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

Silahdar Damad Ali Pasha was the most powerful man in the Ottoman Empire after the sultan. Abdülkadir Özcan's article on him in the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam traces his rise: a palace page who became sword-bearer to Ahmed III, married the sultan's daughter Fatma in 1709 and became grand vizier in April 1713. Like the viziers before him, he meant to win back what the Treaty of Karlowitz had given up in 1699, and in 1715 he took the Morea from Venice in a single campaign.²

Venice then allied with Austria. Prince Eugene of Savoy, whom Özcan calls Austria's chief minister, wrote to Ali Pasha demanding that the Venetian lands be returned and warning that the peace could be broken. The grand vizier chose war. When an opponent in council objected that it was unlawful to break the peace before blood had been shed, Ali Pasha answered, as Özcan reports, that the infidel had already seized them by the collar, and sent him into exile.³

To Petrovaradin

Ali Pasha set out with an army of more than 100,000 men in April 1716. At a council of war in Belgrade, the TDV articles relate, the Janissary agha Hüseyin Agha proposed crossing the Danube toward Timişoara and drawing the Austrians that way. At the urging of Sarı Ahmed Pasha, governor of Rumelia, the grand vizier instead ordered a march on Petrovaradin, the fortress on the Danube where the Austrian army was waiting. Özcan gives the Austrians about 64,000 men.⁴

Eugene had left Vienna for the front on 1 July, writes Constantin von Wurzbach in his Biographical Lexicon of the Austrian Empire, and joined the army gathered at Futak; on 27 July he moved to Petrovaradin. In a reconnaissance skirmish the Hungarian commander Count János Pálffy was driven back by, in Wurzbach's figure, 50,000 Turks, who then camped facing the imperial troops before the fortress and even summoned it to surrender. Eugene decided to attack.⁵

A day lost

The Ottoman army crossed to the Zemun side with guns taken from the fortress of Belgrade, but Özcan writes that it was short of artillery and ammunition. In council some urged an immediate attack. Sarı Ahmed Pasha argued that the army was tired, and the next day he again held the troops back in their trenches. The camp was ringed with trenches and ammunition wagons. When reports came that the Austrians were withdrawing, Ali Pasha waited still longer; it was rumored, Özcan adds, that he was waiting for the court astrologer to name a favorable hour for the attack. The day passed in an exchange of cannon fire.⁶

At seven in the morning of 5 August Eugene ordered the attack. The battle lasted about five hours, according to both Wurzbach and Bekir Gökpınar's TDV article on Petrovaradin, and by noon it ended in a heavy Ottoman defeat.⁷

The death of the grand vizier

When the commander of the Ottoman right wing, Türk Ahmed Pasha, was killed, Ali Pasha mounted and rode forward with drawn sword to rally the troops. Özcan writes that by then only palace cavalry and a few fief-holders were left around him. The chronicler Silahdar Mehmed Agha, who knew him, records that the grand vizier rode up to the Janissary tents shouting for his men, and was told that he had left no soldiers worth the name. A bullet struck him in the forehead, and he died.⁸

His body was carried to Belgrade in the treasurer's provisions wagon and buried beside the mosque of Süleyman the Magnificent in the fortress; a tomb was built over it after the Ottomans retook Belgrade in 1739. Özcan notes the story, told by the historian Hammer, that when the Austrians took Belgrade again some seventy years later they carried his bones to Vienna as a trophy.⁹

The year of Petrovaradin

Wurzbach lists the spoils: the whole Ottoman camp, 2,000 camels and horses, 1,000 loaded wagons, 20,000 oxen, 164 guns and mortars, five horse-tail standards and 150 flags, with more than 26,000 dead and wounded on the field. These are nineteenth-century Austrian figures, and the Ottoman sources summarized in the TDV speak only of great losses. Gökpınar adds that Ottoman chroniclers came to call the disaster simply the year of Petrovaradin.¹⁰

Eugene turned at once on Temesvár. The trenches were opened on 1 September, and on 6 October the fortress surrendered, bringing the whole Banat under Austrian rule after 165 years of Ottoman government, Wurzbach writes. The next summer Eugene again gathered his army at Petrovaradin and won the great battle of Belgrade on 16 August 1717. The Peace of Passarowitz of 21 July 1718, Wurzbach notes, then ended the fighting for sixteen years.¹¹