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The University High School Band
The History and Theory of Music

The Great Turkish War

Charge of the Winged Hussars by Mirosław Szeib

On September 11, 1683, the Ottomans invaded the Holy Roman Empire and, trying to succeed where Suleiman the Magnificent had failed a century earlier, laid siege to Vienna once again with an army of 150,000 soldiers. The Austrian leader, Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, had only 16,000 soldiers to defend the city. He appealed to King Louis XIV for aid, but the French House of Bourbon was unwilling to aid the Habsburgs. Saxony, Bavaria, and a few other Habsburg states in the Holy Roman Empire managed to raise a relief force of 47,000, but not until the siege was well underway.

However, in the fourth week of the siege, King Jan III Sobiewski of Poland-Lithuania arrived with eighteen thousand horsemen (called "Winged Hussars"), breaking the Ottoman lines. After the European forces won the Battle of Vienna, the Venetian Republic joined the war, and the following year, Tsar Peter the Great also entered the alliance, marking the first time Russia became involved in a European conflict.

The war from this point turned against the Ottomans, continuing for four more years before the decisive battle was fought near the Serbian city of Zenta on September 11, 1687. The war formally ended with the Treaty of Karlowitz, in which the Ottomans ceded Hungary and Transylvania to the Habsburgs. This marked the last substantial Ottoman attempt to invade Europe.