On 18 September 1739, in the Grand Vizier’s camp near Belgrade, Wilhelm Reinhard von Neipperg concluded, for Emperor Charles VI, peace with the Ottoman Porte. The mediator is the French ambassador Louis Sauveur de Villeneuve. The instrument, one of the last international treaties drawn in Latin, closes the Austro-Turkish war of 1737–1739. It is not the Russian treaty signed in the same camp, nor the finalisation at Niš on 3 October.

The Habsburgs cede three lands gained at Passarowitz on 21 July 1718: the Kingdom of Serbia with Belgrade, the Banat of Craiova (Oltenia, Little Wallachia) and the Bosnian stretch of the Posavina. The new line runs along the Sava and the Danube. The Banat of Temesvár remains Habsburg. The left bank of the Danube and Sava, on the Hungarian side, remains Austrian; the fortress of Böğürdelen (Šabac), on the Sava, remains with the Porte.

Belgrade passes to the Porte. The fortifications, batteries, magazines and suburb wall built by the Austrians after 1718 are to be demolished; guns, ammunition and stores remain with the evacuating garrison. The German Vienna print of the imperial exemplar is titled Definitif Friedens-Tractat and bears the date of the Ottoman camp.

Preliminaries had been initialled on 1 September. Meanwhile Vienna had revoked Neipperg’s negotiating powers, but the news arrived after the signature. The battle of Grocka, 21–22 July, is Wallis’s defeat, not the peace. The convention of Constantinople of 28 December is the later exchange of instruments, again under French mediation, not this treaty.

This is not Karlowitz of 1699, not Passarowitz of 1718, not Sistova of 1791 and not the Russo-Ottoman articles on Azov, Kabarda and the Black Sea. Neipperg and Wallis were arrested on their return; they were freed after Charles VI’s death in 1740. The next Habsburg occupation of Serbia is the war of 1788–1791, not a clause here.

Plan of Belgrade in the year of the cession to the Porte. Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

For context: Treaty of Belgrade. The printed text: Der Definitif Friedens-Tractat, 18 Septemb. 1739.