Turning the Ottoman tide: 1683
I have posted about this before- John III Sobieski at Vienna- We came, we saw, we conquered. There is a great, famous painting in the Vatican of the end of the battle where Sobieski wrote those famous words to his wife.
Caesar's quote was different: he said I came, I saw I conquered. Veni, vidi, viciThe following morning, the army swept down on the largely unprepared and poorly defended Turkish encampments below. Kara Mustafa had never been confronted by a relieving army bent on breaking a siege. He rejected the advice of some of his officers to abandon the siege and concentrate his full attention on the substantial force to his rear. Instead, the grand vizier kept up the pressure on Vienna, diverting only an estimated six thousand infantry and twenty-two thousand cavalry, backed by six cannons, from the siege.
They were not enough. Even though the Christian army could not get most of its artillery over the mountains and into place, its steady attack and greater numbers proved impossible to withstand. First, the Saxons and Imperial troops attacked from the Kahlenberg heights; then additional Imperial troops advanced on the Ottoman center. The Ottomans launched a counterattack, but in twenty minutes they had been beaten back. Because of deep ravines and other terrain problems, the Poles had been slow to engage, but when they came in on the Christian right, the battle was decided. At about 4 p.m., the various Christian forces advanced on all sides, Sobieski leading his “winged hussars” in what was a decisive charge against the Ottoman cavalry. By late afternoon, the Turkish lines began to waver. A desperate Kara Mustafa led his personal escort into the fray, hoping to withstand the Christian onslaught, but could do no more than rescue the flag of the Prophet.
“We came, we saw, and God conquered,” wrote Sobieski to Pope Innocent XI, echoing Julius Caesar’s famous remark on the conquest of Pontus, in modern Turkey. The siege was ended.
Those Turks who had not been killed or captured fled back toward Belgrade. Kara Mustafa succeeded in taking most of his treasure with him, but it would do him little good. As so often happened to those who had failed the sultan, he was strangled two months later.
Vienna, wrote one despairing Ottoman historian, had been a defeat “so great that there has never been its like since the first appearance of the Ottoman state.” He was almost right (the 1402 Battle of Ankara, in which Tamerlane’s Tatars captured the Ottoman leader Bayezid I, had been more devastating). And although neither he nor any of his contemporaries, Christian or Muslim, may have fully realized it, Mehmed’s failure was to be the first step in the steady but inexorable decline of what had for so long seemed the unstoppable advance of the Ottoman Empire.