Kahlenberg slopes, Vienna

A city under siege for two months

The Ottoman army under Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha laid siege to Vienna on 14 July 1683.

The siege would last 60 days.

Kara Mustafa's force numbered perhaps 150 000 men with 300 cannons. The defending Habsburg garrison under Count Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg was 16 000. The Ottoman strategy was to mine under the city walls rather than batter them. By the second week of September the explosive mines were beginning to breach the Burg bastion and Löbel bastion. The defenders were down to 4 000 effectives.

Within days the city would have fallen.

A relief army from four nations

The relief army that arrived on 11 September 1683 had been assembled by the personal diplomacy of Pope Innocent XI.

21 000 Imperial troops. 11 000 Bavarians. 9 000 Saxons. 10 000 Franconians. And decisively, 27 000 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth troops under King Jan III Sobieski.

Sobieski commanded the overall army by seniority. They camped on the wooded slopes of the Kahlenberg mountain north of Vienna on the night of 11 September, in clear view of the besieging Ottoman camp 8 kilometres below.

Kara Mustafa, told that Sobieski's force was overrated, made no attempt to attack them in the night.

Three thousand winged hussars

The decisive moment of the battle came at 6 p.m. on 12 September.

Sobieski led the largest cavalry charge in human history. Roughly 18 000 horse, with 3 000 Polish Winged Hussars at the centre.

The Hussars were Poland's elite cavalry. They wore wooden back- frames mounted with eagle feathers — the "wings" — and carried 5.5-metre kopia lances. The wings were not just decorative. They made a sound at gallop that frightened enemy horses, and they prevented enemy cavalry from lassoing the riders from behind.

The charge crossed 3 kilometres of open ground from the Kahlenberg foot-slopes into the Ottoman centre. The Ottoman line, exhausted from siege work and unable to redeploy its artillery in time, broke within an hour.

Coffee, and pastries

Kara Mustafa fled south through the Balkans, abandoning his camp, his tents, his treasury, and according to Polish tradition his green coffee beans.

The first coffee beans in central Europe.

Kraków, then Vienna, then most of Habsburg Europe took up coffee drinking from the Ottoman model within a generation. The crescent-shaped Viennese pastry called Kipfel — and later the French croissant — is sometimes attributed to bakers commemorating the Ottoman defeat by shaping their morning bread in the form of the Islamic crescent moon.

The story may be folklore. The documentation is thin. But the cultural appropriation is real — an enormous amount of what modern Europeans now consider "European" food and drink culture entered Europe through the spoils of 1683.