Morean War

The Morean war (Italian: Guerra di Morea), 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 (Peloponnese) peninsula in southern Greece.

On the Venetian side, the war was fought to avenge the loss of Crete in the Cretan War (1645–1669). It happened while the Ottomans were entangled in their northern struggle against the Habsburgs – beginning with the failed Ottoman attempt to conquer Vienna and ending with the Habsburgs gaining Buda and the whole of Hungary, leaving the Ottoman Empire unable to concentrate its forces against the Venetians. 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.

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.^{[citation needed]}

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.

The Austrians and Poles considered Venetian participation in the war as a useful adjunct to the main operations in Central Europe, as its navy could impede the Ottomans from concentrating their forces by sea and force them to divert forces away from their own fronts. Other than that, the allies' esteem for Venetian capabilities was low, as the Republic's power was in evident decline; indeed it was precisely the retreat of Venetian influence in Italy and the Adriatic that enabled a rapprochement between Vienna and Venice, hitherto rivals in these areas. On the Venetian side, the debate in the Senate about joining the war was heated, but in the end the war party prevailed, judging the moment as an excellent and unique opportunity for a revanche. As a result, when news arrived in Venice on 25 April 1684 of the signing of the Holy League, for the first and only time in the Ottoman–Venetian Wars, the Most Serene Republic declared war on the Ottomans, rather than the other way around.

Nevertheless, at the outbreak of the war, the military forces of the Republic were meagre. The long Cretan War had exhausted Venetian resources, and Venetian power was in decline in Italy as well as the Adriatic Sea. While the Venetian navy was a well-maintained force, comprising ten galleasses, thirty men-of-war, and thirty galleys, as well as auxiliary vessels, the army comprised 8,000 not very disciplined regular troops. They were complemented by a numerous and well-equipped militia, but the latter could not be used outside Italy. Revenue was also scarce, at little more than two million sequins a year. Venice received considerable subsidies from Pope Innocent XI, who played a leading role in forming the Holy League and, according to the historian Peter Topping, "nearly impoverished the Curia in raising subsidies for the allies".