On This Day 346 Years Ago ...

..London Diarist...

19th August 1664

The news of the Emperour's [sic] victory over the Turkes [sic] is by some doubted, but by most confessed to be very small (though great) of what was talked, which was 80,000 men to be killed and taken of the Turke's side.

The battle to which Pepys is referring must be the Battle of Saint Gotthard which had taken place nearly three weeks earlier on 1 August, near the modern day Hungary-Austria border. The scrap was  between Leopold I, the Habsburg emperor of Austria, and the Ottoman empire, under whose control much of Hungary had come since the previous century. The Ottomans had taken Transylvania and Leopold essentially wanted to take it back, in the process recruiting various Protestant north German allies. Despite being outnumbered about 3 to 1 the Austrian forces under Montecuccoli were triumphant and, whilst not inflicting the damages which Pepys himself had doubted, took between 16-22,000 casualties. The Ottomans were inexperienced in fighting modern, disciplined ranks of musket-bearing soldiers and a failure to adapt to this was eventually their undoing in south-eastern Europe. A 20 year truce was signed and, whilst Hungary was not liberated from the Ottomans immediately, that process started from around 1683. So there you go.