In vain a new Kiuprili was found to head the Turkish armies and to reform the Turkish State. A short gleam of success under his leadership was ended by his death in battle. In vain a Sultan, Mustapha II., again appeared himself at the head of his armies. The means of warfare of the Ottomans were to a great extent expended and lost beyond repair in the great disaster at Vienna. New enemies rose up against them in their weakness. Russia in the Ukraine, Venice in the Morea and in Dalmatia, began conquests at the expense of the Porte. The war indeed dragged on, delayed by the renewed contest between France and the Augsburg league; but the very weakness of Austria served merely to show more clearly the fallen fortunes of the Turks, who could make no lasting stand against her. Steadily upon the whole the fortunes of the Ottomans declined, though it was not till the great victory of Eugene at Zenta, in 1697, that they were driven reluctantly to treat. The peace signed at Carlowitz, in 1699, illustrates the altered relations of Europe since the beginning of the war, when the Turks had been a menace to Germany. For the first time, an European conference considered the affairs of Turkey. England and Holland were mediators of the peace, that the Emperor might be more free to act with them in the coming war of the Spanish Succession. Sobieski had nearly three years earlier become a memory, with his victories, his schemes, and his disappointments, in the grave; and with him ended the ever unstable greatness of Poland. Another yet more notable northern sovereign, Peter the Czar, was a party to the negotiations. Everywhere was territory rent from Turkey. To Austria, she yielded nearly all of Hungary and Transylvania, with most of the Sclavonian lands between the Save and the Drave; to Poland, she gave up Podolia; to Russia, Azof; to Venice, the Morea and parts of Dalmatia. One point she proudly refused to yield. The Hungarian Tekeli and his friends, who had sought her hospitality, were retained by her, safe from the vengeance of the Emperor; as in 1849 other Hungarian exiles were shielded by the Turks, against the vengeance of Austria and of Russia combined. This was the first peace which had permanently reduced the frontiers of the Ottomans; it marked the termination of the last of the great Mohammedan aggressions upon Christendom; it saw the end of the secret understandings by which, since the days of Francis I., France had endeavoured to use Turkey for the subversion of Austria and for the ends of her own ambition. The complete reversal of the former positions of the combatants, the disastrous termination of the war for Turkey, the "rolling away of the stone of Tantalus that hung above _their_ heads, the intolerable woe for the _Germans_",[27] the far-reaching results of the struggle in the future history of Europe--all are traceable to the day when the genius of Sobieski marked triumphantly, from the windy