Battle of Vienna

Background

The Habsburg–Ottoman peace of 1664 was due to run for twenty years, but the Ottomans declared war on 6 August 1682. Their pretext was Hungary, where the Protestant magnate Imre Thököly had risen against Emperor Leopold I's Counter-Reformation policies; the Porte recognised him as king of 'Upper Hungary' and sent him troops. Sultan Mehmed IV authorised his Grand Vizier, Kara Mustafa Pasha, to campaign as far as the fortresses of Győr and Komárom. Kara Mustafa went further.

The Ottoman army left Edirne at the end of March 1683 and reached Belgrade in early May. Leopold, meanwhile, had made alliances with Bavaria in January, Poland on 31 March and Saxony, and Pope Innocent XI sent money. Under the Polish treaty, King John III Sobieski was bound to march if Vienna was attacked.

The Imperial field army of about 30,000 under Charles V, Duke of Lorraine, fell back before the Ottoman advance, and the court fled the city on 7 July. On 14 July the Ottomans encircled Vienna. Count Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg held it with about 11,000 regulars and some 5,000 militia and volunteers. The besiegers lacked heavy guns and relied on trenches and mines against the walls between the Burg and Löbel bastions. By early September they had taken the Burg ravelin and blown breaches in the walls; dysentery was spreading inside the city.

Lorraine beat Thököly at Bisamberg on 24 August. The Poles crossed the Danube at Tulln on 6 September and joined the Imperial and German contingents. On 9 September the relief army marched, and on 11 September it occupied the heights of the Vienna Woods north-west of the city, which Kara Mustafa had left unguarded.

The armies

Sobieski, the senior allied sovereign and a veteran of Ottoman wars, held overall command of roughly 65,000–80,000 men and 140–200 guns. Lorraine led the Imperial army; Prince Georg Friedrich of Waldeck the Bavarians, Franconians and Swabians; and Elector John George III some 9,000 Saxons. The Polish contingent's most famous element was its winged hussars, heavy lancers: Polish pay records show 24 banners with about 3,045 horses on the campaign that took in both Vienna and Párkány. Lipka Tatars, Muslim light horse in Polish service, wore sprigs of straw in their helmets to tell themselves apart from the Crimean Tatars opposite. The Lithuanian army arrived only after the battle.

The Ottoman army had been worn down by two months of siege. A captured Ottoman list records 48,544 dead up to 10 September, among them 10,000 janissaries and 22,000 diggers and miners, and Ottoman sources put desertion at about a quarter. Its core was the sultan's household troops, janissaries and household cavalry, with provincial sipahis and vassal contingents. The Wallachians, Moldavians and Transylvanians were posted to guard bridges, and the Crimean khan's horsemen, charged with the rear, would not attack the relief army as it crossed the Danube or emerged from the woods. Modern estimates of the Ottoman troops actually engaged run from about 28,400 to 50,000, with around 60 guns, far below the older figures.

The battle

CDB90 treats the day as a single engagement, number 32 (VIENNA), from 05:30 to 18:00. Times below come from secondary accounts and are approximate.

Deployment and the Ottoman spoiling attack (dawn). After a Mass said by Marco d'Aviano, the allies came down from the Vienna Woods in a broad arc from Nussdorf on the Danube to Neuwaldegg. The Imperial army held the left, moving along the river from Klosterneuburg; the Bavarians, Saxons and other German contingents formed the centre, climbing the Kahlenberg range; the Poles on the right came on from the Tulbinger Kogel. Around 04:00 the Ottomans attacked to disrupt the allied deployment before it was complete.

The Imperial left takes the villages (morning to midday). Lorraine's troops went over to the counter-attack and, after heavy fighting and repeated Ottoman counter-attacks, took the fortified villages of Nussdorf and Heiligenstadt. By midday they were close to a breakthrough. Kara Mustafa fed most of his field troops into counter-attacks but kept janissaries and sipahis in the trenches for a final assault on the city. His sappers had ten mines ready under the Löbel bastion; the defenders found and disarmed them. On the Danube the Wallachian contingent abandoned the bridge on Brigittenau island it had been posted to cover.

The Polish wing comes into action (afternoon). On the allied right the Polish infantry advanced against the Ottoman right flank, and by about 16:00 they had taken the village of Gersthof, which became the base for their cavalry. At about 15:30 the Germans renewed their attack on the left; after a slow start they took Unterdöbling and Oberdöbling by 17:00 and closed on the Türkenschanze, the central Ottoman position. A probing charge by a detachment of about 120 hussars showed the Ottoman line could be broken, at heavy cost. With the Türkenschanze now threatened from three sides, Kara Mustafa left it for his headquarters in the main camp, and many Ottoman soldiers were already leaving the field.

The cavalry attack (about 18:00). Sobieski then sent his cavalry forward in four groups, three Polish and one Imperial, leading the hussars himself. This is the most mythologised moment of the battle. Wikipedia gives 18,000 horsemen and 3,000 hussars and calls it the largest cavalry charge in history; neither number is well sourced there, and the Polish pay records cap the hussars at about 3,000 horses for the whole campaign. However many rode, the charge broke an Ottoman army that was already exhausted, demoralised and threatened on its flank by the Imperial infantry.

Rout (evening). The cavalry rode on into the Ottoman camps and Kara Mustafa's headquarters while the garrison sallied from the city. By nightfall the Ottomans were in full retreat towards Hungary, leaving guns, baggage and the camp behind. Margrave Louis William of Baden, at the head of his dragoons, was the first allied officer into the city.

Aftermath

The relief army lost about 3,500–4,500 killed and wounded. Ottoman losses in the battle were perhaps 8,000–15,000 dead and 5,000–10,000 captured, on top of at least 20,000 lost in the siege, and one account says thousands of Christian prisoners were killed before the Ottomans fled. The allies took an enormous haul of loot; Sobieski claimed first choice of it, the Saxons went home without a share and without joining the pursuit, and Sobieski reported to the Pope 'Venimus, vidimus, Deus vicit'. The Poles went on to defeat the Ottomans at Párkány on 7 October. Kara Mustafa was strangled in Belgrade on Christmas Day 1683.

The war that followed took Buda in 1686 and Belgrade in 1688, and at Karlowitz in 1699 the Ottomans ceded most of Hungary. Many historians treat the battle as a turning point in the Habsburg–Ottoman wars; others point out that the Ottomans held the Balkans for two more centuries.

Its memory has been contested from the start. Vienna celebrated it with processions, medals and 'Turks' heads' on houses; the 1930s regime gave it a religious-ideological edge; a papal Mass on the anniversary was dropped from the 1983 visit programme. Recent scholars stress that alliances crossed faiths: Muslim Tatars rode with Sobieski, a Lutheran Hungarian and Orthodox princes stood with the Ottomans, and Catholic France worked against the Habsburgs. Far-right writers have adopted the battle as a symbol, and in 2024 Vienna declined a proposed monument to Sobieski.

Wargaming it

Vienna is a big, open-field battle with a siege attached, and the siege is best treated as off-table pressure. At brigade or regimental level, with turns of about an hour, the whole arc from Nussdorf to Gersthof fits on one table; the Imperial fight for the Danube villages or the Polish cavalry attack also stand alone at a smaller scale.

The terrain is the story: wooded ridges and hills the relief army must come down, then fortified villages and the Türkenschanze earthworks before the Ottoman camp. Allied deployment should be slow and piecemeal, and the Ottoman player should be able to strike at it early, as Kara Mustafa did at dawn.

The key design decisions are the Ottoman numbers and morale. Use the modern estimates and the Ottomans are outnumbered and brittle; use the old ones and the game becomes a desperate Polish gamble. A sensible compromise is an Ottoman force whose units degrade as the day goes on and whose vassal and Tatar contingents may refuse to fight. The other clock is the city: an Ottoman player who keeps troops in the trenches has a chance each turn of a mine breaching the walls, at the cost of fewer men facing the relief.

The what-ifs follow naturally: Kara Mustafa holding the Vienna Woods passes on 11 September, the Tatars attacking the Danube crossing, the mines under the Löbel bastion going off, or Sobieski committing his cavalry before the Imperial infantry had fixed the Ottoman centre.

Maps and pictures