Venice received most of Dalmatia along with the Morea (the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece), although the Morea was returned to the Turks within 20 years by the Treaty of Passarowitz. [2] There was no agreement on the Holy Sepulchre, although it was discussed in Karlowitz. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire, strengthened by its successes against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, turned its gaze to Vienna.[4] The sultan undertook important logistical preparations, including the repair and construction of roads and bridges leading to the Habsburg territory and its capital, as well as the transfer of ammunition, cannons, and other resources from the entire empire to Hungary and the Balkans. The treaty with the Ottomans ushered in a period of peace that was desperately needed to repair the Commonwealth. John Sobieski managed to completely reform the Polish army, the infantry eventually dropped pike and replaced them with battle axes, and the Polish cavalry took control of the hussar and dragoon formations. The new king also greatly increased the number of guns and introduced new artillery tactics. Although the powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not participate directly in the Thirty Years` War, it allied itself with the Habsburg monarchy and intervened in Transylvania against Gabriel Bethlen. In response, the young Ottoman sultan Osman II, tired of Poland`s influence in Russia and Cossack raids on Turkish colonies, assembled a large army with the intention of leading a punitive invasion of the Commonwealth. The scale of the defeat forced the Ottoman Empire to sign the Treaty of Karlowitz in January 1699, which confirmed the then current territorial possessions of each power. Remarkably, the Habsburg monarchy was able to reconquer all of Hungary, except for the corner between the Maros and Tisza rivers, thus ending the tripartite part of the kingdom.
What we are witnessing in this period is less a decline than a transformation of the empire into something more like a modern bureaucratic state than the absolutist monarchy it once was. As I said, the rest of the neighborhood began to catch up, and the Ottoman defeat in the Great Turkish War shows, among other things, that the Ottomans were unable to wage a multi-front war against several European enemies. But the empire gained or at least blocked a number of military conflicts with the European powers in the early 18th century. He brought Pruth back from Russia in 1711, recaptured the Peloponnese from Venice in 1718, and fought Russia and the Habsburgs to a stalemate in the 1730s. So it wasn`t as shaky as the traditional narrative. It simply wasn`t the undisputed power it had been a century or two earlier. After a two-month congress between the Ottoman Empire on the one hand and the Holy League of 1684, a coalition of the Holy Roman Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Republic of Venice and Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia,[3] was signed on 26 January 1699. [2] See more encyclopedia articles on: Turkish and Ottoman history Although peace was signed and both sides claimed victory after the Battle of Khotyn in 1621, the border area between the Ottoman Empire and the Commonwealth remained in a semi-permanent state of war throughout the 17th century, the Ottomans responded to further Cossack raids by directing their Crimean Tatar vassals against Polish territory. During this period, a majority of Hungarians living under Ottoman rule became Protestants, as Habsburg counter-reform efforts could not penetrate Ottoman lands and Turks were indifferent to the Christian denominations practiced by their Hungarian subjects. In Transylvania, which is now beyond the reach of Catholic authority, Lutheran and Calvinist preaching has been allowed to flourish.
When the declining Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, weakened by decades of wars and uprisings, attempted again in 1670 to take control of the Cossack hetmanate, the Ottoman Empire invaded Ukraine to take control of the region for itself. And although the newly elected Polish king John Sobieski inflicted several defeats on the sultan`s forces, the Commonwealth was forced to cede large parts of Ukraine to the Ottoman Empire when peace was signed in 1676. Along with the Republic of Venice and the Russian Empire, a new „Holy League“ was initiated by Pope Innocent XI and John Sobieski to recover previously ceded lands and prevent further Ottoman expansion into Europe in a so-called „14th Crusade“. While the Second Battle of Mohács in 1687 allowed Habsburg forces to conquer vast areas, including most of present-day Transylvania, the decisive Battle of Zenta sealed the fate of the Ottomans in Europe a decade later. . Pingback: How research shaped cultural development in Central Europe However, Karlowitz`s treatise has long been seen as a turning point in the traditional, slightly ahistorical view of Ottoman history, and so its effects have been overestimated. This narrative postulates that the Ottoman Empire began to deteriorate as early as the 16th century, and this decline manifested itself entirely with Karlowitz. Among the Ottomanists, however, this „theory of decline“ has been fairly well debunked. I mean, 400 years is a long time to be in constant decline.
The Ottoman Empire seems weaker in the 17th century than it was in the 16th century, not so much because it was in decline, but because the rest of the Mediterranean was catching up. Yes, the Empire made its way through a number of sultans and even through the occasional Grand Vizier, who weren`t exactly dynamic rulers. But the imperial bureaucracy was so entrenched at the time that the state apparatus was still buzzing. Karlowitz forced the Ottomans to cede considerable European territory to the Habsburgs, a region that included parts of present-day Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. They lost Dalmatia (another part of modern Croatia) and the Peloponnese (in Greece) to Venice (although they recovered the Peloponnese soon after) and parts of modern Ukraine and Moldova to Poland-Lithuania. Negotiations that began here and were concluded in the Treaty of Constantinople (1700) ceded Azov to Russia (the Ottomans later recovered it). But Karlowitz`s symbolism, the unmistakable admission that the power dynamic in Ottoman-European relations had stabilized or even shifted a little to the European side, was arguably more important than any of his terms. In the late summer of 1697, the Ottoman Sultan Mustafa II led one last great expedition north, but was decisively defeated by Prince Eugene of Savoy at the Battle of Zenta (September 11).
Thus defeated by the Austrians and threatened by the Russians, the sultan agreed to negotiate. A peace congress was held in 1698 in the village of Carlowitz (spelling in the treaty) or Karlowitz (today Sremski Karlovci, Serbian) near Belgrade for 72 days. For the first time, the Turks agreed to negotiate with a coalition of European nations, to accept the mediation of neutral powers and to admit defeat. On January 26, 1699, the Ottoman Empire signed peace treaties with Austria, Poland and Venice. Austria received all of Hungary (with the exception of the Banat de Temesvár, which is bordered by the tisza, Mureș and Danube rivers), Transylvania, Croatia and Slovenia; the Austro-Turkish treaty was to last 25 years. Venice acquired the Peloponnese (which the Turks recovered in 1715) and most of Dalmatia, including the port of Cattaro (Kotor). Poland returned its conquests to Moldavia, but regated Podolia as well as part of Ukraine west of the Dnieper that the Turks had conquered in 1672. .