Maps
Introduction
Prologue: Ottoman Expansion in the Balkans
1 Hungary and Venice Defeated
2 The Ottoman Advantage: Advances in Slavonia, Croatia, and
Dalmatia
3 Diplomacy and Kleinkrieg
4 War by Consultation vs. War by Command
5 War in a Time of Peace
6 Two Wars and Three Borders
Conclusion
Glossary
Bibliography
James D. Tracy is emeritus professor of history at the University of Minnesota.
The Habsburg-Ottoman battle to dominate the Mediterranean world in
the 16th century has received considerable scholarly attention,
with many accounts portraying this as a ‘clash of civilizations.’
What has been overlooked was the fight for the Balkans. Tracy
remedies that with his portrayal of this three-way struggle for
Balkan ascendancy among the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, and the
Venetian Republic. Like a chess master, Tracy details the strategic
and military roles of the three powers and their proxies. He relies
extensively on Hungarian and Turkish sources and provides
considerable insight into these strategic attempts to dominate the
region. More significant was the role of the Venetian Republic,
which challenges a ‘clash of civilizations’ argument. Venetian
merchants, predominantly Christian, maintained good relations with
the Ottomans to preserve access to the spice markets, and La
Serenissima’s rulers often undercut Habsburg efforts to launch a
crusade against Islam. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division
undergraduates through faculty.
*CHOICE*
Tracy's . . . greatest contribution [is] to assemble an
extraordinary array of information on a military frontier 600 miles
long running from the Adriatic through Croatia and Hungary as far
as Ukraine. This is the story of the Habsburg Province of Croatia,
the Ottoman Province of Bosnia, and Venetian Province of Dalmatia
in their common experience of war from 1527–1618. . . . [T]he quite
remarkable aspect of Tracy's narrative is its extraordinary
generosity and excavation of decades of scholarship by Habsburg,
Hungarian, Italian, and Ottoman military historians. . . . Tracy
eschews the sensational exemplified in the clash of civilizations
binary, preferring to describe a clash of two fundamentally
different systems of government, the one autocratic and arbitrary;
the other composite and consultative.
*Austrian Studies News Magazine*
James D. Tracy’s book mixes old and new perspectives in a
comprehensive overview of the balance of power in the Western
Balkans from the mid-fifteenth century to the beginning of the
seventeenth. . . . Based on rich archival material. . . . Balkan
Wars is a valuable contribution to the history of Ottoman expansion
and Christian reactions during the sixteenth century. By focusing
on a large border region, on its background, particularities and
challenges, Tracy offers a better understanding not only of the
Ottoman, Habsburg and Venetian policy but also on the role played
by Bosnia, Croatia and Dalmatia in each imperial system.
*European History Quarterly*
The liveliest debate is likely to be provoked by Tracy’s argument
that there was, if not quite a conflict of civilizations in the
early modern Balkans, at least a conflict of governing styles. . .
. The implicit judgement that “government-by-consultation”
eventually outperformed “government-by-command” (albeit by adopting
a few of the latter’s techniques) will no doubt give rise to
further discussion, a valuable outcome of Tracy’s work in
redirecting attention to an underexamined region.
*Sixteenth Century Journal*
Balkan Wars provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of
the strategic thinking and operational realities that accompanied
the Ottoman advance into southeast Europe in the sixteenth century.
It is based on a wide range and depth of sources, giving emphasis
to the sources available in Western languages, but by no means
excluding the Ottoman perspective, which is conscientiously
reconstructed from a variety of first-hand sources available in
translation from Ottoman texts. The book is organized around a
regional analysis with detailed coverage of Bosnia, Dalmatia, and
Croatia, which formed the borderlands as well as the conflict zone
situated in the interstices between major states and empires. As
such it provides a welcome alternative to the Istanbul- and
Vienna-centered political narrative, courtly apologetics, and
triumphalist tone that has all too often tainted previous studies
on sixteenth-century European conflict in the age of imperial
rivalry.
*Rhoads Murphey, Birmingham University*
James Tracy’s Balkan Wars is an impressive, even masterful, work of
historical reconstruction by an expert on early modern history who
brings a lifetime of expertise in the field to bear. Tracy has
distilled the complex situation on the Balkan frontier between the
Venetian, Ottoman, and Habsburg empires with great skill and
clarity. His contention that this region presents a clear example
of the so-called clash of civilizations challenges the dominant
historiographical narrative, which has sought to overturn this
binary model in favor of one that emphasizes the fluid nature of
relations in this period. The book will undoubtedly elicit
significant scholarly debate.
*Eric Dursteler, Brigham Young University*
An excellent overview of the Ottoman-Habsburg conflict in the
western Balkans at the beginning of the Early Modern period.
Drawing on rich archival sources, James Tracy makes an important
contribution to our understanding of the Habsburg and Venetian
region of the Balkans as a bulwark against the Ottomans. His book
will be the definitive English-language account of western Balkan
history in the sixteenth century for years to come.
*Géza Pálffy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest*
‘Could a monarchy obliged to respect local prerogatives compete
with an empire whose political arrangements offered no lawful
obstruction to commands from the top?’ This is the question the
distinguished historian James D. Tracy seeks to answer in his
detailed study of the struggles and conflicts, which occurred on
the frontiers between three Early Modern Empires, those of the
Habsburgs ruling in the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottomans, and the
Venetians.
*Journal of World History*
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