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Rami Mehmed Efendi was chief of the Ottoman delegation at Karlowitz. Rami Efendi was a bureaucrat, the Reisülküttab, Chief of the Scribes, an office which was to evolve into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by the nineteenth century. Heretofore, negotiations between belligerents had been conducted on the battlefield by the sultan and grand viziers. The Ottomans, decisively defeated for the first time in two centuries, were no longer able to dictate terms unilaterally, and began a long period of adjustment to European-style diplomacy.

Thereafter, the following chapters will include a brief review of the major diplomatic and military concerns of a particular period, with select campaigns, and select questions about Ottoman strategies and organisation as the focus of discussion. Under-utilised Ottoman texts and an attempt to describe warfare from the ground up, whenever feasible, will enhance the better-known political and diplomatic narratives. For example, in discussing the 1737–39 Austro-Russian and Ottoman War, it seems appropriate to dwell on the Ottoman recuperative strengths and the nature of siege style warfare in the Balkans, in what proved to be the last great Ottoman war, and its illusionary triumph in the return of Belgrade.

Some long-term fiscal adjustment, and new taxation, however, can be traced over the period under discussion, at least until the disastrous 1787–92 war with Russia during the reign of Selim III. Bankruptcy faced Selim III, inhibiting the expansion of his ‘new order’ and accompanying economic reforms. Austria, meanwhile, reluctant partner of Russia INTRODUCTION throughout, withdrew from eastern adventures after the 1790 rapprochement of Prussia and Austria, and the signing of a Habsburg–Ottoman armistice.