Siege of Vienna (1683)
The Ottomans' failed 1683 siege of Vienna, broken by Jan Sobieski's cavalry charge, marked the high-water mark of Ottoman expansion into Europe.
By early September 1683, Vienna was starving, its walls cracked by Ottoman mines, its garrison down to a few thousand exhausted men. The Habsburg emperor had fled. For sixty days a vast army under Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha had squeezed the city, and the Ottoman banners looked poised to fly over the gateway to Central Europe. Then, on September 12, a Christian relief army poured down a wooded hill and turned the high-water mark of Ottoman conquest into the start of its long retreat.
The siege
Kara Mustafa marched on Vienna in July 1683 with a field army of roughly 90,000 fighting men, gambling that taking the Habsburg capital would crown his career. It was the second Ottoman attempt on the city; Suleiman the Magnificent had besieged it and failed in 1529. The defense fell to Count Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg and a garrison of around 15,000. Rather than storm the walls, the Ottomans dug: trenches, then tunnels packed with gunpowder to blow breaches in the bastions. By September the defenders had lost half their strength to fighting, dysentery, and hunger, and were signaling the surrounding hills with rockets, begging for rescue.
The largest cavalry charge
Rescue came from a coalition stitched together by Pope Innocent XI and led by Jan III Sobieski, the warrior-king of Poland-Lithuania. His combined force of Polish, Austrian, and German troops, perhaps 70,000 strong, assembled on the Kahlenberg heights northwest of the city. Late on September 12, after a day of grinding infantry combat, Sobieski unleashed the cavalry. Some 18,000 horsemen, spearheaded by Poland's winged hussars, thundered downhill in what is often called the largest cavalry charge in history. The Ottoman line broke. Sobieski, echoing Caesar, reported the victory to the pope as "We came, we saw, God conquered" (Latin: "Venimus, vidimus, Deus vicit"). Kara Mustafa fled toward Belgrade, where the sultan's men strangled him with a silk cord on Christmas Day for the disaster.
The long retreat, and the legends
Vienna held, and the momentum reversed for good. A Holy League formed the next year, and the 'Great Turkish War' ground on until the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz, the first in which a beaten Ottoman Empire signed away vast lands, stripped it of Hungary and most of its Central European holdings. The empire that had twice reached Vienna's gates would never threaten them again.
The battle also spawned tastier myths. Legend says Viennese bakers invented the croissant in the shape of the Ottoman crescent to celebrate, and that the city's first coffeehouse opened using beans abandoned in the Ottoman camp. Both stories are almost certainly later inventions, folklore dressed up as history. What actually changed at Vienna was harder: the tide that had carried Islam's greatest empire deep into Europe for three centuries finally stopped, on a hillside above the Danube, and began to roll back.