Relief of Vienna – Vienna, 1683

The successful battles of Vienna (September 12, 1683) and Parkany (October 7-9, 1683) for the anti-Turkish coalition made Jan III Sobieski, the commander-in-chief of the victorious anti-Turkish coalition, a famous figure throughout Europe. Thanks to these triumphs, Vienna was saved and the Ottoman Empire was significantly weakened. In later years, the Empire took advantage of this, launching an ambitious expansion program in Hungary and the Balkans, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which, under the Treaty of Karłowice in 1699, regained Podolia, which it had lost to the Turks in 1672.

The victorious Polish monarch was given many nicknames - the Defender of Christianity, the Lion of Lechistan, the Savior of the Homeland, and the Thunderbolt of the East. His fame was accompanied by numerous works of artists - including: painters, graphic artists, medalists trying to immortalize the achievements of the victorious victor. These activities were often consciously supported and sponsored by the king himself, who, in accordance with the customs of the time, typical of absolute rulers, saw them as a tool to achieve one of the main goals of his reign - to turn his family into a full-fledged royal dynasty. The way to achieve this was the Sobieski family's affiliation with the most important European aristocratic families. These plans met with opposition both domestically and abroad. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the nobility did not want to allow the king's position to strengthen, seeing it as a threat to the political primacy of their own estate in the state. Sobieski also failed to obtain consent for his children to marry the Habsburgs or Bourbons, which was influenced by the Sobieski family's origins, deprived of aristocratic titles and therefore modest from the Western European point of view. Only the less prestigious marriages of the royal children of James, Teresa Kunegunda, Alexander and Constantine with descendants of the electoral families of the Empire took place. These failures, together with the deteriorating health of the already young monarch, contributed to the fact that the second period of his reign, which fell after 1683, although exceptionally rich in terms of the king's artistic patronage, is considered much less politically successful than the first one. , dating from before the Relief of Vienna.

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Author: Rafał Ludwikowski, Museum in Tarnowskie Góry