Treaty of Karlowitz (1699): The Ottomans Cede Hungary

The Treaty of Karlowitz, signed on 26 January 1699 at Karlowitz (today Sremski Karlovci in Serbia), ended the Great Turkish War between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League. The Ottomans surrendered most of Hungary and Transylvania to the Habsburgs, Podolia to Poland and the Peloponnese to Venice. It was the first major, formal loss of Ottoman territory in Europe and a turning point in the history of Central Europe and the Balkans.

Background: sixteen years of war

The war began with the Ottoman siege of the Habsburg capital and its failure at the Battle of Vienna in 1683. In 1684 Emperor Leopold I, Poland-Lithuania and Venice formed the Holy League; Russia joined in 1686.

The League’s armies retook Buda in 1686 and won at Mohacs in 1687, but the war then dragged on, partly because France attacked the Habsburgs in 1688. The decisive moment came on 11 September 1697, when Prince Eugene of Savoy destroyed the sultan’s army at the Battle of Zenta. Both sides were exhausted, and the Nine Years’ War in the West had ended with the Treaty of Ryswick that autumn.

Mediation and the peace congress

England and the Dutch Republic offered to mediate. Both had commercial interests in the Ottoman Levant, and King William III wanted the emperor’s resources free for the expected struggle with France over the Spanish succession. The English ambassador in Istanbul, William Paget (Lord Paget), and the Dutch envoy, Jacob Colyer, played the leading roles.

The congress opened in November 1698 at Karlowitz, on the Danube in Syrmia, between the two armies’ lines. The Ottoman delegation was led by Rami Mehmed Efendi, the chief scribe and later grand vizier, and by Alexander Mavrocordatos, the Greek chief dragoman (interpreter) of the Porte. The grand vizier in Istanbul, Amcazade Huseyin Pasha of the Koprulu family, supported a settlement.

According to tradition, a wooden building with several doors was put up so that the delegations could enter at the same time, avoiding disputes over precedence. Negotiations lasted about ten weeks.

The talks were difficult. The Habsburg delegates, Count Wolfgang von Oettingen and Count Leopold Schlick, pressed for Temesvar, while the Venetians wanted more of Dalmatia and the Poles wanted Moldavia. The Ottoman side tried to limit its losses to what had already been taken by force. The mediators carried proposals between the delegations and helped find compromises, and the agreed principle that each side kept what it held made a settlement possible.

The terms

The treaties were based largely on the principle of uti possidetis, meaning each side kept what it held. Separate agreements were signed with each power on 26 January 1699:

• The Habsburg monarchy received central Hungary, Transylvania and most of Slavonia and Croatia. The Ottomans kept the Banat of Temesvar and the fortress of Belgrade. The Tisza and Mures (Maros) rivers and a line across Syrmia formed much of the border.
• Poland-Lithuania recovered Podolia, including the fortress of Kamianets, lost in 1672. Polish troops withdrew from Moldavia.
• Venice kept the Peloponnese (the Morea) and gained territory in Dalmatia, but returned conquests north of the Gulf of Corinth to the Ottomans.
• Russia signed only a two-year truce. The Treaty of Constantinople of 1700 confirmed Peter the Great’s possession of Azov.

For the Habsburgs, the gains were enormous: the treaty confirmed their possession of a kingdom that had been divided for more than 150 years. The main disappointment was the Banat of Temesvar, which remained Ottoman until Prince Eugene conquered it in 1716.

Joint commissions then surveyed and marked the new frontiers. On the Habsburg side this work was led by the Italian soldier and scholar Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli.

Timeline

• 1683, 12 September: Ottoman defeat at Vienna.
• 1686, 2 September: Buda is recaptured by the Holy League.
• 1697, 11 September: Battle of Zenta.
• 1697, September: Treaty of Ryswick ends the Nine Years’ War in the West.
• 1698, November: The peace congress opens at Karlowitz.
• 1699, 26 January: The treaties are signed.
• 1700, July: Treaty of Constantinople between Russia and the Ottomans.
• 1703: The Edirne revolt deposes Sultan Mustafa II.

Key people

• Rami Mehmed Efendi, the reis ul-kuttab (chief scribe for foreign affairs) who led the Ottoman delegation; he became grand vizier in 1703 but fell from power in the revolt of that year.
• Alexander Mavrocordatos (1641-1709), a Greek scholar and physician from Istanbul and chief dragoman of the Porte, who did much of the detailed negotiating.
• William Paget, 7th Baron Paget (1637-1713), English ambassador at Istanbul and the principal mediator.
• Leopold I (1640-1705), the Habsburg emperor, who wanted peace in the east before the expected war over the Spanish throne.
• Amcazade Huseyin Pasha (died 1702), Koprulu grand vizier who supported the settlement in Istanbul.

Consequences for the Ottoman Empire

Karlowitz was a shock. The Ottoman Empire had lost ground before, but never on this scale in Europe, and never through a formal treaty with a European coalition. Defeat and the cost of peace fed political unrest, and in 1703 a revolt in Istanbul deposed Mustafa II.

The peace also changed Ottoman diplomacy. For the first time the empire accepted foreign mediation and fixed, demarcated borders, rather than treating frontiers as temporary lines in an endless holy war. Officials such as Rami Mehmed Efendi and Mavrocordatos represented a new group of skilled diplomats. Greek dragomans from the Phanar district of Istanbul, of whom Mavrocordatos was the first great example, became important in Ottoman foreign relations, and his son Nicholas Mavrocordatos later became the first Phanariot prince of Moldavia and Wallachia.

Older historians often described Karlowitz as the beginning of an inevitable Ottoman decline. Many recent scholars prefer to see it as a painful adjustment: the empire lost its most exposed provinces in Central Europe but kept the Balkans, the Arab lands and Anatolia, and it soon recovered some ground, retaking the Morea from Venice in 1715 and Belgrade in 1739.

Consequences for Europe

The Habsburg monarchy emerged as a great power in the Danube basin. Its rule over Hungary was not yet secure: the Rakoczi uprising broke out in 1703 and lasted until 1711. Poland regained its lost province but was soon drawn into the Great Northern War. Venice’s hold on the Morea proved short-lived; the Ottomans retook it in 1715, and the Treaty of Passarowitz of 1718 confirmed the change while giving the Habsburgs the Banat and Belgrade.

For the peoples of the frontier, the treaty had mixed results. Serbs who had settled in southern Hungary after 1690 were given privileges by the emperor in return for military service, and the Military Frontier along the new border was extended. Karlowitz itself became the seat of the Serbian Orthodox metropolitans in the Habsburg lands, an important cultural centre in the eighteenth century.

Russia’s gain of Azov signalled the arrival of a new rival on the Black Sea. The Russo-Ottoman wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would build on that foothold.

Legacy

In Sremski Karlovci, the Chapel of Peace, built in 1817 on the site associated with the negotiations, commemorates the treaty. Historians often take Karlowitz as the starting point of the Eastern Question, the long problem of what would replace Ottoman power in south-eastern Europe.

Why it matters

The Treaty of Karlowitz turned the military results of the Great Turkish War into a lasting new map. It ended Ottoman rule in most of Hungary after a century and a half, created the Habsburg Danubian monarchy and began the slow Ottoman withdrawal from Europe.