John III Sobieski
Jan III Sobieski was elected King of Poland in 1674 and relieved Vienna nine years later. Born in 1629 into a magnate family, he was educated at Kraków and travelled in western Europe for two years, and came back to fight in the Deluge — the decade from 1648 in which Cossack rebellion, Swedish invasion and Russian war reduced the Commonwealth's population by something approaching a third. He briefly joined the Swedes during it and returned to the Polish side, which his enemies never let him forget. He made his reputation against the Ottomans and Tatars, and above all at Chocim in 1673, where he destroyed a Turkish army the day after the king died. He was elected to the throne the following year largely on that. The Commonwealth he inherited was structurally ungovernable. The liberum veto let a single deputy dissolve any session, the crown was elective, and the magnates took foreign pensions. In 1683 Kara Mustafa besieged Vienna with well over a hundred thousand men. Sobieski had a treaty with the emperor, and took some 27,000 Poles including 3,000 winged hussars to join the imperial and German forces. He commanded the whole relief army at the Kahlenberg on 12 September, brought it down through the wooded slopes, and led the cavalry charge that broke the Ottoman camp late in the afternoon. He wrote to his wife that he had come, seen, and God had conquered. He got very little from the Habsburgs afterwards and died in 1696.
- Lived: 1629 CE – 1696 CE
- Nationality: Polish
- Roles: monarch, military_leader, head_of_state
