Great Turkish War (1683-1699): The Holy League Rolls Back

The Great Turkish War (1683-1699), also called the War of the Holy League, was the long conflict that followed the Ottoman defeat at Vienna. An alliance of the Habsburg emperor, Poland-Lithuania, Venice and later Russia pushed the Ottomans out of most of Hungary and parts of Greece and Ukraine. The war ended with the Treaty of Karlowitz, the first great Ottoman territorial loss in Europe.

Background: from Vienna to the Holy League

The war began with the Ottoman march on the Habsburg capital and its defeat at the Battle of Vienna on 12 September 1683. The grand vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha was executed that December.

Pope Innocent XI worked to turn the victory into a lasting coalition. On 5 March 1684 at Linz, Emperor Leopold I, King Jan III Sobieski of Poland and the Republic of Venice formed the Holy League. Russia joined in 1686, after signing the Eternal Peace with Poland.

The reconquest of Hungary

The imperial armies, commanded mainly by Charles V, Duke of Lorraine, advanced down the Danube. A first siege of Buda in 1684 failed, but in 1685 they took the fortress of Ersekujvar (Nove Zamky).

In June 1686 Lorraine besieged Buda again with an army drawn from across the Empire and Europe. After about eleven weeks of fighting and repeated assaults, the city was stormed on 2 September 1686, ending 145 years of Ottoman rule that had begun with the Ottoman capture of Buda in 1541. The capture was celebrated across Catholic Europe. Volunteers from many countries had served in the siege, and thanksgiving services, medals and printed accounts spread the news from Rome to London.

On 12 August 1687 Lorraine defeated the Ottoman army near Mohacs, the site of the great Ottoman victory of 1526. The defeat caused a mutiny in the Ottoman army, and in November 1687 Sultan Mehmed IV was deposed in favour of his brother Suleiman II. That autumn the Hungarian Diet at Pressburg (Bratislava) recognised the Habsburgs’ hereditary right to the Hungarian crown. Transylvania also accepted Habsburg overlordship.

In September 1688 the Bavarian elector Maximilian II Emanuel captured Belgrade. Imperial forces then pushed deep into the Balkans; in 1689 an army under Louis William of Baden advanced into Serbia, and a column under General Enea Silvio Piccolomini reached Skopje, which was burned that autumn. Many local Christians joined the advancing imperial troops, hoping for liberation from Ottoman rule.

The French war and the Ottoman counter-offensive

Just then Louis XIV of France invaded the Rhineland, starting the Nine Years’ War (1688-1697). Leopold had to send many of his best troops west, and the Ottomans gained breathing space.

A new grand vizier, Koprulu Fazil Mustafa Pasha, reorganised the Ottoman army. In 1690 it retook Nis and, in October, Belgrade. Fearing reprisals, a large number of Serbs led by Patriarch Arsenije III Carnojevic moved north into Habsburg Hungary, an event known as the Great Migration of the Serbs.

On 19 August 1691 Margrave Louis William of Baden defeated the Ottomans at Slankamen on the Danube, and Fazil Mustafa was killed. The following years brought hard fighting along the Danube and Sava without decisive results.

Inside the Ottoman Empire, the strain was severe. Three sultans reigned in quick succession: Suleiman II died in 1691, Ahmed II in 1695, and Mustafa II then took the throne. The government raised new taxes, sold offices and, in 1695, introduced life-term tax farms (malikane) to raise cash for the war, a reform with long-lasting effects on Ottoman finances.

Venice, Poland and Russia

Venice fought its own campaign, often called the Morean War. Under Francesco Morosini, Venetian forces conquered the Peloponnese (the Morea) between 1685 and 1687. During the siege of the Acropolis of Athens on 26 September 1687, a Venetian mortar shell ignited Ottoman gunpowder stored in the Parthenon, destroying much of the ancient temple.

Poland made several campaigns into Moldavia but failed to recover the fortress of Kamianets, lost in 1672. Russia’s two campaigns against the Crimean Khanate in 1687 and 1689 failed. Peter the Great then attacked the Ottoman fortress of Azov at the mouth of the Don, failing in 1695 but capturing it in July 1696 with the help of a newly built fleet.

Zenta and peace

Sultan Mustafa II, who came to the throne in 1695, led the Ottoman army in person and won some successes. In 1697, however, Prince Eugene of Savoy caught his army crossing the Tisza and destroyed it at the Battle of Zenta on 11 September 1697.

With France at peace after the Treaty of Ryswick that same autumn, and both sides exhausted, negotiations opened under English and Dutch mediation. The Treaty of Karlowitz was signed on 26 January 1699. Russia, which agreed only to a truce there, secured Azov by the Treaty of Constantinople in 1700.

Timeline

• 1683, 12 September: Ottoman defeat at Vienna.
• 1684, 5 March: The Holy League is formed at Linz.
• 1686, 2 September: Buda is recaptured.
• 1687, 12 August: Second Battle of Mohacs.
• 1687, 26 September: The Parthenon is wrecked by an explosion during the Venetian siege of Athens.
• 1688, 6 September: Belgrade is taken by imperial forces.
• 1690, October: The Ottomans retake Belgrade.
• 1691, 19 August: Battle of Slankamen.
• 1697, 11 September: Battle of Zenta.
• 1699, 26 January: Treaty of Karlowitz.

Key people

• Leopold I (1640-1705), Holy Roman Emperor and king of Hungary, who led the Habsburg side throughout the war while also fighting France.
• Charles V, Duke of Lorraine (1643-1690), the imperial commander who took Buda and won at Mohacs; he died in 1690 while the war was still under way.
• Louis William of Baden (1655-1707), known as “Turkish Louis”, victor of Slankamen.
• Eugene of Savoy (1663-1736), who rose from a young volunteer at Vienna to commander-in-chief and won at Zenta.
• Francesco Morosini (1619-1694), Venetian commander who conquered the Morea and became doge in 1688.
• Mustafa II (1664-1703), the sultan who led his armies in person from 1695 and accepted peace after Zenta.

Consequences

The war transformed Central Europe. The Habsburg monarchy became a great power stretching from the Alps to the Carpathians, though Hungary’s integration was troubled; the Rakoczi uprising of 1703-1711 followed soon after.

The human cost was heavy. Years of campaigning, sieges and raids depopulated large parts of the Hungarian plain and the Danube valley. Buda itself was largely ruined in 1686, and many of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were killed or enslaved when the city was stormed. In the decades after the war, the Habsburg authorities brought in settlers, including Germans, Serbs and Slovaks, to repopulate the land, reshaping the ethnic map of the region.

The war also changed armies. The Habsburg forces gained a generation of experienced officers, and the long campaigns encouraged reforms in supply, fortification and the use of infantry firepower that would serve them in the wars of the eighteenth century.

For the Ottomans, the war ended an era of expansion and showed that they now faced coalitions they could not defeat alone. Russia’s arrival on the Black Sea at Azov announced a rivalry that would dominate the next two centuries. The Habsburgs later gained more ground in the Treaty of Passarowitz of 1718.

Why it matters

The Great Turkish War reversed the direction of conflict between the Ottomans and Christian Europe. After 1699 the question was no longer how far the Ottomans would advance, but how much territory they would lose, the beginning of what nineteenth-century diplomats called the Eastern Question.