WDF XTRA: Jan Sobieski Biography VII
Added 2017-11-17 00:01:01 +0000 UTC[PATRONS] Our coverage of Sobieski's incredible life and times continues!
"Beloved Lord Jesus, I cannot wait even one day longer, because great is the misery of my people as they die under the Tartar lash. We can no longer bear the humiliation. It is disgraceful and an offence in the nostrils of God that an infidel nation darkens our great homeland. I am determined to be brute and merciless against these savages, and I expect you to do the same. We have defeated them numerous times before and we can again succeed, only if you have nothing to fear. To victory!"
So said Jan Sobieski, as he contemplated the total ruin of his homeland under yet another deluge - this one launched from the south east by the Ottomans, Cossacks, Moldavians, Wallachians and Tartars. As if Sultan Mehmed IV's 100,000 strong army wasn't bad enough for Sobieski, he also had to contend with the utter devastation caused by the Tartars, who raided and murdered with a new ferocity and tenacity under their Khan Selim Giray.
With overwhelming force, the Ottomans seized the Podole region of the Commonwealth to the south east, which they had chipped away at for centuries. Thus victorious, and with their Tartar allies raiding deep into the Commonwealth itself, even reaching as far as Lvov, it seemed as though the independence of the Polish-Lithuanian state was deeply endangered. Enter Sobieski.
Faced with such overwhelming odds, an empty treasury, scant soldiers and a demoralised homeland, Sobieski would laser focus his attentions on the Tartars, in an effort to give his countrymen some breathing space. His success or failure would determine whether the Commonwealth was to endure, or be snuffed out under the weight of its own collapse
