670 the emperor made him general of horse, and during the following
years he was constantly on active service, first against the Turks and
subsequently against the French. At Seneff (1674) he was wounded. In the
same year he was again a candidate for the Polish crown, but was
unsuccessful, John Sobieski, who was to be associated with him in his
greatest feat of arms, being elected. In 1675, on the death of Charles
IV., he rode with a cavalry corps into the duchy of Lorraine, then
occupied by the French, and secured the adhesion of the Lorraine troops
to himself; a little after this he succeeded Montecucculi as general of
the imperial army on the Rhine, and was made a field marshal. The chief
success of his campaign of 1676 was the capture of Philipsburg, after a
long and arduous siege. The war continued without decisive result for
some time, and the fate of the duchy, which was still occupied by the
French, was the subject of endless diplomacy. At the general peace
Charles had to accept the hard conditions imposed by Louis XIV., and he
never entered into effective possession of his sovereignty. In 1678 he
married the widowed queen of Poland, Eleonora Maria of Austria, and for
nearly five years they lived quietly at Innsbruck. The Turkish invasion
of 1683, the last great effort of the Turks to impose their will on
Europe, called Charles into the field again. At the head of a weak
imperial army the duke offered the best resistance he could to the
advance of the Turks on Vienna. But he had to fall back, contesting
every position, and the Turks finally invested Vienna (July 13th, 1683).
At this critical moment other powers came to the assistance of Austria,
reinforcements poured into Charles's camp, and John Sobieski, king of
Poland, brought 27,000 Poles. Sobieski and Charles had now over 80,000
men, Poles, Austrians and Germans, and on the morning of the 12th of
September they moved forward to the attack. By nightfall the Turks were
in complete disorder, Vienna was relieved, and the danger was at an end.
Soon the victors took the offensive and reconquered part of the kingdom
of Hungary. The Germans and Poles went home in the winter, but Charles
continued his offensive with the imperialists alone. Ofen (Buda)
resisted his efforts in 1684, but in the campaign of 1685 Neuhausel was
taken by storm, and in 1686 Charles, now reinforced by German
auxiliaries, resumed the siege of Ofen. All attempts to relieve the
place were repulse