For two months in 1683, the fate of Central Europe hung on the walls of one city. When the relief finally came, it came down a wooded mountain at a gallop, and the Siege of Vienna became the moment the long Ottoman advance into Europe was finally turned back.
The Ottomans at the gates
A vast Ottoman army under Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa reached Vienna in July and ringed it in. Inside, a garrison and its citizens held a shrinking perimeter as Ottoman engineers dug beneath the walls and blew breach after breach. By September the city was starving and close to collapse.
The relief that almost came too late
A Holy League army of Imperial, German and Polish troops marched to save it, under the overall command of the Polish king Jan III Sobieski. They gathered in the hills above the city, on the wooded heights of the Kahlenberg, and on 12 September began fighting their way down toward the Ottoman camp.
The great charge
Late in the day, with the Ottoman army worn from a day of fighting on two fronts, Sobieski launched the blow that made the battle famous: a massive cavalry charge led by the Polish winged hussars, often called the largest cavalry charge in history, thousands of horsemen thundering downhill straight into the heart of the enemy camp.
The rout
The Ottoman army broke and fled, abandoning its tents, guns and treasure. Sobieski, surveying the captured camp, sent word of the victory with a line echoing Caesar: we came, we saw, God conquered.
The tide turns
Vienna was the high-water mark of Ottoman expansion into Europe. From that autumn the frontier began, slowly, to move the other way, and the Habsburgs pushed south and east over the following decades. A siege that nearly ended in catastrophe became instead a turning point remembered across the continent.