The Great Turkish War — The Siege of Vienna and the Treaty of Karlowitz (1683–1699)
The sixteen-year war between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League of the Habsburgs, Poland-Lithuania, Venice, and Russia. Beginning with the last great Ottoman siege of Vienna and ending with the Treaty of Karlowitz, it marked the first major permanent territorial retreat of the Ottoman Empire in Europe and the rise of Habsburg power in Central Europe.
Events
The Ottoman Army Invests Vienna
Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa led an Ottoman army, supported by vassal contingents including Imre Thököly's Hungarians, into Habsburg territory and besieged Vienna with a force commonly estimated at well over 100,000. Emperor Leopold I had evacuated the city, leaving a garrison under Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg. Ottoman engineers undermined the walls through September as food and ammunition ran low inside the city.
Location: Vienna, Austria
The Battle of Kahlenberg
A relief army of Holy Roman Empire, Polish-Lithuanian, Bavarian, and Saxon forces under the overall command of John III Sobieski descended from the Kahlenberg heights and routed the Ottoman besiegers. Sobieski's winged hussars delivered one of the largest cavalry charges in military history into the Ottoman camp. Kara Mustafa retreated down the Danube; he was strangled in Belgrade in December on the order of Sultan Mehmed IV, who held him responsible for the disaster.
Location: Vienna, Austria
The Holy League
Under the diplomatic sponsorship of Pope Innocent XI, the Habsburg monarchy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Republic of Venice signed a defensive alliance against the Ottoman Empire, later joined by Russia in 1686. The League coordinated multi-front operations from Hungary to the Morea to the Dalmatian coast. It represented an unusual reversal of European rivalries, sustained despite repeated French pressure on the Habsburgs' western front.
Location: Rome, Papal States
The Recapture of Buda
After a brutal 78-day siege, League forces stormed Buda, the ancient Hungarian capital held by the Ottomans since 1541. The storming was followed by a sack of the town in which most of the Jewish and Muslim inhabitants were killed. The fall of Buda gave the Habsburgs the strategic anchor for the reconquest of the rest of Hungary.
Location: Buda, Kingdom of Hungary
The Second Battle of Mohács
Charles of Lorraine destroyed the main Ottoman field army in a battle fought near the site of the 1526 catastrophe that had first opened Hungary to Ottoman rule. The defeat triggered a mutiny in the Ottoman army and the deposition of Sultan Mehmed IV in November. Ottoman power in Hungary collapsed north of the Danube.
Location: near Mohács, Kingdom of Hungary
The Battle of Zenta
Prince Eugene of Savoy caught the Ottoman army of Sultan Mustafa II in the act of crossing the Tisza river and annihilated it, killing some 30,000 Ottomans including the grand vizier for the loss of a few hundred men. The victory opened the road toward Sarajevo and Bosnia. It forced the Ottomans to the negotiating table from a position of unprecedented weakness.
Location: Zenta, Kingdom of Hungary
The Treaty of Karlowitz
After two years of negotiation conducted, at Ottoman insistence, in tents rather than houses, the Ottomans signed their first peace treaty ceding substantial European territory: most of Hungary and Transylvania to the Habsburgs, the Morea to Venice, and parts of Ukraine to Poland. The treaty established the principle of negotiated, mapped territorial borders in Ottoman-European relations. Contemporaries saw it as the moment Ottoman expansion in Europe ended; modern historians caution that the empire remained formidable and that "decline" was neither immediate nor uniform.
Location: Karlowitz, Kingdom of Hungary