Osman II to Murad IV 1617-48

The war with Poland

Until the beginning of the 17th century the Ottomans had been largely fortunate with their sultans. But with the accession of Ahmed I the quality of their leadership showed an alarming decline. He died in 1617 at the age of 28 and, as his son Osman was then a minor, his pious but incompetent brother Mustafa succeeded him. Only a few months sufficed to show Mustafa's lack of ability to rule, and the boy Osman, then only 14, ascended to the throne in 1618. Young Osman displayed an early thirst for military glory. Not only did he bear the illustrious name of the founder of the Ottoman line, he also had a strong desire to emulate his great ancestor Suleiman the Magnificent, whose armour he delighted to wear. Thus it was that in 1620 Sultan Osman led the Ottoman Empire to war against Poland.

The basis for discontent between the two countries was the old problem of Cossack raids into Ottoman territories. The Cossacks consisted of former serfs who had fled to freedom and of the urban poor who had settled in the plain along the Dneiper River. They acted as a military brotherhood, and more than one king of Poland had found them very useful for defending the extreme edges of his domains. They raided Turkish galleys and invaded Ottoman dominions along the Black Sea coast.

The pretext for war in 1620 was more immediate and came about as a result of the activities of Bethlen Gabor, Prince of Transylvania and vassal of the Ottoman Empire. Like so many of his predecessors the Transylvanian ruler proved to be the loose cannon of Ottoman politics, and in 1618 Gabor had taken the part of the Bohemian rebels in the conflict that was destined to become the Thirty Years War. Bethlen Gabor's intervention took the dramatic form of a siege of Vienna and following an agreement dating back to 1613, the Polish king, Sigismund III, was obliged to aid his brother-in-law, the Emperor, against Gabor's Protestant threat. The Polish Diet, however, refused to sanction such an operation, so Sigismund hired out of his own purse a motley crew of mercenaries, adventurers and Cossacks and defeated Gabor in 1619.

Much hurt, Bethlen Gabor intrigued with his master, the young Sultan Osman II, to provide a suitably united Ottoman response. The opportunity came in 1620 when an Ottoman army invaded Moldavia to depose its ruler, Gratiani, who was friendly to Poland. Gratiani appealed to Poland for assistance, assuring the Poles that he would supply 25,000 men. The Polish Army under the Hetman Zolkiewski was a much smaller force. Only 8,000 men advanced to Moldavia where a mere 600 Moldavians joined them. This was instead of the promised 25,000 because the Cossacks had refused to join in.

Heavily outnumbered, Zolkiewski pitched camp at Cecora on the Prut River where he successfully withstood repeated attacks from the Turkish Army under Iskander Pasha. After 11 days Zolkiewski ordered a retreat. For eight days the Poles conducted a fighting withdrawal, but discipline broke down and the Ottomans attacked again. This time the assault was successful. The severed head of the veteran Hetman Zolkiewski was sent to the Sultan as a trophy of war, and his colleague the Hetman Koniecpolski was captured.

The disaster at Cecora aroused all of Poland, and the Diet made provision for the recruitment of 40,000 Cossacks. Within a year a newly formed Polish army was on the march. They assembled near Lwow, and marched to the Ukraine. News was brought to the Polish commander the Hetman Chodkiewicz that a huge Ottoman army was on the move, so the Poles and Cossacks fortified themselves inside their camp at Chocim on the Dniester River. They were soon surrounded by a Turkish army of three times the size under the personal command of Sultan Osman II.

For five weeks the Ottomans assaulted the camp, and when the Poles counterattacked with their famous winged hussars the Sultan negotiated a settlement. It was an honourable agreement by which Poland swore to restrain the Cossacks and the Turks likewise restrained the Tartars from invading Polish lands. The Poles returned well satisfied after a victory that was to provide them with heroic ballads for many years to come, but Sultan Osman's return to Constantinople was an ignominious one. The Janissaries were now the power behind the throne, and a defeated sultan had little chance of controlling them. A helpful adviser suggested that Osman should go into Asia and recruit a new army with which he might defeat the Janissaries. It was even mooted that the Ottoman capital should be moved east.

Rumours of the plot leaked out and stirred the janissaries to revolt. In May 1622 Osman was deposed and shortly afterwards strangled. The ex-Sultan Mustafa, his mind further weakened by four years of confinement, was dragged back to the throne. With a pliant sultan in charge the Janissaries could increase their demands, and their excesses almost bankrupted the state. Yet Mustafa was so hopeless that the Janissaries began to regret having got rid of Osman, so his executioner was put to death and Mustafa was replaced once again. The new sultan was one of his younger brothers, then aged 12. The accession of Murad IV took place so quietly that the English ambassador commented that 'emperors are made here with less noise than a proctor at Oxford'.

The year of Murad IV's accession saw the renewal of the war with Persia, which lasted intermittently until 1639. As a result the convulsion in Europe caused by the Thirty Years War was carried on with little likelihood of any serious intervention from Turkey. The notion of a crusade against the Ottoman Empire was occasionally revived, usually because of the presence in a European court of some pretender to the Ottoman throne. But there was little prospect of success for any enterprise arising out of such intrigues and the archaic schemes caused little lost sleep in the Topkapi Palace.

Throughout this time Murad IV's domestic position gradually improved, until by 1632 he began to exert a firm rule and set in motion a series of necessary reforms. His invigorated army finally triumphed over Persia, but scarcely a year after his triumph Murad IV died in 1640. He was succeeded by his brother Ibrahim, under whose reign the Ottoman Empire undertook a new and aggressive war against Europe.

The trigger for renewed fighting with the Ottoman Empire came from the activities of the old knightly orders, in particular the Knights of Malta. Relying on the cloak of pious immortality bestowed upon them for their victory in 1565, the knights played the pirate as much as any Barbary corsair. They preyed on friend and foe alike and their activities did more than anything else to poison the relationship between the Turks and Europe. One commentator expressed the opinion that their activities had 'kept on the alert a monster who might otherwise have sunk into slumber'.

Venice actively discouraged her subjects from having anything to do with the Knights of Malta, but found it impossible to close her harbours to the Maltese galleys. One of the most important of these harbours lay on the island of Crete. In 1644 a Maltese squadron encountered a number of Ottoman vessels laden with a rich cargo off Rhodes. The knights captured the ships and headed for Crete. The incident strengthened the arm of factions in the Ottoman court who were hostile to Venice. The winter of 1644/45 saw the Ottomans engaged in preparations for war against the Venetian territory of Crete in a manner very reminiscent of the preliminaries to the assault on Venetian Cyprus in 1570.

On 30 April 1645 the Ottoman fleet sailed via Chios and Navarino. They landed troops on Crete and took Canea. They had committed themselves to a long and arduous war that was to last 24 years. At first the operation favoured the Turks. The rule of Venice in Crete was as oppressive against the local population as it had been in Cyprus and, although there was no prospect of a mass rising of the people in the Ottomans' favour, certain strongpoints had fallen to the Turks by the end of 1646. In the summer of 1647 the Turkish commander began a blockade of Candia (Heraklion) and commenced a siege against its fortifications in April 1648.

The Venetians regarded Candia as the lynchpin of their entire operations. As long as Candia held out Crete could not become Ottoman and Venetian ships could operate elsewhere in support. The offensive operations by Venice were largely carried out at sea and a major plank of their strategy was to try to cut off the Dardanelles to halt the flow of supplies to the besieging Turkish army. To counter the Ottoman threat they improved the fortifications in the Dardanelles. Unfortunately for Venice the sea route via Chios allowed another exit from Anatolia and Venice did not have the resources to maintain two blockades at once in spite of the regular support provided by the Knights of Malta.

In 1647 Sultan Ibrahim was deposed and replaced by his seven-year-old son Mehmet IV. During his long minority administrative inefficiency and a struggle for power at court led to a very ineffective prosecution of the war with Venice, but not its abandonment. A further boost was given to the western powers by the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The Thirty Years War was at an end, and they could now concentrate on the threat from the east.

The life and achievements of Mehmet Koprulu, described in detail above, dominated the period that followed. Mehmet Koprulu was succeeded as Grand Vizier by his son Ahmed in 1661. He ruled until 1676 and celebrated the newly invigorated Ottoman power by launching a war against Hungary in 1663. It began as a raid on a grand scale, but when they returned the following year it was to find that the Imperial Army had been improved and enlarged. Resistance was now under the command of a brilliant Italian general called Raimondo Montecuccoli, who had reinforced the key position of Raab. Ahmed arrived in strength before the fortress of Komarom and there was the strong prospect of a peaceful agreement being reached, but he decided to force the issue. While the text of the treaty was still being discussed he advanced up the left bank of the Raab River. Here he met Montecuccoli's army at St Gotthard. The Turks attacked on 1 August with superior forces, but had made the mistake of not bringing all their troops across the Raab. They lost about 5,000 men and 15 guns in a crushing defeat. The battle of St Gotthard indicated the Austrians' growing superiority in land warfare.

The reversal on land encouraged Ahmed Koprulu to pursue the long war for Crete instead and in 1669 Candia surrendered and the Venetians abandoned the island. This success freed Turkish forces for other possibilities and the Ukraine once again became a hotbed of conflict. The native Cossacks sought Turkish help as they attempted to win independence from Russia and Poland. In 1672 a large Turkish army marched into Poland, conquered the fortress of Kamenec (Kamieniec Podolski) and advanced as far as Lwow. They were not to know it at the time, but this operation meant that the Ottoman Empire had attained the largest dimensions in Europe that it would ever enjoy.

The Poles hit back and King Jan Sobieski achieved a victory at the second battle of Chocim in 1673. But honours were so even that Ahmed Koprulu was able to crown his career by dictating the terms of the Treaty of Zuravno to John Sobieski in 1676. Much of the Ukraine passed into Ottoman hands. It was Ahmed's last gain for his empire. A fortnight later he was dead.

The siege of Vienna

Ahmed Koprulu was succeeded as Grand Vizier by his brother Kara Mustafa, who abandoned Ottoman efforts in the Ukraine for a renewed move against Imperial Austria. He spent several years building up his army and in 1683 moved into the attack for the campaign that is probably the best known of all the Ottoman/European encounters: the siege of Vienna.

The number of Kara Mustafa's army is not known exactly. It may be that the original plan was to capture Raab (Gyor) and Komarom, not Vienna, and none of the initial movements suggested that the capital was threatened. The Ottoman Army advanced up the Danube and crossed the Raab, where a small force was left behind as a pretext of besieging Raab. After a week's march the Turks reached Vienna and began to besiege it. One hundred and fifty-four years had passed since the first siege of Vienna in 1529. The Turks had possessed no heavy guns then and it is strange to note that they also had none in 1683. Mining was tried, but the garrison replied with spirited counterattacks, and all the while a relieving army was gathering. But by the time it arrived the fall of the city was imminent. The allied army signalled their arrival to the desperate citizens and fell on the Ottoman Army. Led by King Jan Sobieski and his winged hussars the Turks were driven from the field. It was the beginning of a long retreat for the Ottoman Empire.