John III Sobieski

John III Sobieski was King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1674 to 1696. A nobleman who rose through decades of war to become the Commonwealth's supreme commander, he is remembered above all for leading the relief of Vienna from the Ottoman siege in 1683, one of the most famous battles in European history. His reign was the last period in which the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth acted as a great power, although he failed to reform its weak political system or found a dynasty.

Jan Sobieski was born on 17 August 1629 at Olesko castle, in the Ruthenian lands of the Polish Crown, now western Ukraine. His family belonged to the wealthy nobility: his father, Jakub, was a senator and later castellan of Kraków, and his mother descended from the celebrated hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski. He grew up mainly at Żółkiew, near Lviv, and studied at a college in Kraków and then at the Kraków Academy, today's Jagiellonian University, finishing in 1646.

With his elder brother Marek he then spent about two years travelling in western Europe, visiting Paris, London, Leiden and other cities. He learned French, German and Italian on top of Latin, and acquired a lasting attachment to French culture that would shape both his marriage and his politics.

The brothers came home in 1648, just as the death of King Władysław IV coincided with the outbreak of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, a massive revolt of Ukrainian Cossacks. Both joined the army and raised their own cavalry units. Marek was captured after the disaster at Batih in 1652 and died in captivity. Jan fought at Berestechko in 1651, spent time as a hostage among the Tatars of the Crimean Khanate, and took part in an embassy to Istanbul, where he learned Turkish and studied Ottoman methods of war. That knowledge proved valuable for the rest of his career.

When Sweden invaded in 1655, the catastrophe Poles call the Deluge, Sobieski at first went over with other nobles of Greater Poland to the Swedish king Charles X Gustav. In 1656 he returned to the side of King John II Casimir and fought in the three-day battle of Warsaw that summer, commanding Tatar cavalry. Over the following years he fought Swedes, Russians and Cossacks, sat in the Sejm, the parliament, and helped negotiate treaties with the Cossacks.

In 1665 he married Marie Casimire d'Arquien, a French noblewoman from the queen's circle and the widow of a magnate. The marriage was a genuine love match, recorded in a long correspondence, and it tied Sobieski to the pro-French faction at court. Promotions followed quickly: Grand Marshal of the Crown in 1665, Field Hetman in 1666 and in 1668 Grand Hetman of the Crown, the head of the Polish army. His victory over Cossack and Tatar forces at Podhajce in 1667 restored a reputation dented by the civil conflict known as the Lubomirski Rebellion.

Under King Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki, elected in 1669, Sobieski led the opposition, and the factional quarrel left the state badly divided when the Ottoman Empire invaded in 1672. The Commonwealth lost the fortress of Kamieniec Podolski and was forced by the Treaty of Buchach to give up Podolia and promise tribute. Sobieski's raids against the Tatars and his reconciliation with the court party restored some unity, and on 11 November 1673 he destroyed an Ottoman army at Khotyn on the Dniester.

King Michał had died the day before. The Polish throne was elective, chosen by the assembled nobility, and the victor of Khotyn was the obvious candidate. On 19 May 1674 Sobieski was elected almost unanimously, although continuing war delayed his coronation in Kraków until February 1676.

Sobieski inherited the largest state in Europe by area, but one exhausted by half a century of war, with an empty treasury and powerful magnates who often dealt with foreign courts on their own account. The Sejm could be paralysed by the liberum veto, which let a single deputy break up a session. After further fighting the Treaty of Żurawno in 1676 brought peace with the Ottomans, though Podolia remained in their hands.

The king used the respite to modernise the army, reorganising regiments and strengthening artillery, and pursued an ambitious plan, backed by France and Sweden, to recover ducal Prussia from the Elector of Brandenburg. It came to nothing. French support faded, many magnates opposed the scheme, and by the early 1680s Sobieski had turned against the French faction, which had plotted with his opponents. In March 1683 he concluded an alliance with the Habsburg emperor Leopold I, in which each promised to help the other if its capital were threatened.

That summer a huge Ottoman army under the grand vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha besieged Vienna, capital of the Habsburg Monarchy. Sobieski marched south with about 25,000 Polish troops and joined imperial, Bavarian and Saxon forces under Charles of Lorraine, taking overall command as the highest-ranking ruler present. On 12 September 1683 the allied army, perhaps 70,000 men, descended from the Kahlenberg hills. Late in the afternoon Sobieski launched a vast cavalry charge, led by the Polish winged hussars, which broke the Ottoman lines. The besiegers fled, leaving their camp and Kara Mustafa's tent to the victors.

The pope and much of Catholic Europe hailed Sobieski as the saviour of Christendom. The battle marked the start of a long Ottoman retreat from central Europe, and Poland joined the Holy League formed in 1684 with the Habsburgs, Venice and later Russia. The later campaigns brought Poland little. While the Habsburgs reconquered Hungary, Sobieski's expeditions into Moldavia in 1686 and 1691 failed, and Kamieniec stayed in Ottoman hands. In 1686 he also had to accept the Eternal Peace with Russia, confirming the loss of Kyiv and left-bank Ukraine.

In his last years Sobieski was ill and heavily overweight, and his court was troubled by quarrels within his family and by opposition in the Sejm. He spent much time at his new palace at Wilanów near Warsaw, where he died of a heart attack on 17 June 1696. He was buried in Wawel Cathedral in Kraków. His hope that his eldest son, Jakub, would succeed him failed: the nobility chose the Elector of Saxony, Augustus II the Strong, in 1697. Podolia was finally returned to Poland by the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699.

Historians generally rate Sobieski's generalship far above his statecraft. He could win battles but could not overcome the magnates, the veto or the foreign interference that would eventually lead to the partitions of Poland a century later. He was also an educated patron of learning and the arts, supporting the astronomer Johannes Hevelius and building Wilanów, one of the finest Baroque residences in Poland. In the nineteenth century, when Poland had disappeared from the map, writers and painters turned the victor of Vienna into a national hero, and he remains one of the best-known figures of the Polish past.