the Balkans. During the Battle of Mohács (1687) Enea Silvio Piccolomini, now a lieutenant-general, with some of his cavalry regiments successfully counterattacked and stopped the attack of the numerically much superior Ottoman Sipahi cavalry, helping in saving the left-wing of the Habsburg army. In 1689 one of the Austrian campaigns was led by Piccolomini. He led an army into Kosovo, where it was welcomed by Albanian Archbishop and Patriarch of Këlmendi, Pjetër Bogdani, and large numbers of Catholic and Muslim Albanians and Serbs, who joined the army. Piccolomini thus had over 20,000 Albanians and Serbs under his orders. He attempted to conquer the Ottoman territories of Kosovo, Bosnia and Macedonia. During the offensive, the city of Skopje, the present-day capital of the Republic of Macedonia, was plagued by epidemics of cholera. To prevent the outburst of the disease, or, by other accounts, to retaliate for the siege of Vienna, General Piccolomini ordered the city to be burned (see Fire of Skopje). He perished of the plague himself in Skopje; leaderless, his army was defeated. Many of the Serbs and Albanians fled into exile, led by the Patriarch Arsenije III Crnojević. Sources The decline of a provincial military aristocracy: Siena, 1560-1740 by Gregory Hanlon. Richter, Die Piccolomini (Berlin, 1874) A. Lisini and A. Liberati, Albero della famiglia Piccolomini (Siena, 1899) Articles by A. Lisini in the Miscellanea storica senese, 3rd series 12, and 4th series, 17 and 189. See also Piccolomini Great Turkish War Holy League (1684) Jovan Monasterlija References 1689 deaths Austrian generals Italian generals Austrian people of Italian descent Italian untitled nobility People of the Great Turkish War Year of birth uncertain Military personnel of the Habsburg monarchy People from Siena Enea Silvio