The Lion of Lechistan: The Life, and Legacy of King John III Sobieski of Poland - Paperback
Pay over time for orders over $35.00 with
Offers & Perks
Earn 26 points with this purchase
Added to your rewards balance after checkout.
100 points welcome bonus
Create an account and start with extra points.
The Lion of Lechistan: The Life, and Legacy of King John III Sobieski of Poland
On the twelfth of September 1683, John III Sobieski led twenty thousand horsemen down the slopes of the Kahlenberg and shattered the largest Ottoman army to threaten Western Europe in a generation. In thirty minutes, the siege of Vienna was broken, the westward advance of the Ottoman Empire was halted, and the man the Turks called the Lion of Lechistan secured his place among the immortals of military history.
But Sobieski's story does not end on the Kahlenberg. It continues in the frozen mud of the Moldavian campaigns, in the Sejm sessions dissolved before they could begin, in the constitutional dysfunction that no military genius could overcome, and in the Eternal Peace that traded Kyiv for a Russian military commitment never properly delivered. The Lion of Lechistan is the full biography of the Commonwealth's last great king - the man whose strategic intelligence surpassed every European commander of his age, whose Crimean hostage service and Istanbul embassy gave him an understanding of the Ottoman world unmatched by any Christian contemporary, and whose extraordinary achievements were ultimately insufficient to save the state he served.
Drawing on the full arc of Sobieski's remarkable career, Milligan O'Leary delivers a narrative that is both a gripping military history and a sustained analysis of why greatness fails when the institutions it serves are broken beyond repair.
Milligan O'Leary is an Irish writer and historian with a longstanding fascination with the military and political history of early modern Central and Eastern Europe. Born in County Galway and educated in history and European studies, he has spent more than a decade researching the wars, courts, and constitutional crises of the seventeenth century, with particular attention to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its turbulent relationship with the Ottoman Empire. His interest in John III Sobieski began with the Battle of Vienna and deepened into a sustained engagement with one of the most complex and underappreciated careers in European history. The Lion of Lechistan is his most ambitious work to date. He is the author of several other books on European military and political history.
Contributor(s)
Author
Free shipping on orders over $75. Standard shipping takes 3-7 business days. Returns accepted within 30 days of purchase.