Lumen 2018

burg (Mikulov) in eight days. There he was joined by the Austrians led by Charles of Lorraine and his Saxon, Bavarian, and Anhalt rein- forcements, thereby gathering about 23 thousand Poles and 46 thousand Germans under his command. 235 It was before this cam- paign that John III Sobieski commended himself and his difficult endeavor to the prayers and intercession of Fr. Stanislaus. While the king was on his way to Vienna, Fr. Papczynski himself and his con- freres sent requests to various places, asking the faithful to pray and do penance to obtain victory over the Turks. Confident in the effi- cacy of the prayers and pleas offered by the faithful, John III Sobieski headed towards the imperial capital and towards victory. 236 On September 12, the famous battle of Kahlenberg took place in which the armies were led by the Polish king with the assistance of Prince Charles of Lorraine. Next to the noblemen in the Polish army were also peasants, of whom a French memoir writer said that they were characterized by “inconceivable determination.” Before the bat- tle actually took place, the joined ally armies had to force their way to Vienna through the hilly terrain of the Vienna Forest. This is what the king wrote about in this passage to his wife: “We were passing through such mountains that we did not simply climb them, but scraped our way to the top. Since Friday, we and our horses have not slept or eaten.” And, after all, it was also necessary to move the can- nons through the steep hills and ravines, at which Poles proved to be much better than the Austrians whose cannons got stuck during the passage. A charge by the husaria units proved to be decisive in this battle; they broke the ring of the Turkish army surrounding the capital of Austria and pushed the Muslims between the Danube River and the ramparts of Vienna. In this way, the army of Kara Mustafa was crushed and the allied armies won a spectacular victory. At the crucial moment, Sobieski, at the head of the husaria, “jumped in resolutely ... spurring everyone by his own example.” The Turkish army could not withstand such an attack and began to disperse. The fact that out of more than two thousand Polish soldiers who found themselves at the front lines, only twenty of themmanaged to keep their lances un- broken, testifies to the force of this charge. King John III Sobieski S TANISLAUS P APCZYNSKI 318