Imperial Ottoman

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The Treaty of Karlowitz (1699)

The Treaty of Karlowitz of 1699, by which the Ottoman Empire ceded Hungary, Transylvania, the Morea, and Podolia, ending the Great Turkish War.

The Treaty of Karlowitz, signed on 26 January 1699 in the town of Sremski Karlovci in what is now Serbia, was the first major peace treaty in which the Ottoman Empire was forced to cede substantial European territory to its enemies. It ended the Great Turkish War of 1683 to 1699 and marked a decisive shift in the long contest between the Ottomans and the European powers. The treaty is one of the central events of decline and reform in the Ottoman Empire and a turning point in the wider history of the Ottoman Empire.

The Great Turkish War

The war had begun with the second Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. The siege was lifted in September of that year by the Polish king Jan III Sobieski, whose famous charge by the Polish hussars has been called the largest cavalry charge in history. The relief of Vienna was followed by a counter-attack by a Holy League of the Habsburg Empire, Poland, Venice, and, after 1686, Russia.

The campaign that followed was one of the most decisive in Ottoman history. The Habsburgs took Buda in 1686, Belgrade in 1688, and most of Hungary. The Venetians, under Francesco Morosini, took the Morea in 1687. The Russians, under the leadership of Vasily Golitsyn, advanced into the Crimea and the lower Danube. By 1690, the Ottomans had been pushed back to a line that approximated the frontier of 1541.

The negotiations

The negotiations for peace began in 1698, after a series of inconclusive campaigns and the death of Sultan Mehmed IV in 1687. The new sultan, Mustafa II, was determined to recover lost territory, but the military situation was unfavourable. The choice of Sremski Karlovci, in the Vojvodina region of what is now northern Serbia, was a compromise between the Habsburg and Ottoman delegations.

The negotiations lasted several months. The British and Dutch, who were eager to reopen the Mediterranean trade, mediated. The Russians, who had been excluded from the Holy League in 1684, were a difficult partner, but they eventually signed a separate peace at the Treaty of Constantinople in 1700.

The terms

The Treaty of Karlowitz was signed on 26 January 1699. By its terms, the Ottomans ceded Hungary, Transylvania, and most of Croatia to the Habsburgs, Podolia to Poland, and the Morea to Venice. The treaty was the first major European peace in which the Ottomans accepted the principle of territorial compensation for their enemies.

The treaty also made provision for the release of prisoners, the regulation of trade, and the status of the Orthodox Church in Ottoman territory. It did not address the question of Russia, which was settled separately. The diplomatic mechanism of the treaty, including the use of British and Dutch mediators, was a sign of the changing nature of the European state system, and the long-term result of the territorial settlements was to be the gradual incorporation of the Balkans into the Habsburg and Russian spheres of influence. The history of the Ottoman Empire is shaped by Karlowitz, the Ottoman golden age gave way to the period of crisis that Karlowitz inaugurated.

The consequences

The Treaty of Karlowitz was a major shock to the Ottoman establishment. For the first time, the empire had been forced to negotiate a peace in which it lost substantial territory. The traditional view of the empire as the dominant power of the eastern Mediterranean was no longer credible. The period of reform that began in the eighteenth century, culminating in the Tanzimat of the nineteenth, can be dated from the shock of Karlowitz. The dynasty itself had been established, against the odds, by Osman I three centuries earlier, and the cumulative effect of Karlowitz was to make clear that the empire that Osman had founded was now on the defensive.

The treaty also had important consequences for the regions it affected. Hungary and Transylvania entered the Habsburg monarchy, where the Catholic and Protestant populations were brought into a new relationship with Vienna. The Morea, the peninsula of the Peloponnese, was the last major Venetian territorial acquisition in the eastern Mediterranean. The Russian frontier in the south moved closer to the Black Sea, and the long contest with Russia for the region began in earnest. The dynasty that had once celebrated the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the victory at the Battle of Mohács in 1526 was now forced to accept, for the first time, the principle of territorial compensation to its enemies.

The Treaty of Karlowitz has been called the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire. That is an overstatement, since the empire survived for another two centuries. But the treaty did mark a decisive shift in the long contest between the Ottomans and the European powers, and it is rightly remembered as a milestone in the history of the Ottoman Empire and in the long slide toward the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1922. Theopolitical context of the war that produced Karlowitz is described in the Battle of Mohács, which began the long Ottoman presence in central Hungary more than 150 years earlier.