ABSTRACT
Ottoman defeats and reforms In 1683 the Ottomans besieged and almost took Vienna during a war with Austria and other European powers, but in 1699 at the end of that war they had for the first time to sign a peace treaty with Europeans as the defeated party. During the eighteenth century they had occasional successes but more defeats and lost more land to the Europeans. During the nineteenth century this decline accelerated and their Christian subjects in Greece and the Balkans developed nationalist aspirations
and were able to detach themselves from the empire with the help of the European powers. By the beginning of the twentieth century the empire had survived mainly because European rivalries allowed it to.
