History of Rijeka - Turkish Wars

Turkish Wars

Fiume by the 19th century had arisen as the most important port for the eastern half of the Habsburg empire, but its beginnings are modest: at the dawn of the modern age it was still a small port city, with less than 5000 inhabitants. The Kingdom of Croatia, with whom the city bordered along the eastern shores of its river, merged with the Kingdom of Hungary, after the disaster of the Battle of Mohács in 1526. Both kingdoms accepted the sovereignty of the Habsburgs to defend from the Turkish conquests. Following 1526, the stretch of territory south of Fiume and north of the Zrmanja river (called the Littoral) was held by the House of Austria - inheritor of the Crowns of Croatia and Hungary. Southwards, Venetian Dalmatia spread up to Cattaro. As such these lands were permanently put on a frontline, intended to bring to a halt the Ottoman advance that stopped short of the gulf of Quarnero.

Until the late 17th century, the Habsburg monarchy was essentially a landlocked territory: trade and traffic had followed the commercial routes to the North and Northwest, and Hamburg was the main port for Austrian products. When these routes became increasingly blocked by the growing Prussian state, the Monarchy started to turn towards its southern possessions. The trade of the City still languished since the Habsburgs retraced to Trieste all the Austrian exports, also because of the insecurity of land communications thorough Fiume.

Turkish attacks and intrusion in Croatia and the surroundings of Fiume, were particularly frequent from 1469 to 1502, helped by the near absence of any organised defence. The threat from the Ottoman Empire which kept the monarchy engaged in permanent military actions and in concluding coalitions with Christian allies and Venice was one of these. The northern Adriatic thus functioned as something as an Ottoman, Venetian, and Habsburg borderland’s littoral.

The border itself was a very fuzzy and mobile concept in the region for centuries: the Croatian Littoral and its hinterland were an integrated part of the Habsburg Military Frontier which was more than a defensive institution and marked all the stages of societal development in the area. Its principal characteristic was that the various fortresses were manned with regular and irregular troops for a permanent low intensity warfare which included raiding as its main source of revenues. Incursions of armed bands both form the Ottoman side the irregular Hajduks and Uskoks as well as the local Military Frontier troops (Grenzer) were conducted on a daily basis.

Probably no phenomenon describes the turbulent events in the area better than the rise of the Uskok’s piracy and banditry in the northern Adriatic. Uskoks served as irregulars in the Habsburg border garrison of Senj for a century. The Habsburg and the Pope celebrated their role as bulwark of Christendom, while for the Venetians (laics and priests alike) they were “bandits and pirates worse than the Turks and responsible for innumerable atrocities”. Fiume’s history is very much that of the Uskoks for much of the 16th century. In fact the City survived as a port of trade principally thanks to afflux of the merchandise they robbed. It was a world of precarious life and insecurity where trade degenerated into a raiding economy. Venetia, knowing that the Uskoks had Fiume as their main “emporium”, sacked and burned the City in 1530 in a punitive expedition. Uskok piracy aroused as a serious diplomatic problem between Austria and Venetia and was settled in 1612 with the Treaty of Vienna with whom the Emperor refused any support to the Uskoks.

The repeated attempts of Habsburg emperors to expand and enlarge the tiny fishing villages of the northern Adriatic into functioning ports had previously failed because of the domination of Venice that controlled the entire Adriatic and fiercely opposed the development of the Habsburg ports. Even that did not prevent a series of Venetian occupations and destruction of Fiume, from 1508 to 1512, 1530, 1599 and, finally, in 1612. The maritime traffic was reduced to cabotage, since the Serenissima controlled all ships leaving the ports. Habsburg emperors unsuccessfully tried to break this domination of the sea, claiming free shipping for all and formulating it in treaties and diplomatic agreements.

Only with the pacification of the Turks, which seemed realisable for the first time at the end of the 17th century, could new attempts be undertaken. At the end of the 17th century the Ottomans are defeated and with the Treaty of Karlovitz (1699) the Empire regains control over the vast plains of Vojvodina and Banat promptly put under the direct control of the Imperial Chamber (Kaiserliche Hofkammer) of Inner Austria with seat in Graz as the Imperial Regency, to finance the military needs against the Ottomans.