The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire Read Online Free PDF Page B

progress across the Danubian plain.
    Catholic Christendom sought speedily to exploit the advantage won by Sobieski and Charles of Lorraine by weaving, for the first time, a grand strategic design against ‘the
Turk’. 1 In March 1684 emissariesfrom Venice, Poland and Austria came together, with the backing of Pope Innocent XI, to
create a new ‘Holy League’, an offensive coalition which would threaten other frontiers as well as the Danube basin. During these discussions in Venice the earliest provisional plans
were outlined for partitioning the Ottoman Empire in Europe and—more vaguely—in the Middle East, too. Louis XIV, whose ministers maintained profitable relations with successive Grand
Viziers, was disinclined to associate France with any crusading Holy League, but it was hoped Orthodox Russia, Protestant Germany and even Muslim Persia would act in concert with the three Catholic
Powers.
    These plans were over-ambitious: Persia failed to respond to the Capuchin missionaries who served as envoys from Venice; German Lutheran participation was minimal; and another two years passed
before the Russians went to war, then only to mount an expedition against Mehmed’s tributary ruler, the Tatar Khan of the Crimea. But, although the coalition remained incomplete, the Holy
League was able to attack Mehmed IV in rapid succession on several fronts. These operations marked the start of thirty-five years of almost continuous warfare, in which the Sultan’s enemies
sought to roll back the frontiers of Islam and prove that the great empire built up by Suleiman was set in fatal decline.
    The fighting began where it had ended in the previous autumn. Duke Charles of Lorraine continued the war in the Alföld, securing Pest and most of northern Hungary in two summer campaigns,
taking Buda after a month’s siege on 2 September 1686, and defeating the Turks heavily eleven months later near the historic battlefield of Mohács. Charles’s victory allowed
Habsburg armies to clear the Ottomans from most of Croatia and Transylvania. In the first week of September 1688 the Austrians carried the war into the Balkans by storming Belgrade, the capital of
a provincial pashalik for more than a century and a half. In the following summer they advanced to Niš and Skopje, penetrating to within four hundred miles of Constantinople by the
autumn.
    Meanwhile Venice, too, opened up a battle front in the Balkans. Raids on Ottoman outposts along the southern Dalmatian coast and in Bosnia were followed in 1685 by a new campaign in Greece.
Francesco Morosini, a former Doge in his late sixties, landed at Tolon in thePeloponnese—the ‘Sanjak of the Morea’—and encouraged revolts in Epirus
and the Mani. By August 1687 this ‘Venetian’ force, which included Lutheran mercenaries under the Swedish adventurer Count John Königsmarck, had ejected the Turks from all the
Peloponnese except the defiant rocky promontory of Monemvasia. A month later Morosoni’s men swept across the isthmus of Corinth and thrust forwards, by land and by sea, to the Piraeus. They
then attacked the tumbledown cluster of homes and shops around the Acropolis which was all that remained of the greatest of classical cities. After ten days of intermittent bombardment the Ottoman
troops surrendered. Not, however, before irreparable disaster had hit Athens. 2 On the evening of 26 September 1687 a German mercenary fired a mortar
from the Mouseion Hill which blew up a Turkish powder magazine in the Parthenon; the frieze and fourteen columns crashed to the ground. A few days later Morosini ordered the carved horses and
chariot of Athena to be removed from the west pediment and shipped to Venice as a trophy of war, following the marble Lion of the Piraeus which was already on its way to embellish the gates of the
Doge’s arsenal. The task of lowering the group proved too hard for Morosini’s unskilled labourers. Horses and chariot fell to the ground, in ruins. The