It is striking that despite the crushing of the original siege army, the Ottomans were still able to mobilize a vast stream of replacements and the following decades probably marked Europe’s heaviest level of militarization to that date. In a sequence of sieges and battles of overwhelming brutality these Ottoman relief armies were destroyed one by one and Central Europe fell into Habsburg hands. The ethnic balance of the region was completely changed. Muslims who had lived there for many generations fled with the retreating fragments of their armies; massacres cleared out whole towns; mosques
...more
