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THE OTTOMAN SIEGE OF VIENNA, ENGLISH BALLADS, AND THE EXCLUSION CRISIS*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2014

ANDERS INGRAM
ANDERS INGRAM*
Affiliation:
National University of Ireland, Galway
*
National University of Ireland, Galway. University Road, Galway, Ireland[email protected]
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Abstract

The second Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683) generated a higher volume of English writing than any other seventeenth-century event involving the Ottomans. This article focuses upon ballads written in the immediate aftermath of the siege and relates them to the concurrent English political context of the Tory reaction to the exclusion crisis. Situating these ballads within the publication milieu of pamphlet news and political polemic, it examines the figures who produced them and the audiences they were aimed at. Following from this, it shows how the use of commonplace images and associations with the ‘Turk’ as a recurring figure in early modern writing allowed these ballads to find, or depict, synchronicities between the events of the siege of Vienna, and the English political scene.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 53 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Daniel Carey and Christine Woodhead for their help and comments at various stages. This research was completed with the support of a Government of Ireland Fellowship from the Irish Research Council.

References

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93 McShane characterizes the likely audience of this kind of ballad as ‘political activists on the London streets’, McShane, ‘“Rime and Reason”’, p. 218; see also Tim Harris, London crowds in the reign of Charles II, chs. 5–7. On the Observator, see Goldie, Mark, ‘Roger L'Estrange's Observator and the exorcism of the plot’, in Dunan-Page, Anne and Lynch, Beth, eds., Roger L'Estrange and the making of restoration culture (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 70–1Google Scholar.

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