 11 September had 51 battalions, 112 squadrons and 60 guns according to the Kriegsarchiv order of battle: about 50,000–55,000 men, not counting the hussars and the Serbian militia, whom the official history counts separately. Polish-Saxon and Brandenburg auxiliary infantry stood in the centre. Rabutin's cavalry corps had joined from Transylvania after a run of forced marches. Under Eugene, Field Marshal Commercy shared command of the centre, with Börner directing the artillery; Heister led the right wing, Guido Starhemberg the left, with Vaudémont commanding its second line. Its cavalry was mostly cuirassiers and dragoons.

The Ottoman army was the sultan's field army of janissaries and other household troops, provincial cavalry and foot from Rumelia and Anatolia, Albanian and Bosnian infantry, a few thousand Crimean Tatars and Thököly's Hungarian kuruc horse. Grand Vizier Elmas Mehmed Pasha commanded the troops in the bridgehead. Its size is uncertain: estimates run from about 50,000 to 135,000. Cavalry was its largest arm, and by mid-afternoon most of the horse were already across the river.

The bridgehead stood about 2,000 paces south of Zenta. A bridge of some 60 boats, built to a French engineer's design, crossed a river about 350 paces wide between steep banks 4–5 metres high. Its inner works were a retrenchment about 500 paces square, ditched and lined with wagons. An outer semicircular line about 1,000 paces out had a gap of some 700 paces on the south-west, facing Eugene's line of march.

The battle

CDB90 treats the day as a single engagement, number 48 (ZENTA), from 15:00 to 19:30. The sequence and most details below follow the Kriegsarchiv history, which used the Imperial field records; times are approximate.

The approach (dawn to early afternoon). The army left its camp near Ó-Becse at first light in twelve columns, ready to fight on the march. About 09:00 word came that scouting parties sent out the night before had run into strong Ottoman forces near Zenta. Hussars freed them and took a pasha prisoner. Threatened with death, he said the sultan had crossed with several thousand horse, the heavy guns and baggage were crossing, about 100 guns were still on the near bank, and the bridge was entrenched. Eugene rode ahead with the cavalry and some guns. From about an hour south of Zenta he saw the Ottoman army packed on the bridge and in the works.

Deployment (afternoon). With only a few hours of daylight left, Eugene decided to attack at once rather than let the Ottomans finish crossing in the night. As the infantry came up he formed the army with its right on the river and its left extended across the plain, while the heavy guns pushed through the gap in the unfinished outer line to cover the deployment. This took about two hours. A few thousand Ottoman horsemen came out; Eugene led three dragoon regiments at them, but they fell back into the works and an artillery duel followed. The army closed to half cannon-shot and wheeled right, so that the centre faced the wagon line and both wings rested on the river, enclosing the bridgehead in a crescent.

Confusion in the bridgehead. Elmas Mehmed recalled sipahis who had already crossed; their return against the stream of cavalry still crossing jammed the bridge, and they came back on foot to man the works. Thököly urged the sultan to break the bridge and force the army to fight it out, but he refused. An Ottoman cavalry sortie under cover of the high bank against the Imperial left was driven back by gunfire and fled towards the bridge, which batteries on both wings now took in crossfire.

The assault (from about 18:00). The sortie had shown a strip of foreshore, 40–50 paces wide, between the bank and the low river, which ran round the end of the works to the bridge. Eugene put guns and infantry on it and sent Starhemberg's whole left wing against the Ottoman right, while the centre and Heister's right wing attacked the works in front. Through canister and musketry the left-wing infantry got over the rampart and into the rear of the position. In the centre dismounted troopers stormed the ditches sword in hand. The left wing took the inner work and the wagon line and cut the defenders off from the bridge. A Turkish account of the same phase has two assaults beaten off and Vaudémont's cavalry breaking the Ottoman right.

Slaughter at the bridge (to nightfall). The Imperial troops gave no quarter, though pashas offered large ransoms. Thousands were driven into the Tisza or off the bridge. The grand vizier, trying to stop the flight at the bridgehead, was killed there; one account says by his own mutinous janissaries. The sultan watched from the far bank, then fled for Temesvár with his escort. The killing ended only with full darkness, and Eugene drew the army back from the works two hours after sunset.

Aftermath

The Imperial army lost 429 killed and 1,598 wounded, and more than 3,500 horses. The Kriegsarchiv history puts the Ottoman dead at over 20,000 on the field and over 10,000 drowned, with hardly 2,000 escaping across the river; Ottoman chronicles admit only 7,000–8,000. Several modern works give up to 30,000. Among the dead were the grand vizier, the janissary agha, several other viziers and governors, and many senior officers. On 12 September the victors took the camp: seven horsetail standards, 423 banners, 87 guns, the baggage and the imperial seal, never before captured. The official history doubts the often-cited three-million war chest: Eugene was still begging Vienna for money days later.

The army was too exhausted and too short of supplies to follow up in strength; hussars and 600 Croatian dragoons chased the fugitives towards Temesvár, where the sultan arrived on 12 September with barely 2,000 horsemen. In October Eugene raided Bosnia and burned Sarajevo. Zenta was the last great battle of the war: peace talks followed, and at Karlowitz in January 1699 the Ottomans gave up Hungary except the Banat, together with Transylvania and Slavonia.

Nineteenth-century Austrian writers made it a model of the bold commander, while some contemporaries, Rabutin among them, called it a miracle that the Ottoman army had not struck during the two-hour deployment. The often-told story that Eugene attacked despite orders from Vienna against a battle is disputed by the official history, which says no couriers could reach the army in those days.

Wargaming it

Zenta is a rare thing: a set-piece assault with a stopwatch. Eugene has perhaps four hours of light to deploy and storm a fortified bridgehead before the enemy can finish crossing and slip away. At brigade or regimental level, with turns of 20–30 minutes, the whole field fits on one table: the open plain, the unfinished outer line with its gap, the wagon-lined inner retrenchment, the high river bank and the single bridge.

The Imperial player's problems are time and order. Deploying 50,000 men in front of the enemy takes two hours, and the Ottoman cavalry is the threat while it happens. The hidden foreshore under the bank is the key to the position and should be found, not handed over, perhaps revealed only when Ottoman troops use it.

The Ottoman player faces a real dilemma. Hold the bridgehead and keep crossing, recall the cavalry to stiffen the infantry and choke the bridge, or take Thököly's advice and break it. Rules should make the infantry's cohesion depend on cavalry support, as contemporary observers described, and should make the bridge a chokepoint that can collapse into a massacre.

What ifs: the Ottoman horse charges during the deployment, as Rabutin feared; Eugene arrives three hours later; the sultan stays on the near bank. Scored on Ottoman units across by dark, rather than by a body count, the battle is far more balanced than its result suggests.

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