Ahmad II Jalayirid (1689-1703) - part 2.
It is said that the tactic the Jalayirids followed in the subsequent war was ordered by the young Ahmad II himself (who, while being frail of body, showed great talent for strategy already at a young age). Whether this is true is impossible to find out now, but what is certain is that it played out extremely well for the Jalayirids.
While dramatically expanding their army size in the first few months of the war, the Jalayirids ruthlessly scorched the lands near the border with Austrian Analtolia, and then allowed the Austrians to enter these provinces, which they did en-masse.
In combination with the winter, this resulted in massive supply problems for the Austrians, which caused their large advance army (36,000 strong) to dwindle to easy-to-handle proportions. In the battle of Armenia, fought between the talented Qasim Sa'id and the mediocre Michael von Riedesel, the Austrians were heavily outnumbered and handily defeated.
The remnants of the army were then easily mopped up by Hasan Jahagir.
In August of 1690, the Jalayirids signed a peace treaty with Great Britain in which they made some concessions that amounted to nothing but a slight loss of prestige.
An unexpected added effect of this peace treaty was that now, the Venetians were free to come to their ally Austria's aid, thus declaring war on the nation that had been their war ally only days earlier.
The destruction of the Austrian advance army was only a prelude for what was to come, as many more Austrians were making their way to the East. These started arriving in Anatolia in the Fall of 1690.
The focus of the war now split up into two fronts: a Western one, concentrated in Southeast Anatolia and Northern Syria, and an Eastern one, which was fought in, and North of, the Caucasus.
In both regions, the Jalayirids tried to employ the same scorched-earth tactic as before and in the West, the Austrians made the same mistakes as before. They, along with Venice, eagerly poured troops into the province of Mus and started a siege, while Hasan Jahagir (Commander in the West) stood by and watched the Austrian numerical superiority slowly melt away.
In the East, Qasim Sa'id was less successful in employing this tactic, as, while he was retreating from Astrakhan, he was caught off-guard by an Austrian army traveling through Bohemia and forced to battle a much larger force than his own, because the delay caused by battling the forces from Bohemia allowed Qasim's pursuers from Dagestan to catch up and join the battle.
He made up for his mistake by winning a devastating victory over an enemy that outnumbered him by more than 2 to 1.
Meanwhile, in the West, Hasan Jahagir managed to defeat the now seriously depleted Austro-Venetian forces in Mus in July 1691, and repeated this trick in September.
However, he was never able to fully capitalize on his advantage because of Austrian reinforcements and had to pull back when regrouped Austro-Venetians moved back into the province by the end of September.
In the East, the Austrians sent Franz Stefan von Hatzfeldt to the North to defeat Qasim Sa'id, who had just arrived back in Astrakhan after destroying the remnants of his earlier opponents in Bersh.
Qasim easily tore von Hatzfeldt's army to shreds and destroyed him in Dagestan in January 1692. Von Hatzfeldt did not live to tell the tale.
This proved to be the turning point in the East: from now on, the Austrians were outnumbered; this situation was augmented some more when two more armies were destroyed by Qasim and by Mahmud Jahagir, Hasan's younger brother, in the summer of 1692.
Meanwhile, by the Summer of 1692, the Austrians had moved into Northern Syria but had foolishly split up their army between the provinces of Aleppo and Hammah. Hasan Jahagir responded by combining his forces with those that had arrived from Egypt and then utterly destroyed both armies in two extremely one-sided battles (on July 3rd and August 21st, respectively).
He then moved North into Mus, and from there started the long process of occupying Austrian Anatolia.
In the East, things moved a bit slower: it took till the Fall of next year to destroy the last Austrian armies.