On July 14, 1683, Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha laid siege to Vienna, the city the Ottomans had failed to take in 1529 and prized as the key to the Danube trade routes. The campaign grew out of Emperor Leopold I’s crackdown on Protestants in Hungary, which sparked a revolt led by Imre Thokoly, whom the Ottomans backed and promised a crown. The Ottoman army, 90,000 to over 170,000 people driving herds of sheep and cattle, mobilized in early 1682 but had to wait 15 months for spring. Leopold fled to Passau and sealed the Treaty of Warsaw with Poland’s King John III Sobieski, while Count Ernst Rudiger von Starhemberg held the rotting walls with about 15,000 soldiers and 8,700 civilian volunteers, refusing to surrender after the massacre at Perchtoldsdorf.

Rather than storm the city, Kara Mustafa dug mines under the walls, likely hoping a formal surrender would hand him Vienna’s wealth intact instead of losing it to plunder. Inside, sleeping sentries could be shot and residents ate cats and donkeys. A relief army of 70,000 to 80,000 nearly came apart over who would pay for troops and supplies until Pope Innocent XI sent funds. On September 12 the fighting began at 4 a.m., the defenders disarmed the final ten mines, and around 6 p.m. Sobieski led 18,000 horsemen, spearheaded by 3,000 winged hussars, down the Kahlenberg into a worn out Ottoman line that broke in under three hours.

• Defenders located Ottoman sappers by watching for ripples on drums of water set on their tunnel floors.
• Wallachian forces abandoned a key Danube bridge, easing the relief army’s crossing.
• Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki crossed the siege lines in Ottoman dress, singing Turkish songs, to coordinate the attack.
• Sobieski wrote to the Pope, we came, we saw, God conquered, and described camels and ostriches left in the abandoned camp.
• Kara Mustafa Pasha was strangled with a silk cord in Belgrade on Christmas Day 1683, and the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz followed.