Battle of Zenta, 1697: Prince Eugene at the Tisza bridge

The Ottoman army lost its grand vizier, its guns and its treasury in a few hours of fighting at the end of a summer afternoon. It was the last great field battle of a war that had begun under the walls of Vienna fourteen years earlier, and it was won by a commander of thirty-three who had come to the emperor's service as a refugee from the court of Louis XIV.²

Background: a war fought back and forth across Hungary

The war began with the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683 and set the Ottoman Empire against the Holy League of Austria, Poland, Venice and Russia. Year after year the imperial armies pushed into Hungary and the Ottomans struck back, and by the mid-1690s neither side had forced a decision.³ › The Siege of Vienna, 1683

Mustafa II, who came to the throne in 1695, wanted to win back what had been lost since Vienna and resolved to lead his armies in person. His first two campaigns, in 1695 and 1696, brought gains against Austria. In 1696 the imperial army under the Elector of Saxony, Frederick Augustus, was beaten at Olaș near Timişoara, and the Habsburg position in southern Hungary looked weak.⁴ › Battle of Slankamen, 1691

Armies and commanders

Eugene was born in Paris on 18 October 1663, a son of the Count of Soissons and of Olympia Mancini, a niece of Cardinal Mazarin. Louis XIV wanted him for the church and refused him a commission, so the young prince left France for Vienna and offered his sword to Emperor Leopold I. He fought in the relief of Vienna in 1683, and fourteen years later the emperor gave him the army in Hungary.⁵

He took over in the summer of 1697, in July according to Mark C. Herman and at the end of June according to Malleson, and found the troops unpaid and badly supplied. Leopold told him to be careful; Abdülkadir Özcan's article on Mustafa II says Eugene had been given only a defensive task. He called in the scattered imperial corps, among them Prince Vaudémont's troops and Count Rabutin's men from Transylvania, and marched along the Tisza. Herman puts the united army at 50,000; the reports that reached the Ottoman camp, as the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam records them, spoke of 60,000.⁶

On the Ottoman side the sultan commanded in person, with Grand Vizier Elmas Mehmed Pasha at the head of the army. Mücteba İlgürel, his biographer in the TDV Encyclopedia, judges that he knew little of war, treated those around him harshly and paid little heed to advice. Estimates of the Ottoman army's size vary widely, and the sources used here do not agree on a figure.⁷

The campaign: a race along the Tisza

In August the Ottoman army gathered at Belgrade, where the sultan's council argued over the target. In the imperial camp most expected a blow at the fortress of Petrovaradin on the Danube. Instead the sultan crossed the Danube at Pančevo, marched to the Tisza and took the small fort of Titel from its garrison.⁸ › Battle of Petrovaradin, 1716

The Ottomans then turned toward Petrovaradin after all, and Eugene marched hard to cover it. When he arrived, the sultan's army changed direction again and set off north up the Tisza toward Szeged and Transylvania. A deserter told Eugene the move had been urged by the Hungarian rebel leader Imre Thököly, Malleson writes; the TDV Encyclopedia says the Ottomans hoped to join forces with Thököly's Hungarians. Eugene followed with his cavalry in front.⁹

At Zenta the Ottomans stopped to bridge the river. The TDV Encyclopedia counts 83 pontoons; Herman speaks of sixty boats. Across the bridge went the sultan, his household and the treasury. The sources disagree about who was left behind. Malleson writes that the whole infantry and the rest of the cavalry, with more than a hundred guns, were still entrenched on the near bank. The TDV accounts say the Janissaries, the sipahis and the artillery had gone over with the sultan, while the grand vizier, the commander of the Janissaries and other senior officers stayed behind with the provincial troops.¹⁰

The battle in phases

The prisoner. On the morning of 11 September Eugene's light cavalry captured an Ottoman pasha. Threatened with death, or with torture in the TDV account, he told them that the sultan and the baggage were across the river and that part of the army was still on the near bank. Eugene rode ahead with a small escort to see the camp for himself.¹¹

The approach. The army came up in battle order in the afternoon. The Ottoman position was a camp ringed by earthworks and a ditch, with a barricade of wagons close to the bridgehead. The imperial guns opened fire, and the general assault went in when only about two hours of daylight were left, Malleson writes; the TDV account dates the main attack to after six in the evening.¹²

The frontal attack. The defenders held. The TDV account describes two attacks on the second line and a third on a double barricade of wagons chained together, all thrown back under heavy fire. Malleson also writes that the imperial center and right were held for some time before the defense began to waver.¹³

Turning point: the sandbank

The decisive blow came from the imperial left. A sandbank ran along the edge of the river beside the end of the entrenchment. Troops of Eugene's left wing used it to get round the end of the Ottoman works and into their rear, Herman and Malleson write. Malleson credits the infantry of Guido Starhemberg; the TDV account describes cavalry under Prince Vaudémont striking from the Szeged side, where the Ottomans had not expected an attack and the earthworks were weakest.¹⁴

The defense came apart. The men in the camp ran for the bridge, crushed each other at the barricades around it and fell into the Tisza, and many drowned. The grand vizier tried to stop the flight and was killed in the rout, by his own mutinous soldiers according to Britannica and İlgürel. The imperial troops gave no quarter, and the killing went on after dark.¹⁵

Aftermath

The figures differ by source. Malleson counts about 20,000 Ottoman dead on the field and some 10,000 drowned, Herman gives 30,000 dead, and the TDV Encyclopedia notes that Austrian sources put the dead at around 30,000 while some Ottoman chronicles speak of 7,000 to 8,000. The dead included the grand vizier, several other viziers and the governor of Anatolia. Imperial losses were a few hundred: about 300 killed in Malleson's account, 28 officers and 401 men killed and more than 1,500 wounded in the figures given by the TDV Encyclopedia.¹⁶

The next morning the victors crossed into the abandoned camp on the far bank. They took all the Ottoman artillery, the treasury and thousands of horses and oxen, and with them the seal carried by the grand vizier. The sultan had already ridden away to Timişoara.¹⁷

Eugene did not march on Timişoara. Malleson writes that he judged the season and the marshy country unsuitable; the TDV account says the Austrians, who had losses of their own, did not risk a new attack. Instead he led a raid into Bosnia that autumn and reached Sarajevo, which was plundered and burned.¹⁸

The sultan gave the seal of office to Amcazade Hüseyin Pasha of the Köprülü family. Both empires were exhausted, and both governments wanted an end to the war. With English and Dutch mediation the delegates met at Karlowitz (Sremski Karlovci) on the Danube, and after 72 days of talks the treaties were signed on 26 January 1699.¹⁹

Austria received all of Hungary except the Banat of Temesvár, together with Transylvania. Venice kept the Peloponnese and most of Dalmatia, and Poland regained Podolia. Russia made only an armistice at Karlowitz and won Azov in a separate treaty in 1700. Britannica calls it the first time the Ottomans negotiated with a coalition of European states and admitted defeat.²⁰

Legacy and memory

Historians have treated Zenta as a hinge. Britannica says the victory made Austria the foremost power in central Europe, and Herman that it made Eugene a European hero against the Ottomans. Malleson, writing in 1888, called it the last and decisive blow of two centuries of war, after which the Ottomans would never again attack the emperor's lands but only defend what they held.²¹

On the Ottoman side, nearly all the sources blame the grand vizier, according to İlgürel. The defeat broke the sultan's own resolve: Britannica and Özcan both write that he turned away from affairs of state and gave himself to hunting. The TDV Encyclopedia's article on Zenta reports the view of some historians that the army would have escaped disaster had it dug in instead of trying to cross, since Eugene was not ready for a general battle and had meant mainly to relieve Szeged. In that reading, Zenta was a victory even Eugene had not expected.²²

Artists celebrated the victory at once: an engraved sheet of 1697 hailed Eugene as victor in Hungary, and in London, almost forty years later, George Bickham the Younger's print, the picture at the top of this page, still sold the battle as one of England's Glory, misdating it to 1696. Eugene went on to win at Blenheim, Turin and Belgrade, and his Ottoman victories, Britannica notes, secured Hungary for the Habsburgs once and for all.²³ › Battle of Blenheim, 1704

Visiting Senta today

Zenta is today the town of Senta in the Vojvodina province of northern Serbia, on the right bank of the Tisza. A monument to the battle stands in the town today.²⁴