The recently growing body of 'renewal of faith' literature has hypothesized a pietistic revivalism in early modern Ottoman Empire. This literature argued that the Ottoman processes of state and social formation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were engaged in the Mediterranean age of confessionalization. These contentions inspired one historian to argue that the fateful second siege of Vienna in 1683 by the Ottoman armies under the command of Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha (1676-1683) was a jihad, that is, a religiously motivated undertaking. Rather than interpret the launching of the Vienna campaign exclusively through the prism of religion, my paper undertakes a reconsideration of Kara Mustafa Pasha’s grand vizierate through a comparative analysis of seventeenth-century Ottoman chronicles and Habsburg diplomatic letters. During the late 1670s and early 1680s three Habsburg ambassadors resided in Constantinople, while three other envoys traveled to the city. The Habsburg representatives constantly struggled to maintain ‘gute Nachbarschaft und Freundschaft’ with the Ottomans between the first congratulatory letter of the Habsburg War Council President Raimond Montecuccoli in April 1677 to Kara Mustafa Pasha and the last series of fruitless peace talks between the Grand Vizer and Albrecht Caprara. Kara Mustafa Pasha, who, in the words of ambassador Kindsperg, was ‘a harsh and obstinate man satisfying neither Christians nor Turks’, subtly and obstinately ignored all peace attempts. Moreover, the Grand Vizier purposefully instigated the anti-Habsburg rebellion of the Protestant magnates in Upper Hungary and Transylvania. He several times welcomed the representatives of the rebels in the Ottoman capital despite remonstrations of the Habsburg envoys each time. Contemporary Ottoman chronicler Silahdar recorded that the Grand Vizier also arranged dispatches of fake incursion letters from the Austrian border to the Ottoman capital so as to justify a campaign against the Habsburgs. In short, the Vienna campaign was more a function of the Grand Vizier’s personal ambitions, strategic miscalculations, and enthusiasm to redesign Central Europe geopolitically than a purported Islamic revivalism within the Ottoman court. My paper complements recent efforts to revive diplomacy as an heuristic tool in Ottoman historiography. Besides, through a comparison of Kara Mustafa’s aggressive Central European policy with the more balanced tactics of his two Köprülü predecessors, I contribute to the recent discussions on the increasing role of the courtiers in the Ottoman decision-making mechanism. Finally, I illustrate shortcomings of overarching paradigms in explaining specific events and entire eras in Ottoman history.