Battle of Slankamen, 1691: the grand vizier falls

Eight years after the Ottoman army was driven from the walls of Vienna, the war it had started still raged along the Danube. At Slankamen, where the Tisza flows into the Danube between Petrovaradin and Belgrade, the margrave of Baden fought the battle that made him the Türkenlouis of German memory, and the Ottomans lost the grand vizier who had turned the war around.²

Background

The Ottoman failure before Vienna in 1683 opened the Great Turkish War. The Habsburgs and their allies drove the Ottomans back across Hungary and deep into the Balkans. Louis William, Margrave of Baden-Baden, born in Paris in 1655, rose with these campaigns: he became general of cavalry in 1683, field marshal in 1686 and, in 1689, commander in chief of the imperial troops in the east, where he won at Niš that autumn.³

Then the Ottomans found a strong leader. In 1689 Fazıl Mustafa Pasha, the second son of the great grand vizier Köprülü Mehmed Pasha and brother of another, Fazıl Ahmed, was given the seal of the grand vizier. He reorganized the army and the finances, and in the campaign of 1690 retook Niš, Vidin, Smederevo and, above all, Belgrade, pushing the imperial forces back across the Danube.⁴

Armies and commanders

Both commanders had long experience of war and of court politics. Fazıl Mustafa, born in 1637 at Köprü in Anatolia, had served in his brother's campaigns before he was made a vizier in 1680 by his brother-in-law Kara Mustafa Pasha, the grand vizier who would fail before Vienna. After that disaster he had to step aside. In 1687 he helped depose Sultan Mehmed IV and raise Süleyman II to the throne, and then had to be sent away from the capital to escape the anger of the soldiers.⁵

Louis William had fought in the relief of Vienna in 1683 and in the campaigns that followed. In Schmidt's portrait he was a realist who did not hesitate to tell the emperor's advisers that he knew better, which won him no friends at court.⁶

The grand vizier set out from Edirne again in June 1691. On the road he learned that Sultan Süleyman II had died and that his brother Ahmed II had taken the throne; the new sultan kept him in office. At Belgrade he bridged the Sava and crossed to the Zemun side to meet the imperial army, which was marching down the Danube from Petrovaradin.⁷

Whether to fight at once was argued over in the Ottoman camp. In the account of Abdülkadir Özcan in the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, a council of war at Belgrade advised waiting for the Crimean Tatars and the provincial troops, and the grand vizier overruled it. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, whose history drew on the Ottoman chronicles, places the debate on the day of the battle itself: the commander of the household troops, the agha of the Janissaries and the old vizier Halil Pasha all voted for delay, and Fazıl Mustafa ordered the guns forward.⁸

The margrave had found the Ottoman lines too strong to attack and drew back toward Slankamen. The Ottomans followed and got round him, taking up a position between Slankamen and Petrovaradin that cut his road back. Hans Schmidt, his biographer in the Neue Deutsche Biographie, sums up the danger: an enemy at least twice his strength stood entrenched on high ground across his line of retreat.⁹ › Battle of Petrovaradin, 1716

The numbers are disputed. The Karlsruhe city lexicon, like Schmidt, says the enemy had the larger army. Özcan, writing from the Ottoman side, puts the imperial army at 100,000, which cannot be squared with the German accounts.¹⁰

The battle in phases

The battle was fought on 19 August 1691. Louis combined frontal attacks that pinned the Ottomans in place with a move around their flank. The fate of the Ottoman right wing would decide the day.¹¹

Turning point

The decision came on the Ottoman right. Louis put himself at the head of his cavalry regiments, which swung around that wing, and drove the Ottomans into wild confusion. The grand vizier fell in the crisis, and the sources tell it in different ways. Britannica has him shot while rushing to support his right wing; Özcan has him ride forward in the center to steady his troops against the imperial attack; Hammer-Purgstall, following the Ottoman chronicles, has him throw on a black jacket and charge sword in hand at the imperial barricades, where a musket ball struck him down.¹²

His death broke the army. It scattered and fled, and the imperial troops took the Ottoman camp with its tents, cash chests and guns. Fazıl Mustafa's body was never found, despite every search.¹³

Aftermath

The victory was dear. Schmidt writes that the margrave's army lost a quarter of its strength; according to Hammer-Purgstall, the imperial bulletins put the loss at five to six thousand men.¹⁴

Emperor Leopold I rewarded Louis on 27 August 1691 with the rank of imperial lieutenant general, the highest military post in the empire. Both Schmidt and the Karlsruhe city lexicon call Slankamen the greatest triumph of his career.¹⁵

For the Ottomans the defeat was a disaster. Britannica counts it among the heavy blows of Ahmed II's reign, which brought substantial losses of territory in Hungary. The war went on for years in sieges and smaller campaigns, and Louis himself left the east: from 1693 he commanded on the Rhine against France. The Peace of Karlowitz in January 1699 ended it.¹⁶ › Battle of Zenta, 1697

Legacy and memory

Fazıl Mustafa Pasha had held the seal for less than two years. Özcan describes a reserved, honest and devout man and a reformer who believed in the changes the state needed. Hammer-Purgstall records that the Ottoman histories gave him the name of the Virtuous and judged him no general but an outstanding statesman.¹⁷

Schmidt judged that Slankamen removed the Ottoman danger for years. For Louis William it was the peak of a career that ended in the long, cautious defense of the Rhine; he died at Rastatt in 1707, in the palace he had built there.¹⁸ › Battle of Vienna, 1683

The spoils of his Turkish campaigns, the Türkenbeute, are kept today in the Badisches Landesmuseum in Karlsruhe.¹⁹