The army the grand vizier Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha brought before Vienna in the summer of 1683 besieged the city from mid-July. Ottoman siege technique relied on digging mines and blowing the walls from beneath, and by early September breaches had opened. But the besieging army was not adequately entrenched against a relief force coming from behind. On 12 September the combined army under King Jan III Sobieski of Poland came down from the Kahlenberg heights; by the end of the day the Ottoman army had abandoned its baggage and withdrawn. Kara Mustafa Pasha was executed in Belgrade the same year.

The significance lies less in the single battle than in the chain that followed. The Holy League, formed at the Pope's call, took all of Hungary over sixteen years of war. The Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 was the first agreement in which the Ottoman state ceded territory at the negotiating table — until then treaties had registered conquests. It is in this period that the state began to see itself as a power defending rather than expanding, and that change of self-understanding lies behind the military reform attempts of the eighteenth century.

1683 also occupies a strong place in European political memory, and is still used today, detached from its context, in narratives of civilisational conflict. The war itself was one of the balance of power more than of religion: Louis XIV of France effectively encouraged the Ottoman advance against the Habsburgs, and alliances crossed confessional lines regularly.