Treaty of Karlowitz

Signed on 26 January 1699 at Karlowitz, today's Sremski Karlovci in northern Serbia, this peace closed the Great Turkish War of 1683 to 1699 between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League of Christian powers. For the first time the Ottomans gave up large territories in Europe, most of Hungary among them. The treaty marked the end of roughly three centuries of Ottoman expansion in central Europe and made the Austrian Habsburgs the leading power in the Danube basin.

The Holy League of 1684 brought together the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Republic of Venice, later joined by the Russia of Peter the Great. After fifteen years of war and a heavy Ottoman defeat at Zenta, the sultan's government agreed to negotiate. A peace congress opened at Karlowitz on 16 November 1698, with England and the Dutch Republic acting as mediators, and the talks lasted about two months. The negotiations took place in a building in the town now known as the Chapel of Peace.

The settlement rested on the principle of uti possidetis: each side kept the lands it held. The Habsburg Monarchy was confirmed in possession of the Ottoman provinces of Eğri and Varat, most of the province of Buda, the northern part of the province of Temesvár and parts of Bosnia, together amounting to most of Hungary, Croatia and Slavonia. Transylvania remained nominally a separate principality but was in practice governed by Austrian officials. The Habsburg gains came to roughly 60,000 square miles.

The terms also protected Catholic churches and Christian worship in nearby Ottoman lands, laid down rules for the Hungarians and Transylvanians who had sided with the Ottomans during the war, and guaranteed shared use of the Maros and Tisza rivers for fishing, watering livestock and navigation.

The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth recovered Podolia and its fortress of Kamianets, lost to the Ottomans in 1672, and in return handed back fortresses it had taken in Moldavia. The Ottomans promised to end Tatar raids, and Poland's tribute payments ceased. The Commonwealth never fought the Ottomans again.

Venice kept most of Dalmatia and the Morea, as the Peloponnese in southern Greece was then known, although it lost the Morea to the Ottomans again within twenty years under the Treaty of Passarowitz. The sultan held on to Belgrade, the Banat of Temesvár and overlordship of Wallachia and Moldavia. Russia agreed only a truce at Karlowitz and made its own peace in the Treaty of Constantinople of 1700, which gave it the Azov region, lost again in 1711.

Joint commissions spent the following years marking out the new Habsburg–Ottoman border, parts of which were still disputed until 1703. Largely thanks to the Habsburg commissioner Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, the Croatian sections were agreed by mid-1700 and those around Temesvár by early 1701. For the first time, the frontier was marked out on the ground with physical landmarks.

Karlowitz is regarded as a turning point in Ottoman history. The borders in the region would shift back and forth over the following century, but the empire never again made conquests in Europe on the scale of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and from the mid-eighteenth century it was largely confined to the lands south of the Sava and the Balkans proper. Together with the gain of the Banat at Passarowitz less than two decades later, the treaty made the Habsburgs the dominant power of central Europe.

In Ukraine, the peace had an unexpected effect. With the Ottoman frontier now secure, the Polish nobility sought to take over land on the right bank of the Dnieper, and the Polish parliament moved to disband the Cossack regiments there, which contributed to the Paliy uprising of the early 1700s.

Our 1650 map shows Ottoman rule reaching deep into Hungary, and the 1700 map shows the new frontier after Karlowitz, with Hungary and Croatia under the Habsburgs and the Ottomans holding Belgrade in today's Serbia.