In September 1788, an Austrian Imperial army of roughly thirty thousand men camped on the Timiș River, got into an argument over schnapps, and routed itself.

The Habsburg Emperor Joseph II had marched his army into the Banat to push the Ottoman Turks back across the Danube. The army was multinational. Germans, Hungarians, Croats, Serbs, Romanians, Italians, Bohemians. The orders were given in German. Most of the rank-and-file did not speak German. On the night of the seventeenth of September, the army camped near the small Banat town of Karánsebes in what is today western Romania. Cavalry scouts crossed the river first to look for Turks. They didn't find any. They found something better. A barrel of schnapps for sale by local peasants. They bought it. They started drinking.

The infantry caught up. They wanted a share. The cavalry, drunk and possessive, said no. They set up a small barricade of carts around the barrel. Words turned to shoves. Someone fired a shot in the air. Then another. The infantry charged. The cavalry charged back. Officers tried to stop it. One officer began shouting 'Halt!' in German. According to the famous nineteenth-century account by the Austrian historian Andreas Joseph Gross-Hoffinger, several Romanian and Slavic-speaking infantrymen heard 'Halt' as the Ottoman war cry. They opened fire. The cavalry began firing back. The Hungarian hussars began firing at the Lombards. Horses spooked. By dawn the Austrian Imperial Army had retreated north in complete disorder, abandoning ten cannon, their wounded, and the field. The Ottoman army arrived two days later. They walked into an empty town.

Gross-Hoffinger, writing six decades after the event, set the casualty figure at ten thousand dead. The figure was repeated in popular histories for the next two centuries. Modern military historians say the figure is wildly inflated, and that the colourful details, the schnapps barrel, the mistaken war cry, the Lombards firing on the hussars, are mostly later embellishment. What is documented is that an Austrian army of thirty thousand men retreated from a position it had not been attacked from, and the Ottomans took the town without firing a shot. Joseph II died eighteen months later.

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