Battle of Vienna
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The battle of Vienna was fought on 11 and 12 September 1683 and stopped the last great Ottoman advance into central Europe. Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa led a large army to the city, dug siege lines and set up his camp on the Kahlenberg, confident that the walls would fall as Buda's had. The garrison and the citizens, directed by the imperial commissioner Starhemberg, held out for two months, diverting the Danube to flood the trenches. Relief came from Poland: King John III Sobieski led eighty thousand men of a holy league, including the winged hussars, down the hills on the morning of 12 September and broke the Ottoman lines in one of the largest cavalry charges in history. Kara Mustafa retreated and was later strangled in Belgrade by order of the sultan for failing. The victory let the allies take Buda in 1686, and the treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 gave the Habsburgs Hungary and Transylvania; the Ottomans never again threatened Vienna. Coffee houses opened by the retreating army's supplies gave Vienna its cafe culture, so the story goes. The relief army was a coalition of Poles, Germans and Austrians, and its victory was celebrated across all of Christian Europe.