Jan III Sobieski

Biography

Jan Sobieski was the son of a Ruthenian magnate who rose through the ranks of the Polish-Lithuanian military to become the greatest soldier of his age. Educated at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, he toured Western Europe as a young man and mastered French, Latin, and several other languages. His military career began in the Cossack and Swedish wars, and he distinguished himself so completely against the Ottomans at the Battle of Khotin in 1673 — winning a crushing victory over a far larger Turkish force — that the Polish nobility elected him king the following year. As king, Sobieski was consumed by the Ottoman threat. When the call came from Vienna in 1683, he marched south with the Polish army and took command of the relief force by agreement of the allied princes. On September 12 he led the largest cavalry charge in recorded history — 18,000 horsemen, including 3,000 of his own winged hussars — down the Kahlenberg and into the Ottoman camp. The Turkish army, which had been within days of taking the city, disintegrated. Sobieski entered the grand vizier's abandoned tent, sent the captured Ottoman banners to the Pope, and wrote to his wife: 'All the common people kiss my hands, my feet, my clothes.' His later years were bitter. The Polish nobility refused to fund further campaigns, his sons quarreled over the succession, and the alliance with the Habsburgs — who had not shared the spoils of Vienna — soured. He died in 1696, three years before the Treaty of Karlowitz, having saved Christendom and gotten remarkably little gratitude for it.

Key Battles