page_title: Battle of Vienna
section_title: Aftermath
hierarchical_section_title: Battle of Vienna / Aftermath
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Türkische Standarte im Heeresgeschichtlichen Museum, erbeutet bei der Schlacht am Kahlenberg 1683.
context_page_description: The Battle of Vienna took place at Kahlenberg Mountain near Vienna on 12 September 1683 after the imperial city had been besieged by the Ottoman Empire for two months. The battle was fought by the Holy Roman Empire led by the Habsburg Monarchy and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, both under the command of King John III Sobieski, against the Ottomans and their vassal and tributary states. The battle marked the first time the Commonwealth and the Holy Roman Empire had cooperated militarily against the Ottomans, and it is often seen as a turning point in history, after which "the Ottoman Turks ceased to be a menace to the Christian world". In the ensuing war that lasted until 1699, the Ottomans lost almost all of Hungary to the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I.
  The battle was won by the combined forces of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the latter represented only by the forces of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland. The Viennese garrison was led by Ernst Rüdiger Graf von Starhemberg, an Austrian subject of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I. The overall command was held by the senior leader, the King of Poland, John III Sobieski, who led the relief forces.
context_section_description: Contemporary Ottoman historian Silahdar Findiklili Mehmed Agha (1658–1723) described the battle as an enormous defeat and failure for the Ottoman Empire, the most disastrous since the foundation of Ottoman statehood in 1299. The Ottomans lost at least 20,000 men during the siege, while their losses during the battle with Sobieski's forces amounted to around 15,000 dead (according to Podhorodecki) or 8,000–15,000 dead and 5,000–10,000 captured (according to Tucker). Casualties of the allied relief force under Sobieski's command were much smaller, amounting to approximately 3,500 dead and wounded, including 1,300 Poles. Tucker's estimate is slightly higher: 4,500. The Viennese garrison and the civilian populace lost, due to all causes, about half of their initial number during the siege.
  The Holy League troops and the Viennese took a large amount of loot from the Ottoman army, which Sobieski vividly described in a letter to his wife a few days after the battle:
  Ours are treasures unheard of . . . tents, sheep, cattle and no small number of camels . . . it is victory as nobody ever knew before, the enemy now completely ruined, everything lost for them. They must run for their sheer lives . . . General Starhemberg hugged and kissed me and called me his saviour. 
  Starhemberg immediately ordered the repair of Vienna's severely damaged fortifications to guard against a possible Ottoman counterstrike. However, this proved unnecessary.
  Soon the Ottomans disposed of their defeated commander. On 25 December 1683 Kara Mustafa Pasha was executed in Belgrade in the approved manner—by strangulation with a silk rope pulled by several men on each end—by order of the commander of the Janissaries.
  Despite the victory of the Catholic Christian allies, there was still tension among the various commanders and their armies. For example, Sobieski demanded that Polish troops be allowed to have first choice of the spoils of the Ottoman camp. German and Austrian troops were left with smaller portions of the loot. Also, the Protestant Saxons, who had arrived to relieve the city, were apparently subjected to verbal abuse by the Catholic populace of the Viennese countryside. The Saxons left the battle immediately, without partaking in the sharing of spoils, and refused to continue pursuit.
  Sobieski went on to liberate Grau and northwestern Hungary after the Battle of Parkany, but dysentery halted his pursuit of the Ottomans. Charles V took Belgrade and most of Serbia in 1686 and established Habsburg control over southern Hungary and most of Transylvania in 1687.
  The Ottoman defeat at Vienna sparked great celebrations in Safavid Iran; the report was apparently brought in such a spectacular way, that then incumbent King (Shah) Suleiman I (r. 1666–1694) considered a march to Baghdad, which had been lost in 1639 to the Ottomans by virtue of the Treaty of Zuhab. Ultimately, the Safavids did not conduct a new campaign, for concerned state officials (notably the dominant eunuch faction within the royal court) were aware of the decline in Safavid military strength, and thus did not consider it prudent. The eunuchs, according to Professor Rudi Matthee "were not against the idea of having the Ottomans suffer some humiliation, but they did not want their power destroyed for fear that this would remove a buffer against Christian Europe".
caption: Ottoman military flag captured in the Siege of Vienna
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