The historical scholar will find nothing new in the following pages; but I have thought it worth while to tell to the general reader a story worth the telling, and to explain not only the details, but the wider bearings also, of a great crisis in European history, no satisfactory account of which exists, I believe, in English, and the two hundredth anniversary of which is now upon us.

My principal authorities are "Sobieski's Letters to his Queen," edited by Count Plater, Paris, 1826; Starhemberg's "Life and Despatches," edited by Count ThÜrheim, Vienna, 1882; "Campaigns of Prince Eugene, of Savoy," Vienna, 1876, etc.; Schimmer's "Sieges of Vienna;" Von Hammer's "History of the Turks;" Salvandy's "History of Poland;" "Memoirs of Eugene," by De Ligne; "Memoirs of Charles, Duke of Lorraine, and his Military Maxims," published late in the seventeenth century; "Works of Montecuculi;" De la GuillatiÈre's "View of the Present State of the Turkish Empire, etc.," translated, London, 1676, etc.

I have been obliged to reject some statements of Salvandy's, such, for instance, as that the crescent moon was eclipsed on the day of the battle before Vienna.

I regret that I have been unable to use the account of the campaign of 1683 published in Vienna, by the Director of the War Archives, since this went to press. Some of the matter of it is, I believe, contained in the "Campaigns of Eugene," published under the same authority mentioned above, and in Schimmer's work.

Kitlands, 1883.