Although the sea-power of the Turks suffered a serious reverse
at Lepanto (1571), their continued land advances provoked in
Christendom the liveliest apprehension throughout the seventeenth
century. After a twenty-five-years conflict they took Crete from
Venice. They subjugated to their dominion the Tatars and Russians
immediately north of the Black Sea. They exacted homage from the
princes of Rumania and Transylvania. They annexed Hungary. For a time
they received tribute from the king of Poland. In 1683 they laid siege
to the city of Vienna and would have taken it had not the patriotic
Polish monarch, John Sobieski, brought timely aid to the beleaguered
Austrians. That was the high-water mark of the Mohammedan advance in
Europe.
Thenceforth the Turkish boundaries gradually receded. An alliance of
Venice, Poland, the pope, and Austria waged long and arduous warfare
with the Ottomans, and the resulting treaty of Karlowitz, signed at the
very close of the seventeenth century, gave the greater part of
Hungary, including Transylvania, to the Austrian Habsburgs, extended
the southern boundary of Poland to the Dniester River, and surrendered
important trading centers on the Dalmatian and Greek coasts to the
Venetians.
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