The Peace of Passarowitz, 1718

By Charles Ingrao and Jovan Pešalj

In the late spring of 1718 near the village of Pozarevac (German Passarowitz) in northern Serbia, freshly conquered by Habsburg forces, three delegations representing the Holy Roman Emperor, Ottoman Sultan, and the Republic of Venice gathered to end the conflict that had begun three and a half years earlier. The fighting had spread throughout southeastern Europe, from Hungary to the southernmost tip of the Peloponnese. The peace redrew the map of the Balkans, extending the reach of Habsburg power, all but expelling Venice from the Greek mainland, and laying the foundations for Ottoman revitalization during the Tulip period. In this volume, twenty specialists analyze the military background to and political context of the peace congress and treaty. They assess the immediate significance of the Peace of Passarowitz and its longer term influence on the society, demography, culture, and economy of central Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Release date: Aug 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781612491950

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GENERAL OUTLOOK

THE HABSBURG-OTTOMAN WARS

AND THE MODERN WORLD

  Charles Ingrao  

The Peace of Passarowitz of 1718 has received scant attention over the past three centuries. Perhaps the main reason for this neglect lies with another event that took place precisely two centuries later. While we have gathered to commemorate the approaching tercentenary of the treaty between the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Venetian empires, scholars and pundits across Europe and North America will, in just a few years, more likely observe the end of the First World War in 1918 and, with it, the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy. Together with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the concurrent demise of tsarist Russia and the second German Reich, the partitioning of the Habsburg dominions in 1918 refashioned the multiethnic eastern half of Europe into a vast realm of nation-states. And it was that new reality, rather than the coincidental, bicentenary relationship between these two dates, that has relegated the Peace of Passarowitz to a back shelf, if not exactly the dustbin, of history. The new nation-states that emerged from the Great War immediately went about writing heroic national histories that emphasized both their suffering at the hands of their Habsburg, Ottoman, and tsarist oppressors and their achievements against them. Absent from these histories is any appreciation for the long period of mostly peaceful and mutually beneficial coexistence these disparate peoples had enjoyed. This essay constitutes a modest attempt to present a balanced international and multinational perspective on the treaty that was concluded in Požarevac (Passarowitz) while also identifying its actual and potential significance.

The frontiers negotiated in 1718 marked the farthest advance of Western European civilization into the Balkans before the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This is not to say that the Western values or institutions of that time were intrinsically superior to those pervading the Ottoman Balkans. Rather the intent here is to point out differences between the East and the West, without engaging in the kind of condescending Orientalism famously decried by the late Edward Said. However and wherever it was drawn, the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier juxtaposed two different models of state building. To observers from the eighteenth century and today, the Ottoman sultan ruled as an Asiatic despot with absolute unregulated power over his subjects; obedience was ensured through the typically fickle application of terror by the sultan and his officials. By contrast, the feudal regimes of Western Christendom were moderated by law and by a separation of powers whose limited checks and balances were the precursors of modern liberal democracies. Another less widely acknowledged difference was the Ottoman Empire’s relative disinterest in its subjects’ religion, language, or form of local governance, that is, as long as they provided their quota of taxes and army recruits. Meanwhile, the mantra of one king, one god, one law obtained in the West, where progressive governmental centralization was gradually creating culturally and linguistically homogenous polities.

Although the Habsburg monarchy had much more in common with Western Christendom’s other great powers, its exposed position in the heart of Europe obliged it to maintain some of the attributes of its Ottoman and other Eastern neighbors. Less centralized than France, Spain, or even England, the Habsburg monarchy permitted its disparate and sometimes noncontiguous dominions a substantial amount of autonomy. Although the Habsburgs were no less accepting of religious dissenters than their Western counterparts were, they were forced to tolerate Protestant and Orthodox Christians throughout most of their extensive Hungarian lands. Indeed, the monarchy was diverse not only religiously but also linguistically and, in this diversity, resembled its Ottoman adversary much more than it did the polities of Western Europe.

I propose that the Habsburg-Ottoman wars did not by themselves significantly change either empire’s political, economic, or cultural structure. This was because neither empire was sufficiently threatened by the other. Habsburg forces rarely—and then only momentarily—marched beyond Ottoman frontier provinces. Although the Ottomans twice besieged Vienna, they never shook the confidence of the emperors’ ministers that any gains would be but temporary, both because of their access to support from allies and because of the logistical problems that constrained the sultan’s forces. For over two centuries, the Ottoman war machine evolved little in terms of organization or tactics. Meanwhile, improvements in the Habsburg military were driven exclusively by the need to meet threats originating in the West, rather than in Constantinople. Although Leopold I (1657–1705) occasionally flirted with forms of confessional absolutism prevalent in the West, the monarchy survived and ultimately triumphed over the Ottomans by relying on the time-honored tradition of achieving consensus among both its own corporate estates and its prospective allies.

This persistence of these norms had two overriding effects on Habsburg policy in the aftermath of the Peace of Passarowitz. The first was the demographic revolution that took place across the Hungarian plain. The transfer of the Banat, Syrmia, and northern Serbia was attended by the emigration of over 100,000 Turks and other Muslims, further depopulating a region already wasted by war and disease. Left behind was a residual population of Hungarians, Serbs, and Romanians whose numbers swelled with the steady immigration of peoples south of the newly erected Habsburg-Ottoman frontier. Over the next century, these immigrants were joined by far greater influxes from the north and the west. Indeed, the ambitious and ultimately successful attempts to resettle Syrmia and the Banat (together with the previously conquered Baranya, Bačka, Slavonia, and Transylvania) compounded the existing linguistic and confessional diversity of greater Hungary with Czech, German, Hungarian, Ruthene, Slovak, and even a smattering of Catalan and French immigrants. At the same time, the Habsburg regime ensured that its newly acquired territories would be more submissive than other parts of the kingdom represented in the Hungarian Diet by extending the length of the Military Border and placing most of the other remaining conquests under the direct control of the imperial treasury (Hofkammer) or war council (Hofkriegsrat). Nobody could have anticipated then the role this southern strategy would have in laying the groundwork for the administrative and cultural integrity of the region’s non-Magyar populations. Hence, the resettlement and administrative restructuring of the kingdom’s neo acquistica helped to incubate a diversity that would contribute to the kingdom’s dissolution in 1918.

Notwithstanding the long-term consequences of southern Hungary’s demographic and administrative reconstitution, the Peace of Passarowitz marks a missed opportunity of even greater significance. The fact remains that the Habsburg-Ottoman wars did not fundamentally alter the monarchy’s overall political orientation, administrative structure, or strategic outlook. The policymakers in Vienna continued to focus their attention both on threats and on opportunities for territorial expansion in the West, particularly in Germany and Italy. This had been the case throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and remained so as late as 1682, the year before the celebrated siege of Vienna. The city’s relief and the formation of the Holy League (1684) could have marked the beginning of a crusade to liberate the Balkans. Two decades later, Leopold’s successor, Joseph I (1705–1711), spoke wistfully of doing just that once the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) had concluded. Although Joseph I did not survive the war, the Peace of Passarowitz positioned his successor, Charles VI (1711–1740), to acquire the Ottomans’ remaining Serb- and Romanian-inhabited territories. Habsburg war aims during the century’s two remaining conflicts did, in fact, include the acquisition of Niš, Wallachia, and Moldavia. Nonetheless, the triumphant wars that ended in 1718 had conclusively reinforced Vienna’s preexisting predilection for western expansion. Clearly, the Ottomans were no longer a mortal threat, or even a mortal enemy. The resounding triumph over the Turks also so strengthened the self-congratulatory rhetoric of the Habsburg High Baroque that nobody questioned the efficacy of a political system that relied on the close collaboration of the crown, aristocracy, and Counter-Reformation church. After all, the triad had succeeded; the adoption of existing and emerging western models of state building was simply unnecessary.¹

The monarchy’s defeat in the Silesian Wars belatedly inspired far-reaching reforms that brought it into conformity with the innovative agendas of German cameralism and the Enlightenment.² Once again, the driving force behind this revolution from above was the Prussian threat from the West, not any residual fear of the Ottomans. Of course, if the Habsburg monarchy was now a first-class military power capable of defending itself against renewed Prussian aggression, it was also in a position to resume its earlier expansion into the Balkans, where the Ottomans waited until the Russian seizure of Crimea (1783) before embarking on a century of fitful reforms. Alas, the opportunity to exploit Ottoman weakness had passed. The ever-present Prussian threat, soon to be followed by the even more daunting challenge from revolutionary France, kept Vienna’s foreign ministers and field marshals focused almost exclusively on the West. Moreover, the resilient culture of consensus among the monarchy’s corporate institutions and ruling elites foreclosed any possibility of launching a war of aggression in the Balkans.

This longstanding cultural disinclination toward wars of conquest was abetted by the Enlightenment’s acceptance of the non-Christian Turks. The change was evident in Maria Theresa’s commissioning of Josef Starzer’s ballet Le Turc généreaux (1758), in which he sought to assure a Turkish embassy that the recently concluded Diplomatic Revolution (1756) was designed solely against Prussia, and not against their common French ally. The sympathetic portrait of the sultan in Mozart’s Entführung aus dem Serail (1782) reinforced the trend toward relativizing the Turk, as did the enormous popularity of janissary music during the last three decades of the eighteenth century.³

Much as the monarchy’s political and cultural elite accepted their Ottoman neighbor, its policymakers were far from eager to acquire more of the sultan’s Orthodox subjects. This diffidence dated at least as far back as the early eighteenth century.⁴ Nowhere was this disinclination stronger than in the mind of Maria Theresa, who in 1772 at the height of a Russo-Turkish war forcefully argued against territorial expansion at the sultan’s expense:

Of all the enterprises, the most hazardous and most dangerous will be the partition of the Ottoman Empire, whose consequences we have the most to fear. What can we gain from such conquests to the gates of Constantinople? Provinces unhealthy, depopulated, or inhabited by treacherous and ill-intentioned Greeks—they would not strengthen the Monarchy but weaken it. . . . Without a fatal combination of unfortunate circumstances, I will never prepare myself for the partition of the Ottoman Empire, and I hope that our descendants will never see it expelled from Europe.⁵

Admittedly, the Austro-Russian alliance of 1781 briefly raised the prospect of Balkan expansion, although, once again, Emperor Joseph II (1765–1790) was much more interested in recruiting Catherine the Great as an ally against Prussia, while limiting her appetite for Ottoman territory.⁶ When war did break out in 1787, it took only the threat of a Prussian Dolchstoss for the new Emperor Leopold II (1790–1792) to surrender his brother’s conquests in an effort to preempt the impending Prussian invasion. Emperor Francis II/I (1792–1835) and Chancellor Clemens von Metternich followed the Theresian policy of maintaining the Ottoman Empire to the point of declining repeated invitations by Djordje Petrović to absorb Serbia. The emperor even directed his commanders on the Austrian Military Border to forgo reprisals against Turkish incursions in order to preserve the fragile stability of his Ottoman neighbor, despite incessant cross-border raids launched from Ottoman Bosnia. Meanwhile, Francis actively worked to prevent both the publication of Serb propaganda against and Serb immigration from the Ottoman Empire!⁷ Instead Vienna continued the futile policy of eschewing expansion while simultaneously seeking to prevent Russia from filling the power vacuum in the Balkans.

We can only hypothesize about the future the Balkans might have experienced had the monarchy’s leaders expanded to the south and the east. It seems likely that incorporation would have led to modest infrastructural and economic advantages for the new acquisitions. However, by bringing together most if not all of the Serbs and Romanians under a single enlarged empire, Vienna would have preempted the formation of the magnet states centered in Belgrade and Bucharest that would ultimately undermine the monarchy’s territorial integrity. This fatal neglect reaffirms the Prussian dictum that states that cease to expand must contract. The resulting triumph of the nation-state at the end of World War I had been unknowingly abetted by the dynasty’s eclectic colonization program and by its consciously decentralist southern strategy. Hence, the reason so many people remember 1918 and so few celebrate the unfulfilled promise of 1718.

Notes

1    R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 419.

2    See, for example, P. G. M. Dickson, Finance and Government under Maria Theresia, 1740–1780 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Franz Szabo, Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism, 1753–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); C. A. Macartney, Maria Theresa and the House of Austria (Mystic, CT: L. Verry, 1969).

3    Paula S. Fichtner, Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526–1850 (London: Reaktion, 2008), 96.

4    Ivan Parvev, Habsburgs and Ottomans: Between Vienna and Belgrade, 1683–1739 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1995), 175.

5    Karl A. Roider, Jr., Reform and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy, in State & Society in Early Modern Austria, ed. Charles Ingrao (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University, 1994), 321.

6    Karl A. Roider, Jr., Austria’s Eastern Question, 1700–1790 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). Indeed, Vienna’s fear of Russian expansion is already evident under Joseph I, following Peter the Great’s victory over the Swedes at Poltava (1709), while its disinclination to join Russia in a war of conquest against the Ottomans surfaced repeatedly under Charles VI, both in 1722 and 1733. Charles Ingrao, In Quest and Crisis: Emperor Joseph I and the Habsburg Monarchy (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1979), 266; Parvev, Between Vienna and Belgrade, 168–69, 181, 195, 203.

7    Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Austrian Military Border in Croatia, 1522–1747 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960), 102–07, 128–31, 136–37; Charles Ingrao, The Revolutionary Origins of Europe’s Twentieth-Century Holocausts, Proceedings of the 25th Consortium on Revolutionary Europe (1997) (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1997), 29.

THE PEACE OF PASSAROWITZ, 1718:

AN INTRODUCTION

  Nikola Samardžić  

Southeastern Europe was gradually moving closer to the modern European world. Prior to the eighteenth century, the Ottoman conquests had largely prevented it from sharing in the great achievements of European culture. Seemingly condemned to a permanent state of relative decline, Southeastern Europe also remained unaffected by political innovations that were rapidly accelerating the pace of the modernization in the West. Had its medieval and Ottoman inheritance limited its inner human and social potential, or was there still room for further development? Did its troubles conceal a Balkan historical curse that prevented it from reintegrating with the great systems to which it had once belonged? Had the accident of its existing political borders condemned the Balkans to remain on Europe’s periphery? Did these borders themselves constitute confirmation of the curse of the Limes myth?

In the generation following the great siege of Vienna in 1683, the Ottoman Empire lost most of the conquests it had made in the previous 150 years. The peace treaty concluded at Karlowitz in 1699 marked a turning point in the Ottoman Empire’s relations with the Christian world. This turning point came during the very period in international relations that witnessed the establishment of clearly defined borders. The most reliable borders were natural frontiers, such as the new line Habsburg-Ottoman border that was pushed southward to the great Mureş, Tisza, Sava, and Danube Rivers of the Pannonian plain. The Treaty of Karlowitz had revealed the Habsburg monarchy to be a force equal almost to France.¹

Yet these borders were neither absolute nor impenetrable. Hungary remained ardently dissatisfied with Habsburg centralization and the proselytism of Rome. The Hungarian rebels maintained their bond with Turkey and France. In the meantime, developments in the statebuilding process had reduced the Holy Roman Empire to a mere chimera that was now overshadowed by the newly invigorated Austrian Habsburg monarchy. Its emperor and his advisors were aware of all of the opportunities that were opening up before them. And by 1718 they had made the most of these opportunities with a series of triumphs in wars against the Turks and the French. Austria’s great eighteenth century was already well under way, despite the lingering tensions with Hungary and the increasingly complex kaleidoscope of internal contradictions that demanded the kind of careful and well-thought-out answers that were in keeping with the spirit of the eighteenth century.

With the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, Austria achieved a new identity that transcended its German patrimony. The Holy Roman Empire had recovered from the chaos, confessional fratricide, and depopulation of the Thirty Years’ War. The attacks of Louis XIV, including his armies’ systematic devastation of the Rhineland, had promoted a new German unity against Louis XIV symbolized by the formation of the League of Augsburg. German identity and Baroque culture spread to Southeastern Europe, Hungary, and Poland, and even launched a modest Baroque revival in Italy. Yet the Ottomans did not accept their losses, and hostility continued to smolder in their relations with Austria, fuelled by Hungarian discontent.

The seventeenth century concluded successfully for Vienna, enabling it to devote its foreign policy to the question of the Spanish succession and to expanding into Italy. Its new priorities were the confirmation of its new foreign relations and cultural identity. The Spanish question had been opened by the death of Charles II, the last Spanish Habsburg, in 1700. The War of the Spanish Succession had involved the whole of Western Europe. The Swedish king Charles XII opened another front in the Great Northern War (1700–1721) against a coalition of Russia, Denmark, and Poland. It seems almost as if the first decades of the new century belonged more to the previous era of constant crisis and turmoil. War was being waged almost everywhere. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 did no more than herald future settlements. Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI continued hostilities against France for a few more months until Prince Eugene of Savoy signed the Treaty of Rastatt in 1714 in his name. Milan, Naples, and Sardinia were used to compensate Charles VI for not being recognized as king of Spain. With the Barrier Treaty concluded with Holland in Antwerp in 1715, Austria also retained most of the Spanish Netherlands. For the time being, only Austria and Spain remained at war.

Instead of Spain’s Iberian and overseas possessions, Charles VI inherited the continental leftovers from previous conflicts. He also had to face all the limitations of his own position. First of all, he was entangled by the Pragmatic Sanction. The Treaty of Szatmár in 1711, which followed shortly after the death of Joseph I, left Hungary disturbed. Nonetheless, the agreement ended the uprising of Ferenc II Rákóczi (1703–1711), which followed almost two centuries of Hungarian unrest and struggle in the almost wicked triangle between Turkey, Austria, and France.² It was now up to Charles VI to recognize and honor the agreement. This meant seriously reassessing the constitutional crisis. Failing to resolve the Hungarian question would have seriously disturbed the monarchy’s stability, especially if the Ottoman Empire and France became involved. Meanwhile, the increasing demographic, constitutional, and military significance of Croats and Serb settlers raised issues of justice and freedom, with repercussions that could not have been easily foreseen. It was amid these heightened tensions that the Diet at Pozsony (Bratislava) brought together Charles VI and the Hungarian nobility. The Magyar nation had agreed to recognize him as King Charles III with the understanding that he would respect Hungary’s laws and autonomy. The Hungarian court chancellery in Vienna kept Hungarian finances independent of the Hofkammer in Vienna. The agreement implied that the previous forms of Hungarian feudal society would be left intact, with the peasants still firmly attached to the feudal lords. The Hungarian nobility won relief from direct taxation by accepting their obligation to house what they regarded as a foreign German army on their soil. Hungary’s loss of feudal autonomy was thus compensated for by the advancement of their economic interests. Meanwhile, the religious question was left for future consideration.

The Habsburg monarchy’s constitutive problems were underscored by the opening of the question of the Austrian succession. After patiently studying the mood of the estates, the still childless Charles VI announced in 1713 that his possessions would pass intact by the principle of primogeniture to his legal male heirs or, in their absence, to his legitimate daughters. This meant the termination of Joseph I’s line of inheritance. The final solution was left for future consideration.

Despite a succession of peace congresses, declarations, and treatises aimed at stimulating international law, war was still very much a reality. The theaters simply moved south and east from France and Spain. Admittedly the recovery of most of Hungary in the so-called Vienna War (1683–1699) had removed the Balkans as a high priority since descending farther into the peninsula was hardly an attractive proposition. Instead, the impending extinction of the dynasty’s Spanish line had once again elevated Italy’s value almost to the level of Renaissance times. Whether it was a bastion of stability or the symbol—and sometimes the battleground—of major upheavals, Italy remained the champion of unequalled culture in the Baroque era and a symbol of an earthly paradise, with its unsur-passed beauty and pleasures, not to mention all its other whims and attractions. The Peace of Utrecht brought an end to Spanish rule over Naples and Milan and introduced Austrian Habsburg control, which lasted until 1738. Yet Italy was dragged into a new southeastern conflict when Turkey declared war on Venice in 1714 and soon took over many of Venice’s possessions on Crete and the Peloponnese (Morea). Having lost the Peloponnese during the Morean War (1684–1699), the Turks now held a commanding advantage.³ Charles VI’s answer was to renew his alliance with Venice and demand Ottoman withdrawal, a demarche that the Porte refused.⁴

The cast of characters in conflict was even broader. During the second war with Turkey, which began in 1711, Russia invited the Montenegrin and Herzegovinian tribes under Metropolitan Danilo I to move against local Turkish strongholds. When the uprising failed, the Turks launched two punitive expeditions, in 1712 and 1714.⁵ After the Venetians refused to surrender refugees who had fled to Boka Kotorska, the Porte declared war on 10 December 1714. Meanwhile, Danilo visited the Russian court and was granted minimal financial support. Yet Montenegro’s real enemies were despair and anarchy. The period of general confusion following the War of the Holy League fostered a Serbian cultural malaise that manifested as a resistance to modernization. These prejudices were rooted in Russian myth and in the authoritarian, despotic persona of Tsar Peter the Great, but uninformed by the tsar’s celebrated advocacy of western culture, institutions, and technology. Such prejudices had already taken hold of the values and outlook of the post-Byzantine commonwealth. Interpretation of the past, including events that had been completely fabricated—such as the istraga poturica (the persecution of converts to Islam in Montenegro) or the much earlier Serbian character of the army that had fought the Turks in Kosovo in 1389—became as important as the true course of events and their place in history.⁶

Southeastern Europe’s long seventeenth century extended from the beginning of the Austro-Ottoman Long War (1593–1606) to the Peace of Passarowitz in 1718. This period was clearly defined by stagnating living conditions, wars, unstable frontiers, and large movements of the civilian population that sometimes temporarily depopulated entire areas.⁷ The long seventeenth century in Europe continued with the War of the Spanish Succession, which constituted one more chapter in the Age of Louis XIV. The war was concluded by eleven separate treaties signed in 1713 and 1714. These agreements influenced international relations considerably over the next thirty years. However, Austria and Spain remained in a state of war. Philip V accepted the Spanish crown and control over the Spanish Americas, on condition that he found a new, Spanish branch of Bourbons. As compensation, Charles VI received the Spanish Netherlands and possessions in Italy. The Hanoverian dynasty was recognized on the throne of Great Britain, which retained Gibraltar and Minorca and strengthened its influence in the Mediterranean. In the shadow of almost continual warfare, these changes effectively reorganized the political and strategic structure of Europe, and the death of Louis XIV in 1715 heralded a new era of international relations.

Meanwhile, Ottoman ambitions were revived after the empire’s victory over Russia in an important battle near the Pruth River in 1711. Sultan Ahmed III decided to break the Treaty of Karlowitz and declared war on the Venetians. By attacking the Peloponnese he hoped to compensate for the losses sustained in the previous war, while taking advantage of Austria’s engagement in the War of the Spanish Succession. The attack had been expected. It had been preceded by Turkish action against Maltese pirates, followed in 1710 by peace between the Porte and Russia. Venice tried to keep Turkey at war with Russia and then to direct the sultan against Austria. The new war between Turkey and Russia, lasting from late 1711 to June 1713, however, only delayed the conflict with Venice. The Porte made no attempt to conceal its preparations for attacking the Peloponnese; its speedy and relentless stifling of the uprising in Montenegro showed that the Porte also intended to send forces into Dalmatia. The Porte also rejected Vienna’s repeated attempts at diplomatic intervention, reminding him of the good will it had shown by remaining at peace throughout the War of the Spanish Succession and the Rákóczi uprising. Nor had any of the terms and annexes of the Treaty of Karlowitz of 1699 mentioned the alliance between Austria and Venice. Hence the sultan did not prepare for war with Austria and did all he could to avoid it—at least until Venice had been defeated—so that he could then redirect his attention to Hungary.⁸

The sultan’s decision to attack Venice was based on the accusation that Venice had broken a series of peace terms from 1699, assisted both the Montenegrin rebels and Maltese pirates, and tolerated plundering raids in the Adriatic hinterland. Success against Venice depended, among other things, on keeping peace with Austria, and then with Poland and Russia. The new Belgrade seraskier, Numan-pasha Küprüly, was supposed to keep careful watch over the situation on the border with Austria. At the beginning of 1715, the Porte directly contacted Vienna with a communiqué announcing the start of a war with Venice and stating the need to maintain peace between them. Nonetheless, the conventional wisdom in Vienna was that the war with Venice would necessarily be followed by renewed conflict between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires.

The Turks commenced hostilities by occupying the islands of Tinos and Aegina, after which they crossed the isthmus and took Corinth. The Venetian admiral Daniele Dolfin thought it better to save his fleet than to risk it for the Morea. In the meantime, Nauplia, Modon, Corone, and Malvasia all fell. Within a few months the Turks had conquered all of the Peloponnese, except for a few coastal garrisons. Even the island of Kitera fell after having been under Venetian rule since the fourteenth century. Lefkas in the Ionian Sea and the bases of Spinalonga and Suda on Crete were abandoned. Only when the Turks landed on Corfu did the Venetian defenders manage to rebuff them. Subsequent Venetian naval operations in the Aegean and the Dardanelles in 1717–18 meet with no success, despite their Habsburg ally’s dramatic victories elsewhere.

Vienna lent only limited support to the beleaguered Venetians, partly because of its own reserved position during the War of the Spanish Succession and Rákóczi’s uprising. Charles VI concentrated instead on securing his new Italian possessions in Naples and Sicily, without putting any extra strain on his forces in the Mediterranean. Prince Eugene, chief Habsburg military commander and president of the Hofkriegsrat, favored a new war with Turkey, arguing that the seizure of Temesvár and Belgrade would further protect Hungary. Yet his awareness of the monarchy’s parlous finances inclined him to buy precious time by maintaining peaceful relations with the Porte.

By summer 1715 it had become only too clear that the war in the Peloponnese would move to Dalmatia, where the Turkish forces would be in a better position to resume the struggle for Hungary. Fortunately, the death of Louis XIV (15 September 1715) created circumstances under which Austria could move more freely. France was hardly in a position to support either the Ottomans or Spain. Vienna itself was without powerful allies, aside from the hapless Venetians and the modest contingents usually provided by the German principalities. Prince Eugene was opposed to recruiting the tsar, who could only offer minimal military assistance.

Once again Eugene became a key figure in plotting the monarchy’s grand strategy, as he had been during the War of the Spanish Succession. By now he had become a reflection of the age to which he belonged. Baroque taste, manners, and mentality were gradually retreating before an age characterized by a greater sense of organization and rationalism. Policy making was increasingly being made by cabinet absolutism. Charles VI himself thought that the new Turkish war would give his Hofkriegsrat president Prince Eugene and Hofkammer president Count Starhemberg more authority than they had ever had, given its bearing on foreign policy and administrative reform.⁹

Austria sought assurance from Venice that it would allow Austrian troops free passage and join their operations on land and at sea in the event of an attack by Spain on Austria’s possessions in Italy. The alliance was signed in Vienna on 13 April 1716. By joining forces with Venice, Vienna expected to fortify its gains from the previous Turkish war. Prince Eugene of Savoy gave an ultimatum to Turkey to cease hostilities and to refund Venice for the losses it had sustained. Turkey refused and requested that Austria remain neutral.

While part of the Ottoman army attacked Corfu and another part remained in Dalmatia, the sultan’s son-in-law, Grand Vizier Damad Ali Pasha, set off with the main body toward Petrovaradin. It was there on the banks of the Danube that he and his 120,000 men encountered Prince Eugene. Although his own force was significantly smaller, Eugene attacked on the morning of 5 August, killing the grand vizier and 30,000 Ottoman soldiers.

This defeat instigated unrest in Istanbul. The sultan withdrew his forces from Corfu, expecting that the Austrians would attack Belgrade next. Instead, Eugene marched on Temesvár, which surrendered in mid-October. By November the Austrians had taken Pančevo and Nova Palanka, thereby completing the conquest of the Banat of Temesvár. They continued into Wallachia, capturing Târgovişte and taking prisoner Wallachia’s Prince Nikolas Mavrocordato, the former lead interpreter of the Ottoman Porte. His brother John surrendered all of Wallachia west of the Olt (Oltenia) in February 1717. Combat continued along the front between Belgrade and Šabac as well as in Syrmia and northern Bosnia, but Austrian attacks on Bihać, Novi, and Gradiška were unsuccessful. The assault on Belgrade would have to wait until the following year.

Austria prepared for the attack on the city by bringing in new forces from Bavaria and Saxony. Eugene crossed the Danube downstream at Višnjica, thus avoiding the Turkish border troops. He laid siege to Belgrade before the end of June, only to be surrounded in turn by Ottoman forces brought in by Grand Vizier Halil Pasha. It is estimated that the grand vizier brought as many as 150,000 soldiers, while the Belgrade garrison commanded by Mustafa Pasha numbered no more than 30,000 men. At one stage it seemed as though Eugene’s cause was lost. To save the situation, he launched a surprise attack on 16 August 1717, defeating the grand vizier’s army and forcing the Turkish garrison to surrender two days later. Belgrade’s garrison withdrew along with the entire Muslim population, who were able to take with them only their basic personal possessions.¹⁰ The Austrians followed up by occupying northern Serbia as far as Niš (Nissa), while the Turks abandoned the south bank of the Sava and Danube as far as Orşova. It was at this point that the emperor was obliged to turn his attention to the Spanish descent on Habsburg Italy, which had begun with an attack on Sardinia on 20 August 1717. This threat to his Italian patrimony obliged Charles VI to conclude the war with Turkey and sue for peace.¹¹

Following the dramatic losses of Belgrade and northern Serbia, the Porte asked Britain and the Netherlands to mediate a peace. The British delegate, Sir Edward Wortley Montagu, traveled from London via Vienna to begin the negotiations and was eventually joined by the Netherlands diplomat, Count Colyer. By then, however, the sultan had changed his mind. The French ambassador, the Marquis de Bonnac, announced a continuation of the war with the emperor, thanks in part to the signing of a separate peace agreement with Venice and to lobbying by Hungarian rebel exiles. Spain then added to the drama by invading Sicily. Charles VI rejected the suggestions that Montagu had placed before the Porte, resulting in Montagu’s recall.

The emperor’s actions reflected the pervasive influence of Prince Eugene, who had heretofore relied on Anglo-Dutch mediation, but now wanted to buy time. The official Ottoman proposal that negotiations begin with the principle of uti possidetis revealed that the Porte had abandoned hope of returning to the Karlowitz frontiers, but intended to retain its recent conquest of the Peloponnese. Turkey suggested that the negotiations should take place in Passarowitz, a small town in Serbia, near the point where the Morava flows into the Danube. Prince Eugene rejected a truce, but agreed to mediation, and set conditions that implied he would accept the principle of uti possidetis if Venice were included in the negotiations. Eugene protested when the grand vizier replied at the end of January without alluding to these conditions. Nonetheless, by March an agreement had been reached to commence negotiations in Passarowitz. The new grand vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, led the Porte’s peace faction and the negotiations were speeded up. The plenipotentiaries met in Passarowitz in May, the emperor being represented by Count Virmont and Michael von Talman, Venice by Ruzzini (who had also negotiated at Karlowitz), and the sultan by Ibrahim Agha and Mehmed Effendi, with the British and the Dutch ambassadors to the Porte, Robert Sutton, and Count Colyer, acting as intermediaries.

The Austrian side did not accept the grand vizier’s authorization, and the peace conference did not begin until a letter arrived from the sultan on 5 June, consenting to Venice joining the negotiations. Eight conferences were held, eventually resulting in the declaration of a truce and the acceptance of uti possidetis, which suited the Ottomans as far as the Peloponnese were concerned, the occupation of which ensured additional security for the capital, Constantinople. Of course, they also had to accept the Austrian conquests. When the emperor laid claim to the whole of Serbia and some fortresses in Bosnia, Moldavia, and Wallachia, the Ottoman side insisted on the consistent application of the territorial principles that had been agreed to in advance. It also rejected Austria’s request that the sultan hand over Rákóczi and the other leaders of the Hungarian revolt. Eugene was obliged to yield to the Ottoman demarche, and Austro-Turkish negotiations lasted until the end of the second week of July. Then all that remained was the dispute over the Peloponnese. The emperor’s team refused to allow separate negotiations with the Venetians, who were still left with no alternative but to accept uti possidetis.

The peace treaties were signed in Passarowitz on 21 July 1721. The text of the treaty between the emperor and the sultan contained 20 paragraphs. According to the uti possidetis principle, the Habsburg monarchy gained the Banat with Temesvár, the southern part of Syrmia, northern Serbia including Belgrade, the area from the Drina River as far as the confluence of the Timok and Danube Rivers, a tiny belt of Bosnia along the Sava River,¹² and the region west of the Olt (Oltenia) known as Little Wallachia. The peace treaty provided for the formation of border commissions that, over the ensuing two months, would determine the new frontiers. Remaining areas of dispute were left to the experts.¹³