ABSTRACT
By the Treaty of Karlowitz of 1699, which ended years of intermittent warfare with the Holy League (Austria, Poland, Russia, Venice and the Papacy), the Ottoman Empire ceded all of Ottoman Hungary (except Temegvar), Transylvania, Slavonia and parts of Croatia to Austria; Kamenice, Podolia and parts of the southern Ukraine to Poland; and Azov to Russia, which opened the door to the Caucasus for Peter the Great and his successors. The Venetians kept their gains in the Morea and parts of Dalmatia, although their victory was elusive, as the Ottomans would recapture the territories within two decades. By any standard, it was a crushing defeat for the Ottomans, and rightly considered over the centuries the major turning point for the empire. Significantly, the Ottomans reorganised and remobilised their army four times over the course of the campaigns from 1683-99, but were unable to establish long-lasting supremacy on the battlefield. While Eugene of Savoy’s military command is generally recognised as the key to Austrian success, it is equally notable that Habsburg setbacks prompted much re-thinking of strategy and reform in the later decades of the eighteenth century. Russia, added to the League in 1686, emerged as the most significant player in these same decades, although the fruits of many of Peter the Great’s reforms would not be immediately apparent.
