THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE 117Between 1683 and 1687 the disasters that befell the Ottomans caused
a tremendous internal disintegration. The Empire’s agricultural base suf-
fered from heavy conscription of men for the army. Serious shortages of
food resulted. Thousands of demoralized soldiers, fleeing the battlefields
to the north, turned to banditry. The losses of Hungary and Transylvania
stripped the Empire of much tribute. The occasional wise sultan, like
Suleiman II, could slow the disintegration, but not halt it.
At the same time that the Austrians were inflicting these disasters in
the northwest, the Russian threat was surfacing in the northeast. Peter the
Great (1689–1725) had built the Russian military into a coherent force
and marched south, taking Azov in 1696. The Russians had begun the
process of turning the Sea of Azov into a Russian lake. Before the century
had passed, the Russians would be trying to do the same to the Black Sea.
After years of short, disastrous reigns, in 1703 Ahmet III ascended the
Ottoman throne and would remain there until 1730. This might have been
an opportunity for an Ottoman recovery. The capable Ahmet faced a Eu-
rope tangled in the War of the Spanish Succession and the Great Northern
War, which gave his Empire a chance to sit back, reorganize, and rebuild.
The peace was short-lived however. A new and aggressive Russia joined
the Austrians as enemies of the Ottomans.
Peter the Great ended the Swedish threat to his kingdom at Poltava, and
on December 20, 1710, declared war on Turkey with promises of support
from the princes of Moldavia and Wallachia. The opposing armies met at
the Pruth River in Moldavia, and the Ottomans caught the Russian army
in a bad tactical and logistical situation. Peter the Great offered a nego-
tiated peace. The Ottomans, in equally precarious logistical straits, ac-
cepted this offer to negotiate on the basis of a return of conquered
territories and the surrender of their cannons as a prerequisite for talks.
The Treaty of Pruth, signed on July 23, 1711, returned the conquered
territories to the Ottomans and had the Russians destroy their frontier forts
and promise to abstain from further intervention in Ottoman affairs.
Having defeated the Russians, the Ottoman war party pushed to engage
Venice and recover Morea, a part of modern Greece. War was declared
on December 8, 1714. Morea was taken with little effort, but this Ottoman
success provoked Austria to renew its alliance with Venice and demand
full Ottoman withdrawal from their latest conquests. Thinking themselves
strong enough to deal with the Hapsburgs and reconquer Hungary, the
Ottomans expanded the war to new frontiers and quickly encountered new
disasters. The grand vizier, leading 100,000 men, was attacked and routed
by Eugene of Savoy at Peterwardin on August 5, 1715. Serbia was opened
up to Austrian invasion.