The Ottoman Siege of Vienna That Was Broken on 12 September 1683 by the Largest Cavalry Charge in History

The Ottoman Empire at its 1683 territorial peak controlled the Balkans, Hungary, and most of the eastern Mediterranean. The strategic objective of the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha in summer 1683 was the capture of Vienna — the capital of the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire and the symbolic centre of Catholic central Europe.

An Ottoman army of approximately 150,000 men crossed the Hungarian Plain in spring 1683 and reached Vienna on 14 July 1683. The Habsburg emperor Leopold I had evacuated the city; the defence was commanded by Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg with a garrison of approximately 15,000 troops and the armed civilian population.

The siege ran for 60 days. Ottoman miners drove tunnels under the city’s western bastions; counter-mining by the defenders prevented the larger detonations. The garrison lost approximately one-third of its strength to combat and disease. By early September the western wall was breached in two places and a final Ottoman assault was being prepared.

The relief army

The international relief force had been forming through summer 1683 under the diplomatic leadership of Pope Innocent XI, who had organised the Holy League of Habsburg Austria, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Republic of Venice, and several German principalities. The agreed military commander of the combined relief army was the Polish king Jan III Sobieski, who had defeated the Ottomans at Khotyn (1673) and Lwów (1675) and was the most experienced anti-Ottoman field commander available.

The combined relief army of approximately 80,000 men — about 27,000 Polish under Sobieski, 20,000 Imperial Austrian under Charles V of Lorraine, 11,000 Bavarian, 9,000 Saxon, and 9,500 other German contingents — arrived at the Kahlenberg ridge northwest of Vienna on the afternoon of 11 September 1683.

The Ottoman position was unfavourable. Kara Mustafa had concentrated his forces on the city siege rather than fortifying the outer perimeter against the relief. The Ottoman counter-deployment to the Kahlenberg arrived too late.

12 September

The battle began at approximately 4 a.m. on 12 September 1683. The right wing of the Holy League army — Imperial and Saxon infantry under Charles of Lorraine — engaged the Ottoman left through the morning, working slowly down the Kahlenberg’s southeastern slopes.

The Polish army on the right of the line was held in reserve until afternoon. By approximately 5 p.m. the Ottoman position had been weakened by the eight hours of infantry combat. Sobieski ordered the cavalry charge.

The Polish cavalry charge of 12 September 1683 is the largest single cavalry charge in recorded military history. Approximately 20,000 cavalry — including all 3,000 of the available Polish Winged Hussars (the heavy cavalry with the distinctive wooden-frame “wings” attached to the saddle, the elite assault force of the Polish military) — descended the Kahlenberg slope in a line approximately three kilometres wide.

The charge struck the Ottoman left-centre at full speed. The Ottoman line broke within thirty minutes. Kara Mustafa abandoned his command tent (where the Ottoman financial treasury was kept) and fled south with his personal guard. The Ottoman army disintegrated.

The pursuit continued through dusk and into the night. Approximately 15,000 Ottoman troops were killed in the rout. The Ottoman camp — including approximately 25,000 tents, the entire siege artillery train of about 300 cannon, the campaign treasury, and most of the Ottoman provisions — was captured intact.

Sobieski’s after-action dispatch to Pope Innocent XI paraphrased Caesar: Venimus, vidimus, Deus vicit — “We came, we saw, God conquered.”

What followed

The Ottoman northwestward expansion ended. The subsequent Great Turkish War (1683-1699) drove the Ottomans out of Hungary entirely; the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz transferred most of central Europe from Ottoman to Habsburg sovereignty. The Ottoman Empire would survive for another 240 years but would never again threaten central Europe.

Kara Mustafa reached Belgrade alive but was executed by the Sultan on 25 December 1683 for the loss of the campaign. The Ottoman court delivered him a silken cord, the conventional method of execution for senior officials, in his quarters. He used it.

Among the captured Ottoman supplies were several hundred sacks of dark roasted coffee beans that the retreating army had not had time to remove. The Vienna coffee-houses date their establishment from the days immediately following the battle. Coffee had been known in Vienna before 1683, but the commercial coffee-house culture that defined late-17th-century and 18th-century Vienna was a direct legacy of the Ottoman supply chain. The Polish-born Vienna resident Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki is conventionally credited with opening the first dedicated Viennese coffee-house, the Hof zur Blauen Flasche, in 1685, using captured Ottoman beans.

The Polish Winged Hussars made one more major battlefield appearance — at the Battle of Parkany on 7-9 October 1683, also against retreating Ottomans — before the military category was retired by the end of the 17th century. Vienna 1683 was their finest hour.