Only a quarter of the Empire's troops actually faced the Turks in 1695
From 1683 to 1699 the Ottoman Empire fought a papal-backed Holy League that joined the Habsburg-led Empire with Venice, Poland-Lithuania, Hungary and Russia. It ended at Karlowitz with the first major Ottoman loss of territory, a defeat Ottoman writers called the Disaster Years, and the West's attention was split the whole time.
The defeat was historic. For the first time the Ottomans gave up large territories, in Hungary, in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and across part of the western Balkans, and Russia entered an alliance with Western European states for the first time too. German speakers named the conflict the Great Turkish War; others called it the Last Crusade or the Fourteenth Crusade, since the papacy backed the League.
France stayed out, having quietly revived an informal partnership with the Ottomans in 1673 in return for recognition of Louis XIV as protector of Catholics in Ottoman lands. Louis first exploited the Habsburgs' distraction to grab Luxembourg in the War of the Reunions, then accepted the Truce of Ratisbon in 1684, judging it unseemly to fight the Empire while it battled the Turks. Once the League took Belgrade in 1688, though, France feared a Habsburg rival grown too strong and besieged Philippsburg on 27 September, sparking the Nine Years' War.
That western war sucked away imperial strength. Early on the Ottomans had to split their forces, stationing about 60,000 men against the Empire, 37,000 against Poland-Lithuania, 35,000 against Venice and a smaller body facing Russia, which joined in 1687. But with the Habsburgs now fighting France, the League's advance stalled and the Ottomans recaptured Belgrade in 1690. At the peak in 1695 the imperial states had 263,000 troops in the field, of which only 74,000, roughly a quarter, faced the Turks. Across 1683 to 1699 they averaged 88,100 men against the Ottomans, against about 127,410 on average fighting France between 1688 and 1697.
Stalemate followed until 1697, when an Ottoman bid to recover Hungary was smashed at Zenta, opening the way to peace two years later. The roots stretched back decades. After Bohdan Khmelnytsky's uprising, Russia took Commonwealth lands in what is now eastern Ukraine in 1654, and the Cossack leader Petro Doroshenko, seeking Ottoman protection, attacked the Polish commander John Sobieski in 1667.
Source: Great Turkish War
