Józef Brandt — Return from Vienna, 1683. National Museum, Warsaw.↗
For sixty days in the summer of 1683, the Ottoman Empire laid siege to the Habsburg capital. The relief that came on September 12 was the largest cavalry charge in history—and the beginning of Ottoman decline in Europe.
Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha arrived outside Vienna on July 14, 1683 with between 90,000 and 150,000 men. Vienna held roughly 11,000 defenders under Count Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg. Emperor Leopold I had fled. The city was on its own.
The Ottomans went under Vienna's walls. Ottoman engineers were among the world's best military miners, driving tunnels beneath the bastions and packing the ends with gunpowder. By early September, multiple tunnels had been detonated and the walls were failing. The city's fall was measured in days.
The relief army assembled at Tulln—roughly 70,000 men from the Habsburg Empire, Poland, Bavaria, and German states—was commanded nominally by Polish King Jan III Sobieski. On September 11, the army appeared on the Kahlenberg ridge. Kara Mustafa hesitated, splitting his forces. At approximately 5 PM on September 12, Sobieski launched 20,000 Polish and Habsburg cavalry in a single coordinated charge down the hillside into the Ottoman rear—the largest cavalry charge in recorded history. The Ottoman formation disintegrated.
Kara Mustafa fled south and was strangled on Christmas Day 1683 by order of the Ottoman Sultan. The Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 formalized what the Siege of Vienna had made inevitable: the Ottoman Empire would contract, not expand, for the next two centuries.
Hodder & Stoughton, 1964
HarperCollins, 2008
Markus Wiener, 2005
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