Battle of Petrovaradin, 1716: the grand vizier falls before Prince Eugene

The grand vizier had sent the Austrians a summons to surrender their fortress. He never got an answer. At seven the next morning the imperial army came out of its trenches, and by noon the vizier was dead, his army was streaming back toward Belgrade, and his tents, guns and treasure belonged to Prince Eugene. Petrovaradin was the first great blow of a war that ended the Ottoman hope of winning back Hungary.²

Background: a war to undo Karlowitz

Two decades earlier the Ottomans had lost Hungary. At Zenta in 1697 Prince Eugene destroyed the army of Sultan Mustafa II, and in 1699, by the Treaty of Karlowitz, the Porte gave up wide lands, among them the Morea, the Peloponnese, which went to Venice. The grand viziers who followed made it their aim to win those lands back.³ › Battle of Zenta, 1697

The Porte had reason for confidence. In 1711 the army of Sultan Ahmed III had trapped Peter the Great and his army on the Prut, a reminder that the Ottoman war machine could still beat a European great power.⁴

Under Ahmed III the next target was Venice. In 1715 the grand vizier Silahdar Damad Ali Pasha led an army into Greece and took the whole Morea from the Venetians in a single campaign. Austria could not stand by. On 13 April 1716 the emperor Charles VI concluded a defensive alliance with Venice, and Prince Eugene wrote to the grand vizier demanding that the Venetian lands be restored.⁵

Ali Pasha chose war. In April 1716 he set out at the head of a great army, which gathered at Belgrade, the frontier fortress where the Sava meets the Danube.⁶

Armies and commanders

Prince Eugene was then 52. Born in Paris in 1663, he had been refused a commission by Louis XIV and had gone to Vienna in 1683, where he fought in the relief of the city that summer. Since then he had beaten the Ottomans at Zenta and the French at Blenheim, Turin, Oudenaarde and Malplaquet. Britannica calls him one of the greatest soldiers of his generation.⁷

His army gathered in the early summer under the Hungarian general Count János Pálffy at Futak and Petrovaradin, and Eugene took command there in July. The sources agree on its size: the Turkish historian Abdülkadir Özcan gives the Austrians about 64,000 men, the British biographer G. B. Malleson some 65,000. On the Ottoman side the figures differ widely. Özcan writes of an army of more than 100,000 men; Malleson, following the Austrian accounts, of 200,000.⁸

Petrovaradin itself was a strong place. The Austrians had held the rock fortress on the right bank of the Danube since the 1680s and had rebuilt it; in 1694 an Ottoman army under the grand vizier had besieged the fortified camp in front of it for three weeks and gone home empty-handed. Eugene's army now occupied that fortified camp, a double line of entrenchments under the guns of the fortress.⁹

The battle in phases

The vizier's advance

In late July the Ottomans crossed the Sava and marched down the right bank of the Danube toward Karlowitz, a few miles from the fortress. On 2 August Eugene sent Pálffy forward with a mixed force of cavalry and infantry to reconnoiter, and it ran into a mass of Ottoman horsemen. Malleson puts them at 20,000, Wurzbach at 50,000; either way Pálffy was driven back to the fortress.¹⁰

The Ottomans followed him to within sight of the walls and dug in. Their camp was ringed with trenches and with their wagons and ammunition carts, and their batteries opened a heavy fire on the imperial lines. Confident in his numbers, the grand vizier sent Eugene a summons to surrender the fortress. Eugene decided instead to attack.¹¹

The attack at seven

On 4 August the two armies spent the day in an exchange of cannon fire. At seven in the morning of 5 August Eugene ordered the attack. On the imperial left, where the ground was open, the infantry of Prince Alexander of Württemberg and Pálffy's cavalry went forward against the Ottoman right; in the center the imperial infantry came out of the entrenchments against the Janissaries dug in opposite them.¹²

The decision came on the left. The imperial cavalry charged the Ottoman horsemen and chased them back into their own camp, and Württemberg's infantry, wheeling to its right, fell on the flank of the Janissaries in the center while the imperial infantry pressed them from the front. Baillieul's plan, engraved the same year, marks both moves in its key.¹³

The death of the grand vizier

Seeing his line breaking, Ali Pasha mounted and rode forward with drawn sword to rally his men. Özcan writes that by then only the palace cavalry and a few fief-holders were left around him; Malleson, that the Janissaries let him ride alone into the enemy. A bullet struck him, in the forehead by the Ottoman account, and he fell. With him went the last resistance.¹⁴

Turning point: the camp taken by noon

After about five hours of fighting, both Wurzbach and the Turkish encyclopedia agree, the battle was over, and before midday the whole Ottoman camp was in imperial hands: the tents, the treasury, the baggage and the guns, 164 of them by Wurzbach's count, 172 by Malleson's.¹⁵

The losses are told very differently. Wurzbach, writing in 1874, counts more than 26,000 Ottoman dead and wounded on the field; Malleson puts the Ottoman dead at about 6,000 and the imperial loss at just over 3,000. The Ottoman sources summarized by the Turkish encyclopedia speak only of heavy losses.¹⁶

Aftermath

Eugene did not stop. He marched on Temesvár, the great Ottoman fortress of the Banat, and opened the siege trenches on 1 September. The fortress surrendered in October, on the 6th by Wurzbach's date, and with it the whole Banat passed to Austria after some 164 or 165 years of Ottoman rule.¹⁷

The war went on into a second year. A new grand vizier, Halil Pasha, took command of the Ottoman army for the campaign of 1717, while Eugene spent the winter in Vienna preparing his.¹⁸

The next summer Eugene gathered his army at Petrovaradin again, crossed the Danube and laid siege to Belgrade. Trapped between the fortress and a relief army many times larger, with disease thinning his ranks, he attacked on 16 August 1717 in a battle begun in fog before dawn, routed the relief army, and the city surrendered. By the Treaty of Passarowitz, signed on 21 July 1718, the Porte gave up the Banat of Temesvár, Belgrade with northern Serbia and Little Wallachia, while Venice let the Morea go. Britain and the Dutch Republic, whose trade in the eastern Mediterranean the war had disrupted, had pressed for the peace, and an Austro-Ottoman commercial treaty was signed alongside it.¹⁹

Legacy and memory

Britannica counts Zenta, Peterwardein and Belgrade as the three victories by which Eugene secured Hungary from the Ottomans for good, and sees the Peace of Passarowitz as marking the end of Ottoman expansion to the west. Malleson draws the same line: the Porte was finally shut out of Hungary. For the Ottomans the defeat was a disaster remembered above all for the death of a grand vizier on the field.²⁰

The rock above the Danube kept its role as a frontier fortress. The Austrians went on rebuilding and enlarging it through the eighteenth century into the huge fortress that still stands opposite Novi Sad.²¹ › Battle of Slankamen, 1691

Visiting today

Petrovaradin is now a district of Novi Sad, the capital of Vojvodina in northern Serbia, joined to the city by bridges across the Danube. The Austrian fortress on its rock dominates the river bend, and the slopes in front of it, where the imperial army formed up in 1716, lie at its feet.²²