Reconciliation on the banks of the Danube : the Congress of Carlowitz (1698-1699) and the supracultural diplomatic practices of peace-making at the end of the seventeenth century

Abstract

The present thesis explores the inter-polity peace-making norms and practices during the lateseventeenth century through the first comprehensive analysis of the Peace Congress of Carlowitz (1698-1699), which ended the Sixteen Years’ War between the Ottoman Empire and a coalition of Christian powers, the so-called Holy League. It perceives reconciliation as a process that must pass through various determined phases to achieve completion and as a theatrical play containing specific and particularly choreographed acts. It equally contends that the Carlowitz Congress, the first genuinely multi-religious such diplomatic gathering of the early modern period, reveals the extent to which inter-cultural diplomatic encounters were primarily based on supra-cultural and long-established peace-making procedures and attests that congress diplomacy, far from being the cultural monopoly of a specific geographical area, was quickly supra-culturally appropriated and evolved as a practice across Europe during the second half of the seventeenth century.