The king who beat the Ottomans at Vienna had studied their tactics as an envoy
As a young officer, Jan Sobieski volunteered as a hostage in the Crimean Tatar capital and joined a Polish mission to the Ottoman Empire, learning Turkish and Tatar and studying how their armies fought. Three decades later, in 1683, he defeated the Ottomans outside Vienna, and they gave him a name: the Lion of Lechistan.
Sobieski arrived on 17 August 1629 at Olesko, a town in present-day Ukraine, born into a distinguished noble family; his mother's grandfather had been a celebrated hetman. After studying philosophy at Kraków, he and his brother Marek spent more than two years touring Leipzig, Paris, London and The Hague, meeting figures such as the future Charles II of England and adding French, German and Italian to his Latin. They returned in 1648 to a country at war and raised their own cavalry banners. Marek died in Cossack captivity in 1652.
The Commonwealth lurched through a Cossack uprising, a Swedish invasion known as the Deluge, and war with Russia. Sobieski's loyalties were not always steady; early in the Swedish war his regiment swore allegiance to the Swedish king before he switched back in 1656. Yet his talent was plain. He led Tatar cavalry at the battle of Warsaw, married the Frenchwoman Marie Casimire d'Arquien in 1665, and in 1668 became Grand Hetman of the Crown, effectively commander of the whole army. Factional feuding grew so bitter that the court party branded him an enemy of the state in 1672.
Victory repaired his standing. On 11 November 1673 he routed the Ottomans at Khotyn, a day after King Michael died, and the following May he was elected king with near-universal support. War kept him at the front so long that his coronation waited until February 1676. He inherited a realm, then among Europe's largest, drained by almost half a century of fighting, with an empty treasury and magnates courting foreign powers.
He used a truce with the Ottomans to modernise the army, reorganising it into regiments, swapping infantry pikes for battle axes and greatly expanding the artillery. That force carried him to Vienna in 1683, where the Pope hailed him as saviour of Western Christendom. His 22-year reign steadied the Commonwealth. Burdened by poor health and obesity late in life, he died in 1696 and lies in Wawel Cathedral in Kraków.
Source: John III Sobieski
