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The Habsburg Empire's grand strategy for outmaneuvering and outlasting stronger rivals in a complicated geopolitical world The Empire of Habsburg Austria faced more enemies than any other European great power. Flanked on four sides by rivals, it possessed few of the advantages that explain successful empires. Yet somehow Austria endured, outlasting Ottoman sieges, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. A. Wess Mitchell tells the story of how this cash-strapped, polyglot empire survived for centuries in Europe's most dangerous neighborhood without succumbing to the pressures of multisided warfare. He shows how the Habsburgs played the long game in geopolitics, corralling friend and foe alike into voluntarily managing the empire's lengthy frontiers and extending a benign hegemony across the turbulent lands of middle Europe. The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire offers lessons on how to navigate a messy geopolitical map, stand firm without the advantage of military predominance, and prevail against multiple rivals.
Notwithstanding the spectacular upswing in the research, there are areas of Ottoman slavery that have still not received the attention they deserve. This volume intends to take a step towards bridging this gap. The twelve studies it contains are organised around connected themes: the hunt for, the trade in and the treatment of captives in the Balkans and in Central Europe. The area under scrutiny is focussed on Hungary, and some other border regions extending from the Crimea to Malta. It offers both an analytic and synthetic approach based on a great deal of so far unpublished Ottoman and European archival material. It not only examines Christian slavery in the Ottoman Empire, but also provides greater insight into the tribulations of Ottoman slaves in the Christian world and sheds light on the devastating effect of captive-related transactions on trade and sometimes on the financial position of whole communities.
The Central European military frontier in the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries hides a treasure of military history information. This collective volume provides a fascinating overview to scholars and students interested in the paradigms of the history of frontiers, of imperial structures, and of early modern state finances. The first part of the book examines the birth and development of the Hungarian and Habsburg defence systems from their origins until their dissolution in the early eighteenth century. The second part focuses on the Ottoman military establishment in Hungary. Special emphasis has been put throughout on administration, finance, manpower problems, and aspects of the military revolution in the marches. The book is unique in its complex and comparative approach; no similar effort has yet been made concerning other areas of the Ottoman Empire.
Eine von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft getragene Forschergruppe an der Universität Regensburg untersucht seit einigen Jahren im Rahmen einer Neuen Militärgeschichte "Formen und Funktionen des Krieges im Mittelalter". Im März 2004 wurde auf einer international und interdisziplinär ausgerichteten Fachtagung, organisiert von Mitgliedern der Regensburger Forschergruppe zusammen mit dem Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, versucht, traditionelle Epochengrenzen, wie sie zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit nach wie vor bestehen, zu überwinden. Die Tagungsbeiträge werden in diesem Band veröffentlicht.
Explore the epic conflict and contrasting leadership styles of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Albrecht von Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland, two titanic figures in the Thirty Years War whose strategic brilliance and dramatic deaths shaped the course of modern warfare, analyzed in vivid detail by the author. The conflict, personal rivalry and contrast in personality, generalship and command, between the two iconic commanders in the Thirty Years War, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden for the Protestant powers, and Albrecht von Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland. More than just commanders at the tactical level they were statesmen, military organizers and strategists on a continental scale. Both ...
This volume examines continuities and new developments in the conduct of warfare in early modern Eastern Europe from the early sixteenth century, when Ottoman imperial expansion reached the Danube and Crimea, to the late eighteenth century, when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned out of existence and Russia rolled back Ottoman power from Ukraine and Moldavia. Contributors include specialists in Russian, Polish, Ottoman, Habsburg, Cossack, and Crimean Tatar history. The essays engage military history understood in the broadest sense and treat such subjects as taxation, recruitment, the sociology and culture of officer corps, logistics, command-and-control, and ideology as well as technology and tactics. The volume aims at facilitating comparative study of Eastern European military development across Eastern Europe and its points of divergence from military practice in the West. Contributors are Virginia H. Aksan, Brian J. Boeck, Peter B. Brown, Brian Davies, Dariusz Kupisz, Erik Lund, Janet Martin, Oleg Nozdrin, Victor Ostapchuk, Geza Palffy and Carol Belkin Stevens.
In War on the Eve of Nations: Conflicts and Militaries in Eastern Europe, 1450–1500, Vladimir Shirogorov examines how Eastern European armed forces produced critical geopolitical changes in the region. Analyzing the interactions between changes in warfare and the nation-building process, Shirogorov focuses on developments regarding the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Muscovy, Sweden, the Kazan Khanate, and Ottoman Turkey.
This title analyzes the ways in which empire builders interacted with the indigenous populations during colonization in the early modern period.
When looking at the early modern period (c. 1500–c. 1800), we often speak of "the military" or "the army". But what exactly do we mean when using these terms? The forms and structures of the armed forces have not only changed between 1500 and 1800, but also varied throughout different regions of the world and even within Europe. The contributors to this volume examine twelve early modern examples of armed forces in the Holy Roman Empire, Western and Eastern Europe, Eastern Asia and North America and paint a multifarious and even disparate picture during this period. The findings suggest that modern notions of the armed forces common in the early modern period should be used more prudently to avoid prevalent implications of non-existing continuity and uniformity.
In The Ottoman Threat and Crusading on the Eastern Border of Christendom during the Fifteenth Century Liviu Pilat and Ovidiu Cristea focus on less-known aspects of the later crusades in Eastern Europe, examining the ideals of holy war and political pragmatism. They analyze the Ottoman threat and crusading as political themes through a unifying vision based in the political realities of the fifteenth century and the complex relationship between crusading, Ottoman expansion, and the political interests of the Christian states in the region. Approaching the relationship between the borders of Christendom and crusading as a highly complex phenomenon, Pilat and Cristea introduce new elements to the image of Latin Christendom's frontier from the perspective of Catholic-Orthodox relations, frontier ideology, and crusading rhetoric in political propaganda.