For the struggle between Turk and Christian was not of the character of those operations to which the term of civilized warfare is conventionally applied. Prisoners were seldom made. The Christian slaughtered; the Turk, if he spared, sold into slavery his captives; prisoners we cannot call them to whom future release was denied. Far and wide before the Turkish armies, the Tartars and the irregular horsemen, whose sole pay was plunder, whose diversion and whose business at once was rapine, spread in a desolating cloud over the country. The whole of the unconquered Hungary, the Austrian duchy, the plains of Moravia and the mountains of Styria were swept or threatened by the scourge. Poland they had long held to be their licensed field of plunder, and now Bavaria, and Bohemia even, trembled at the terror of their approach. The painful curiosity of their friends has attempted an estimate of the numbers of Turkish captives taken in this invasion. 32,000 grown persons, the great majority women, 204 of whom were maiden daughters of the nobility; 26,000 little children were, they tell us, carried off into slavery. This return seems to make no mention of lads, nor of elder girls, who would perhaps form the majority of those spared for the slave-market. How many of these perished under their hardships, or by the Turkish disasters; how many others tasted death, but before slavery; how many others may have lost home, wealth and honour, must remain beyond enumeration or even conjecture. It is said that in lower Austria and on the frontiers of Hungary alone, 4936 villages and hamlets were given to the flames in 1683. To meet this torrent of devastation, the Emperor Leopold could muster but scanty forces. A full half of the territory now united under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was in the hands of the Turks, or of the Hungarian rebels; or then formed part of the territories of Poland. The finances of Vienna have never been a source of strength. "Business men laugh at our finance, for my part I weep over it," said Eugene to the Emperor not long afterwards, lamenting the want of the sinews of war. The Imperial influence of Leopold in Germany was small. The German princes were distant, jealous, slow to move. Brandenberg was irritated over the Silesian claims, that fruitful source of future war. France was all but openly hostile. Spain was powerless. Venice, a shadow of her former self. Poland alone, under her heroic monarch, John Sobieski, might give present and substantial assistance. Yet all knew that to lean upon the support of Poland was to risk leaning upon a bruised reed indeed.