Polish–Ottoman War or the War of the Holy League refers to the Polish side of the conflict otherwise known as the Great Turkish War. The conflict begun with a great Polish victory at the battle of Vienna in 1683, and ended with the Treaty of Karlowitz, restoring to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth lands lost in the previous Polish-Ottoman War. It was the last conflict between the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire, and despite the Polish victory, it marked the decline of power of not only the Ottoman Empire, but also of the Commonwealth, which would never again interfere in affairs outside of its declining borders.
War
After a few years of peace, the Ottoman Empire attacked the Habsburg Empire again. The Ottomans almost captured Vienna, but king of PolandJohn III Sobieski led a Christian alliance that defeated them in the Battle of Vienna which shook the Ottoman Empire's hegemony in south-eastern Europe. A new Holy League was initiated by Pope Innocent XI and encompassed the Holy Roman Empire, the Venetian Republic and Poland in 1684, joined by Tsarist Russia in 1686. Ottomans suffered two decisive defeats against the Holy Roman Empire: the second Battle of Mohács in 1687 and a decade later, in 1697, the battle of Zenta. On the smaller Polish front, after the battles of 1683, Sobieski, after his proposal for the League to state a major coordinated offensive, undertook a rather unsuccessful offensive in Moldavia in 1686, with the Ottomans refusing a major engagement and harassing the army. For the next four years Poland would blockade the key fortress at Kamenets, and Ottoman Tatars would raid the borderlands. In 1691, Sobieski undertook another expedition to Moldavia, with slightly better results, but still with no decisive victories. The last battle of the campaign was the battle of Podhajce in 1698, where Polish hetmanFeliks Kazimierz Potocki defeated the Ottoman incursion into the Commonwealth. The League won the war in 1699 and forced the Ottoman Empire to sign the Treaty of Karlowitz. The Ottomans lost much of their European possessions, with Podolia returned to Poland with imposion of Austria.
