Kara Mustafa Pasha

Biography

Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha was the adopted son and protégé of the powerful Köprülü family of grand viziers who had restored Ottoman military power in the mid-seventeenth century. He rose through the Ottoman provincial administration and military, eventually succeeding his foster brother Fazıl Ahmed Pasha as Grand Vizier in 1676. Ambitious, capable, and arrogant, he was the driving force behind the decision to besiege Vienna — against the counsel of more cautious advisors who remembered that Suleiman the Magnificent had failed before the same walls in 1529. Kara Mustafa's plan was not unreasonable: the Habsburg Empire was distracted by Louis XIV's aggressions, the Hungarian rebels under Imre Thököly had opened the road, and Vienna's fortifications were outdated. He arrived before the city with perhaps 150,000 men in July 1683 and conducted a methodical siege, driving mines toward the walls rather than risking costly assaults. The strategy might have worked — the walls were breached and the garrison was near collapse — but he fatally underestimated the speed of the relief force and failed to fortify his camp against attack from the Kahlenberg heights. When Sobieski's cavalry swept down the hillside on September 12, the Ottoman army was caught between the garrison and the relief force and shattered. Kara Mustafa retreated to Belgrade, where he was strangled with a silk bowstring on the sultan's order on Christmas Day 1683 — the traditional Ottoman punishment for a grand vizier who failed. His skull was reportedly sent to Vienna as a trophy.

Key Battles