On the opening of the campaign of 1739 Munnich led his army through Podolia, a province then belonging to Poland, whose neutrality he violated. He spread desolation along his march, as though he were passing through an enemy’s country. He crossed the frontier of Moldavia and defeated a Turkish army at Khoczim, and then advanced to Jassy, the capital of the province, and captured it.
Meanwhile the Austrians renewed their attack on Serbia and Bosnia under two new generals, Wallis and Niepperg. An army of fifty-six thousand Austrians issued from Peterwardein and marched southwards, apparently in total ignorance of the strength of the Turkish army which was advancing to meet them. By great efforts the Porte had raised and equipped an army of two hundred thousand men, under the Grand Vizier Elhadji Mahomet. It met the Austrian army at Krotzka, half-way between Semendria and Peterwardein. The Austrians were defeated, as was to be expected, in view of the enormous disparity of the two armies. They fell back again on Belgrade. The Ottomans followed up their victory and commenced a bombardment of Belgrade.
Nothing could exceed the imbecility and infatuation of the Austrian generals, Wallis and Niepperg. They were now as anxious to make peace as they had been boastful and bellicose at the commencement of the campaign. The French Ambassador, Villeneuve, was with the Turkish army. His mediation was accepted by the Austrians, and terms of peace were agreed to, without consultation with the Russian generals. Belgrade and all the parts of Serbia and Bosnia which had been ceded to Austria by the treaty of Passarowitch and a great part of Wallachia were restored to the Ottoman Empire. The victory of the Ottomans at Krotzka and, still more, the treaty of Belgrade which followed, caused dismay and indignation to the victorious Russians in Moldavia. It was obviously impossible for their army at Jassy to make any further advance into Turkey, or even to hold its own in Moldavia, when an Ottoman army of two hundred thousand, fresh from victory over the Austrians, was on their flank on the Danube. Munnich’s grandiose scheme for the capture of Constantinople was extinguished. It became necessary for the Czarina to follow the example of the Austrians and to make peace with the Turks. Terms were ultimately agreed to, under which the Russian conquests in Moldavia and the Crimea and the city of Oczakoff were given up. Russia retained only a narrow strip of land on the shores of the Black Sea. The city of Azoff was to be demolished and its territory was to form a belt of borderland, uncultivated and desert, between the two Empires. The Russians were prohibited from maintaining a fleet either in the Black Sea or the Sea of Azoff.
The two treaties, as a result of the campaign of 1739, were a triumph for Turkey. They were more due to the imbecility and incapacity of the Austrian generals than to the valour of the Ottomans, for it was no great feat of arms for two hundred thousand Turks to defeat fifty-seven thousand Austrians at the battle of Krotzka. But the strategy of the Porte in concentrating their main force against the Austrians on the Danube, while making little resistance to the Russians in Moldavia, was fully justified.
XVI
TO THE TREATY OF KAINARDJI
1739-74
The campaign, and the resulting treaty of Belgrade, saved the Ottoman Empire from further shrinkage for many years. There followed a long period of peace. This was due not merely to the fact that the Porte pursued a policy of peace, but because the two great Powers in Europe, Russia and Austria, who were bent on the dismemberment of Turkey, were not in a condition to prosecute their aims, and were not able to enter into any combination for the purpose. In 1740 the Emperor Charles VI died. This event led to a scramble among the neighbouring Powers for his inheritance, and to the war known as that of the Austrian Succession, which was brought to an end by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. This was followed later again by another war, known as the Seven Years War, which was concluded in 1763. In neither of these great wars did the Porte take any part, and it is to its credit that it did not take advantage of them to attempt the recovery from Austria of any of its lost dominions in Hungary. Till war broke out with Russia in 1768 there was profound peace.
Sultan Mahmoud died in 1754 and was succeeded by his brother, Othman II, who reigned for three years only. He was deformed—a hunchback. He does not appear to have made any change in the foreign policy of his government. In his three years of reign there were six Grand Viziers, and it seems probable that the real power of the State was exercised by the successor to the Kislaraga Bashir, from behind the curtain of the harem.
Mustapha III succeeded his brother at the age of fifty. He had spent his life up to this time in seclusion, in the Cage of the Seraglio, cut off from all contact with, or even knowledge of, public affairs. For the first six years of his reign he left matters very much in the hands of his Grand Vizier, Raghab Pasha, the last of the many who had filled this post under Mahmoud. Raghab proved to be a most wise and competent statesman, not far behind Sokolli and the Kiuprilis, and, like them, devoted to a policy of peace.