The 1660s saw new Ottoman conquests in Hungary (16), Crete (1669), and Poland-Lithuania (16) under the able leadership of the K öpr ül ü grand viziers. In 1683 Vienna was besieged for the second time by the Ottomans, who by 1541 had conquered central Hungary, bringing the frontier dangerously close to the Austrian capital. ![]() After another failed attempt in 1532, when the small Hungarian castle of K üszeg (G üns) stopped Suleiman's army, the sultan and Ferdinand accepted the status quo in Hungary. With winter approaching, the Ottomans raised the siege. The defenders discovered or disarmed most of the Ottoman mines, and when some mines did succeed in opening significantly large holes, the attackers were repulsed by pikemen and harquebusiers. The Ottoman bombardment was not effective, for the attackers had had to leave their siege artillery in Bulgaria and Hungary owing to unusually rainy weather and muddy roads. The siege lasted for some two weeks (27 September –15 October 1529). Vienna was defended by some 18,000 to 25,000 soldiers under the able leadership of Niklas Graf zu Salm and Wilhelm Freiherr von Roggendorf, who had ordered the city's medieval and obsolete defenses substantially strengthened. Suleiman, however, wanted the resolve the Habsburg-Ottoman rivalry in Central Europe by conquering Vienna, the capital of the Habsburgs' Danubian Monarchy. The Ottoman army of 80,000 to 100,000 men retook Buda, Hungary's capital, from the Habsburgs in September 1529 and gave it back to their ally J ános. After Suleiman's prot ég é, J ános Szapolyai (ruled 1526 –1540), was ousted from Hungary by his rival, Ferdinand I of Habsburg, also elected king of Hungary (1526 –1564), Suleiman was eager to redress the unintended consequences of his victory at Moh ács. When, at the battle of Moh ács in 1526, the troops of Sultan Suleiman I (ruled 1520 –1566) wiped out the Hungarian army and killed King Louis II, they cleared the way to the Hungarian throne for their main rival, the Habsburgs. The city of Vienna was the object of two unsuccessful sieges by Ottoman forces during the early modern period. The Habsburgs now started the offensive which step by step was to conquer the whole of Hungary.VIENNA, SIEGES OF. The victory of the imperial army at the Second Siege of Vienna proved to be the turning point in Habsburg-Turkish relations: early in 1684, Pope Innocent XI and Emperor Leopold I allied themselves with Poland and Venice to form the Holy League, which was later also joined by Russia. The Ottoman army suffered a crushing defeat and Kara Mustafa fled. On 12 September, under the supreme command of Jan Sobieski, the 70,000-strong relief force descended on the Turks from the Kahlenberg to the north of the city. Succour, however, was nigh: at Tullnerfeld to the west of the city, the imperial army under the command of Duke Charles V of Lorraine joined ranks with troops under the Polish king Jan III Sobieski and further auxiliary forces from member states of the Holy Roman Empire. By September the Ottoman assaults and widespread disease were making the situation increasingly urgent – the city seemed certain to fall. The commander of the city Count Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg defended the fortifications with 11,000 soldiers. The summer of 1683 saw a Turkish force of as many as 200,000 men massed before the city, from which Emperor Leopold I and many of Vienna’s inhabitants had fled in July. Some years later the Ottomans launched a new offensive under the grand vizier Kara Mustafa and advanced as far as Vienna, where they besieged the Habsburg capital and seat of the imperial court as they had done once before in 1529. The rebellion failed and several of its leaders were executed. Feeling that the Emperor had left them in the lurch, they responded with a ‘conspiracy of the magnates’. However, as Leopold I was at this time also at war with France, he concluded a swift peace with the Turks, much to the displeasure of the Hungarian and Croatian nobility. On 1 August 1664, in the first Habsburg defeat of an Ottoman army under a grand vizier, the imperial general Raimund Montecuccoli won a notable victory at Mogersdorf (now in Burgenland, Austria). ![]() In 1663 there was an escalation of hostilities in Transylvania (Siebenbürgen), leading to the first major Turkish war since the beginning of the century. Until the end of the seventeenth century the Habsburgs were on the defensive with regard to the Ottoman Empire.
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