After twelve hours of fighting, the Poles held the high ground on the right. The Holy League cavalry waited on the hills, and watched the infantry battle for the whole day. Then at about 5 PM, the cavalry attacked in four groups. One group was Austrian-German, and the other three were Polish. Over 20,000 men charged down the hills (one of the largest cavalry charges in history). The charge was led by Sobieski at the head of 3,000 Polish heavy lancers, the famed “Winged Hussars”. The Lipka Tatars who fought on the Polish side wore a sprig of straw in their helmets to distinguish themselves from the Tatars fighting on the Turkish side. The charge broke the lines of the Ottomans, who were tired from the long fight on two sides. In the confusion, the cavalry headed straight for the Ottoman camps, while the remaining Vienna garrison sallied out of its defenses and joined in the assault.
The Ottoman troops were tired and dispirited following the failure of both the sapping attempt and the brute force assault on the city. The arrival of the cavalry turned the tide of battle against them, sending them into retreat to the south and east. In less than three hours after the cavalry attack, the Christian forces had won the battle and saved Vienna.
After the battle, Sobieski paraphrased Julius Caesar’s famous quote by saying “Venimus, Vidimus, Deus vicit”—“We came, We saw, God conquered”.
Painting by Józef Brandt. ‘Leaving Vienna’ or ‘Return from Vienna’. Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth army returning with loot after defeating the Ottoman Empire forces sieging Vienna, during the battle of Vienna (1683).
Until the Battle of Vienna in 1683, the Polish hussars fought countless actions against a variety of enemies, and rarely lost a battle. In the battles of Byczyna (1588), Kokenhausen (1601), Kluszyn (1610), Gniew (1626), Chocim (1673) and Lwów (1675), the Polish hussars proved to be the decisive factor often against overwhelming odds. One of the most notable examples of such victories of the Polish hussars was the Battle of Kircholm of 1605, in which 3,000 hussars under Jan Karol Chodkiewicz managed to defeat 11,000 soldiers of Charles IX of Sweden—with negligible losses.
