Many bloody battles, however, occupying a considerable period of time, had to be fought before the Moslem oppressors were entirely swept away from Hungarian territory. Duke Charles marched to the southern parts of Hungary and destroyed the Turkish army near Mohács, there, where 161 years before the Hungarian army had been annihilated by the Moslems. Soon after, Transylvania, too, passed under the supremacy of the king of Hungary. All the principal fortresses and towns were successively occupied by the royal troops, and when, in 1691, a Turkish army numbering 100,000 men was sent again to Hungary by the Sublime Porte, they were completely routed near Szalánkemén. It was one of the most sanguinary battles of that century; the grand-vizier himself, the aga of the Janissaries, seventeen pashas, and 20,000 Turkish soldiers lost their lives during the engagement. During a few years succeeding this great battle, lesser engagements only were fought, but hostilities never ceased. In 1697, however, Duke Eugene of Savoy, the “noble knight” and illustrious general, assumed the commandership of the royal forces. In the battle near Zenta he utterly annihilated, after a contest of two hours, a Turkish army led by Sultan Mustapha II., inflicting frightful losses upon the enemy; 10,000 Turks met their death in the waters of the Theiss, 20,000 were killed, and among the dead were the grand-vizier, 4 pashas, and 13 begler beys. These successive disasters and the frightful loss of men, amounting to many hundreds of thousands in the course of the fifteen years of warfare, finally prevailed upon the sultan to accept the terms of peace proposed by Leopold I. The treaty of peace was signed at Carlowitz in 1699, and under its terms Transylvania and the greater part of the Hungarian territory was restored to the king of Hungary by the sultan, but a smaller portion, lying between Transylvania and the Theiss, the ancient county of Temes, was still permitted to remain in Turkish hands. The court of Vienna, instead of attempting to regain the remaining territory, elated by the recent military successes, again renewed its attacks upon the nationality of the Hungarians and their ancient liberties, which it had always looked upon with decided dislike, and the complete subversion of which it now attempted. The nobility, weary of the absolutism of the court, combined at last with the peasantry, who had suffered severely under the lawlessness and illegal exactions of the soldiery, to raise the standard of rebellion, under the lead of Francis Rákóczy II. The great national struggle for liberty was initiated by electing Rákóczy king of Hungary and Transylvania, and, very soon, the Kurucz troops roamed as far as Austria. Later on, however, the fortunes of war changed, and Rákóczy retired to Poland hoping to obtain aid from the Russian Czar Peter the Great. During his absence he entrusted one of his generals, Alexander Károlyi, with the