Charles V of Lorraine
Charles V of Lorraine was a duke without a duchy who commanded the armies of the emperor for fifteen years, broke the siege of Vienna with Sobieski, and took Buda back from the Ottomans after a hundred and forty-five years. He was born in Vienna in 1643, the nephew of Duke Charles IV, at a time when Lorraine was in French hands and its dukes lived on Habsburg charity. He inherited the title in 1675 and never governed a yard of it: Louis XIV held the duchy for the whole of his life, and the Peace of Nijmegen in 1679 offered it back on terms he refused. He had made his career in the imperial army instead, fighting the Turks at St Gotthard in 1664 and the French on the Rhine, and in 1678 Leopold I gave him his widowed sister Eleonora, the queen of Poland, and with her the standing of a member of the family. When Kara Mustafa marched on Vienna in 1683 Charles commanded the field army, some 30,000 men, too few to fight; he covered the retreat of the court, kept his force intact north of the Danube through the two months of the siege, and beat the Ottoman vassal Thököly in the meantime. On 12 September he held the left of the relief army on the slopes of the Kahlenberg while Sobieski's Poles came down on the right, and the Ottoman camp broke before evening. The war that followed was his. He took Esztergom that autumn, besieged Buda in 1684 and failed, and came back in 1686 with 80,000 men and stormed it on 2 September, the first time the city had changed hands since Suleiman took it in 1541. At Mohács in August 1687, on the ground where the kingdom of Hungary had been destroyed a century and a half before, he and Louis of Baden broke the grand vizier's army in an afternoon, and Transylvania submitted to the emperor the next year. He was worn out by then - he had been ill for years and had no fortune - and he died at Wels in April 1690, at forty-seven, on the road to Vienna. His grandson Francis married Maria Theresa and gave the Habsburgs their next dynasty, and his great-grandson Charles Alexander, the other Charles of Lorraine in this corpus, lost Leuthen.
- Lived: 1643 CE – 1690 CE
- Nationality: Lorrainer
- Roles: general, military_leader
