The Baroque Age (1648-1792) in Germany : Wars with the Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman threat from the east had been effectively checked since the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. By the middle of the 17th century, however, the destruction of the Thirty Years’ War had made the empire’s eastern frontiers again vulnerable. Ottoman forces invaded Hungary in 1663, but imperial troops managed to defeat them and win a 20-year truce. France’s Louis XIV and the Hungarians, both eager to check the Habsburgs, encouraged Ottoman aggression against them. When the truce expired, the Ottomans besieged Vienna in 1683. Imperial troops, combined with those of Jan III Sobieski of Poland, rescued the city, and the Ottomans were driven beyond the Danube. As a result, Austria compelled Hungary to recognize the Habsburg right to inherit the Hungarian crown. The Ottoman wars continued until the brilliant general Prince Eugene of Savoy led imperial troops to victory at Senta in northern Serbia in 1697. By the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, the Habsburgs regained most of Hungary from the Ottomans.

The country, ravaged and greatly depopulated due to the conflict, was resettled with German veterans, and imperial authority from Vienna was imposed.

By 1740 the German states of Austria and Prussia had emerged as the chief rivals for dominance in central Europe. Austria had been the core territory of the Habsburg family since the 13th century. The Habsburgs had built their power and land by acquiring territory through diplomacy and dynastic marriages and had become one of the most powerful states in Europe by the beginning of the Reformation. However, religious and dynastic wars, Ottoman invasions in the 17th century, and growing conflict with Prussia had weakened the state by the early 1700s. Encarta