On September 12, 1683, the Polish King Jan III Sobieski saves Vienna from the Ottomans. Thus he interrupted the dreams of expanding the influence of Islam in Central Europe.
It is reached after the Ottoman Empire besieged the city for 2 months. However, on September 12, 1683, the key two-day battle for Vienna ended.
This victory not only stopped the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, but also provided international prestige to Poland, which received the glory of the “front fortress of Christianity”.
The siege of Vienna began on July 14, 1683. Nearly 90,000 Ottoman army, including 12,000 Janissary corps arrived at the city walls.
The battle stops another attempt by the Ottoman Empire to take Vienna.
The first was in the distant 1529. The battle marked the beginning of the hegemony of the Habsburg dynasty in Central Europe.
The culprit for the defeat of the Ottomans is the Polish king Jan III Sobieski. He is the commander of the united Poland – Austrian-German forces against the Ottoman army led by Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha.
Before the denouement came, the Viennese had destroyed the houses outside the city, leaving an empty plain to expose the Turks to return fire if they tried to storm the city. Kara Mustafa Pasha ordered the creation of a network of trenches through which the Turks gradually approached the city walls. The guns of the Turks are obsolete and the walls of Vienna reinforced, so the Turks concentrate on digging tunnels and laying mines to blow up the walls.
Kara Mustafa Pasha could order a storming of the city by his army, which outnumbered the defenders by a ratio of 20:1, but this would cost him heavy losses in manpower, which the Grand Vizier wanted to avoid. According to some historians, Kara Mustafa Pasha wanted to preserve the riches of the city, which would have fallen into the hands of the soldiers if they had been ordered to take the city by storm.
On September 11, 1683, help arrived in the form of a European army of about 84,000 men. The battle is also notable for the largest cavalry charge in history.
The Turks suffered about 15,000 casualties, 5,000 captured along with all the guns. The Allies suffered around 4,500 casualties (killed and wounded). Despite the rout and retreat, the Turks found time to slaughter their captives, except for the nobles who could bring them a large ransom.
In honor of Jan Sobieski, the Austrians built a church on the Kallenberg hill, north of Vienna. The railway route from Vienna to Warsaw also bears his name, as does the constellation Scutum Sobieskii (Shield of Sobieski).
As Sobieski entrusted his kingdom into the hands of the Virgin (the Virgin of Czestochowa or the Virgin of Czestochowa) before the battle Pope Innocent XI declared the feast of the Holy Name of Mary, celebrated only in Spain and the Kingdom of Naples, to be valid for the entire Catholic Church .
It is celebrated on September 12.
Everyone, headed by the Pope, hails him as the savior of Christendom, and he humbly and majestically paraphrases Julius Caesar:
„I came, I saw, God conquered”,
recalls BNR.
Jan III Sobieski was born in 1629 in Olesko, near the present-day Ukrainian city of Lviv, in a magnate, meaning high noble family. His father, Jacob, was voivode of Ruthenia and castellan of Krakow. His mother, Zofia, is the granddaughter of Hetman Stanislav Žulkievski, one of the most famous politicians and military commanders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Little Jan is getting a wonderful education.
He studied at the Nowodvor College in Krakow and graduated in philosophy at the Jagiellonian University, founded in 1364. After this education, however, came more education, this time a much more practical one. Together with his brother Marek, 17-year-old Jan traveled around Europe - today's Germany, Holland, Belgium, not missing Paris and London, meeting famous people such as Prince Condé, Prince William of Orange and Prince Charles, before becoming King Charles II of England. It is no less important, however, that Jan does not waste his time in entertainment, but learns German, French and Italian, which he adds to Polish and Latin. In 1648, the two brothers returned to Poland and joined the campaign against Bogdan Khmelnytskyi's rebellion.
They arm and maintain with their own funds one cavalry unit each. Then Marek died in Tatar captivity, and Jan, who proved to be a very capable soldier, was promoted to colonel and sent by the king on a diplomatic mission to the Ottoman Empire. There he did not waste his time, but learned the Turkish and Tatar languages, became familiar with Turkish military traditions and tactics. This knowledge is very useful to him, because the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire are border states on the edge of the then global Turkish-European political dynamics and are constantly fighting.
But in the first moment, not the sultan, but Carl Gustaf of Sweden invaded Poland, in the attack known until now as the “flood”. It may sound unexpected, but for a number of reasons in this conflict Jan III Sobieski initially fought as an ally of the Swedes. In March 1656, however, he abandoned them and returned to the army of the Polish king Jan II Casimir Vasa.
In the next 18 years, Jan III Sobieski became an increasingly famous fighter and participated in a series of wars. The Swedes were driven out in the 60s, but the battles against the Cossacks, Tatars, Russians, and Turks came. He began to rise in politics as well, was elected to the Diet, received one after another high posts – it starts from the first royal adviser and goes up to the Grand Hetman of the Crown, that is, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. However, despite the stressful life he leads, Jan Sobieski manages to get married for love. His wife is Maria Casimir d'Arquien, a French noblewoman, who came to Poland when she was 5 years old as part of the retinue of Marie Louis Gonzaga, wife of two Polish kings.
Jan III Sobieski and his beloved Marishenka met back in 1656, when she was 15, but it was just an acquaintance. Two years later, Marie married and had three daughters, but her husband died in 65. It seems that even before his death, however, there was banter between her and Sobieski, because, very unusually, the two good Catholics got married after a few months.
This marriage brings Jan III Sobieski three things.
First - love. She did not fade during the long periods of separation, but gave birth to their famous correspondence, in which, in addition to personal feelings, important state affairs were discussed. Second, the fruit of this love were their 14 children, of whom only 4 survived. And third, Marie strengthened Jan's already existing attachment to the idea of a Franco-Polish alliance in politics.
In France at that time, the sun king Louis XIV ruled. Following his model in Poland, after being elected king in 1672, Jan III Sobieski tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to centralize power, including turning the elective monarchy into a hereditary one.
Jan III Sobieski had just defeated the Turks in the famous Battle of Hochim when word came that King Michal I had died. Sobieski is already so famous that the election of a new king is quick, predictable and takes place with an almost complete majority, which is rare for the character of the nobility. The coronation was not so quick, it came almost two years later, because Sobieski was engaged in the campaign against the Turks. He became king in a difficult financial and political situation for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but he slowly stabilized things. Gradually, however, he understood that the proximity to France, at the expense of the competing Habsburg empire, was not so beneficial for Poland itself - Paris was far from the Turkish flood, and Krakow and Vienna were immediately threatened. Therefore, he reversed the policy and concluded a treaty with the Austrian Emperor Leopold I.
It has a clause similar to Article 5 of the NATO treaty – if either capital is threatened, the other rushes to the rescue. And King Jan III Sobieski actually followed through on this commitment when, in the summer of 1683, Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa laid siege to Vienna and tightened the noose around the last serious obstacle to the Turkish invasion of Western Europe. The war has a religious flavor, the Pope calls on all Christian rulers to join, so troops from Poland and the German lands go to Vienna. During this time, Louis XIV not only pretended to be distracted, but quickly struck the Germans in the back and took Alsace. Jan III Sobieski commanded the united Christian forces, not only because he had the highest title. He is very famous for his military skills, and he knows the military tactics of the Turks very well - he has already been to them quite a few times, which is why they call him “The Lion of the North”.
The siege of Vienna was brutal, however,
many people died, and the Turks dug tunnels under the city walls, planted gunpowder to blow them up, and planned the attack for September 12, the day after Sobieski's arrival. Kara Mustafa's army totaled about 300,000 men, and the combined Polish-Austrian-German army about 90,000. The Christian troops attacked early in the morning, just as Turkish units were already trying to break into the city. Sobieski's attack was merciless and on a wide front, fighting took place throughout the day, but only late in the afternoon did he, with a truly whirlwind raid by the Polish heavy cavalry, manage to break the enemy and put him to flight. Because of the defeat at Vienna, Kara Mustafa was strangled with a silk rope by order of the Sultan.
Because of the victory at Vienna, an Austrian baker invented a small crescent-shaped bun. A century later, Princess Marie-Antoinette took it to France, where it was called a croissant. The main culprit behind the victory at Vienna - Jan III Sobieski, received great honors in Europe, but until his death remained an ordinary king in Poland, which means – revered as a great figure, yet contested and criticized. He died at 67 of a heart attack, and his beloved Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lived for another hundred years. It was finally divided between his former allies from the Battle of Vienna – Germans and Austrians who share it with his eternal enemies – the Russians.
The other eternal enemies of King Jan III Sobieski, the Turks, never came near the Polish lands again.