Following a two-month congress between the Ottoman Empire on one side, and the
Holy League of 1684– a coalition of the
Holy Roman Empire (HRE), the
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the
Republic of Venice, and
Peter the Great– the
tsar of Russia, a peace treaty was signed on 26 January 1699. The Ottomans retained
Belgrade, the
Banat of Temesvár (now
Timișoara), as well as suzerainty over
Wallachia and
Moldavia. Negotiations with the
Tsardom of Russia went on for a further year, under a truce agreed at Karlowitz, and culminated in the
Treaty of Constantinople of 1700, in which the Sultan ceded the
Azov region to
Peter the Great. (Russia had to return the territories eleven years later after the failed
Pruth River Campaign and the
Treaty of the Pruth in 1711.) Commissions were set-up to demarcate the new borders between the Austrians and the Ottomans, with some parts disputed until 1703. Largely through the efforts of the Habsburg commissioner
Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, the Croatian and
Bihać borders were agreed-upon by mid-1700, and the borders at Temesvár by early 1701, leading to a border that was marked by physical landmarks for the first time. The acquisition of around of Hungarian territories at Karlowitz, and of the
Banat of Temesvár 18 years later by the
Treaty of Passarowitz, made the
Habsburg monarchy the dominant regional power in Central Europe. The treaty was a watershed moment in the history of the Ottoman Empire, which, for the first time,
lost substantial amounts of territory after three-and-a-half centuries of expansion in Europe. Although the Ottoman borders in the region would wax and wane over the next 100 years, there was no further acquisition of territory on a scale seen during the reigns of
Mehmed the Conqueror,
Selim the Grim, or
Suleiman the Magnificent in the 15th-16th centuries. Indeed, after the mid-1700s, the Ottomans were largely confined to the south of the
Sava River and the Balkans proper. == Maps and images ==