Battle of Slankamen, 1691: the grand vizier falls

After the failed Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, the Habsburgs and their allies drove the Ottomans back across Hungary and deep into the Balkans. Louis William, Margrave of Baden-Baden, 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. In 1689 he won at Niš, and Serbia seemed to be conquered.²

The Ottomans then found a strong leader. In October 1689 Fazıl Mustafa Pasha, a son of the grand vizier Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, was given the seal of the grand vizier, as Abdülkadir Özcan writes in the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam. He repaired the treasury, reorganized the army and in the campaign of 1690 retook Niš, Vidin, Smederevo and, above all, Belgrade, pushing the imperial forces back across the Danube.³

The campaign of 1691

The grand vizier left Edirne on 15 June 1691. Before he reached Sofia he heard that Sultan Süleyman II had died and that Ahmed II had taken the throne; the new sultan kept him in office. At Belgrade a council of war advised him to wait for the Crimean Tatars and the provincial troops. He overruled it, crossed the Sava on a bridge to the Zemun side and took up a position between the fortified post of Slankamen and Petrovaradin.⁴

Louis of Baden had marched down from Osijek in mid-July, according to the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, and found the Ottoman entrenchments too strong to attack. He tried to lure the enemy into open country, moving toward Slankamen in short marches. The Ottomans followed and outflanked him. In Hans Schmidt's account in the Neue Deutsche Biographie, the margrave was now in a bad position: an enemy at least twice his strength stood entrenched on high ground across his line of retreat. Özcan adds that the margrave, short of food and with the road to Petrovaradin cut, attacked at once when he learned that the Tatars had not joined the vizier.⁵

The battle

The battle opened in the afternoon of 19 August. Neither army had a natural line of retreat, and the imperial troops were squeezed into a narrow field. Louis combined frontal attacks that pinned the Ottomans in place with a move around their flank. The ADB describes a bitter fight in which no quarter was given, and the margrave's own report admitted that the Ottomans had victory in their hands for more than an hour.⁶

The decision came on the Ottoman right. Louis put himself at the head of his cavalry regiments, which swung twice around that wing, and drove the Ottomans into wild confusion. In the center, as Özcan tells it, Fazıl Mustafa Pasha rode forward to steady his troops against the imperial attack and was struck by a bullet. His death broke the army, which scattered and fell back.⁷

The cost of victory

The imperial army took the Ottoman camp with its weapons, flags, cash chests, tents and pack animals. The grand vizier's body was never found, despite every search. The victory was dear: Schmidt writes that the margrave's army lost a quarter of its strength. Exact figures for either side vary widely between later accounts, and the biographies cited here do not give them.⁸

Emperor Leopold I rewarded Louis on 27 August 1691 with the rank of imperial lieutenant general, the highest military post in the empire, vacant since the death of Charles of Lorraine, and in 1692 he received the Order of the Golden Fleece. Schmidt calls Slankamen the greatest triumph of his career. The trophies he took in the Turkish wars, known as the Türkenbeute, are kept today in the Badisches Landesmuseum in Karlsruhe.⁹

Why Slankamen mattered

With Fazıl Mustafa Pasha, son and brother of earlier grand viziers, the Ottomans lost the reformer who had turned the war around in 1690. In Schmidt's judgment the Ottoman danger was removed for years, and Louis was soon sent to command on the Rhine against France. The war in the east settled into sieges and smaller campaigns until Prince Eugene's victory at Zenta in 1697 and the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699 ended it.¹⁰ › Battle of Zenta, 1697