page_title: Morean War
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Morean War / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of south-eastern Europe in 1672 AD.
context_page_description: The Morean War, also known as the Sixth Ottoman–Venetian War, was fought between 1684–1699 as part of the wider conflict known as the "Great Turkish War", between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire. Military operations ranged from Dalmatia to the Aegean Sea, but the war's major campaign was the Venetian conquest of the Morea peninsula in southern Greece. On the Venetian side, the war was fought to avenge the loss of Crete in the Cretan War, while the Ottomans were entangled in their northern frontier against the Habsburgs and were unable to concentrate their forces against the Republic. As such, the Morean War was the only Ottoman–Venetian conflict from which Venice emerged victorious, gaining significant territory. Venice's expansionist revival would be short-lived, as its gains would be reversed by the Ottomans in 1718.
context_section_description: Venice had held several islands in the Aegean and the Ionian seas, together with strategically positioned forts along the coast of the Greek mainland since the carving up of the Byzantine Empire after the Fourth Crusade. With the rise of the Ottomans, during the 16th and early 17th centuries, the Venetians lost most of these, including Cyprus and Euboea (Negropont) to the Turks. Between 1645 and 1669, the Venetians and the Ottomans fought a long and costly war over the last major Venetian possession in the Aegean, Crete. During this war, the Venetian commander, Francesco Morosini, made contact with the rebellious Maniots.  They agreed to conduct a joint campaign in the Morea. In 1659, Morosini landed in the Morea, and together with the Maniots, he took Kalamata. He was soon after forced to return to Crete, and the Peloponnesian venture failed.
  During the 17th century, the Ottomans remained the premier political and military power in Europe, but signs of decline were evident: the Ottoman economy suffered from the influx of gold and silver from the Americas, an increasingly unbalanced budget and repeated devaluations of the currency, while the traditional timariot cavalry system and the Janissaries, who formed the core of the Ottoman armies, declined in quality and were increasingly replaced by irregular forces that were inferior to the regular European armies. The reform efforts of Sultan Murad IV (r. 1623–1640), and the able administration of the Köprülü dynasty of Grand Viziers, whose members governed the Empire from 1656 to 1683, managed to sustain Ottoman power and even enabled it to conquer Crete, but the long and drawn-out war there exhausted Ottoman resources.
  As a result of the Polish–Ottoman War (1672–76), the Ottomans secured their last territorial expansion in Europe with the conquest of Podolia, and then tried to expand into Ukrainian territory on the right bank of the Dnieper River, but were held back by the Russians. The Treaty of Bakhchisarai made the river Dnieper the boundary between the Ottoman Empire and Russia.
  In 1683, a new war broke out between Austria and the Ottomans, with a large Ottoman army advancing towards Vienna. The Ottoman siege was broken in the Battle of Vienna by the King of Poland, Jan Sobieski. As a result, an anti-Ottoman Holy League was formed at Linz on 5 March 1684 between Emperor Leopold I, Sobieski, and the Doge of Venice, Marcantonio Giustinian. Over the next few years, the Austrians recovered Hungary from Ottoman control, and even captured Belgrade in 1688 and reached as far as Niš and Vidin in the next year. The Austrians were now overextended, as well as being embroiled in the Nine Years' War (1688–97) against France. The Ottomans, under another Köprülü Grand Vizier, Fazıl Mustafa Pasha, regained the initiative and pushed the Austrians back, recovering Niš and Vidin in 1690 and launching raids across the Danube. After 1696, the tide turned again, with the capture of Azov by the Russians in 1696 followed by a disastrous defeat at the hands of Eugene of Savoy at the battle of Zenta in September 1697. In its aftermath, negotiations began between the warring parties, leading to the signing of the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699.
caption: Map of south-eastern Europe c. 1670.
exif: {}