Ottoman and Habsburg Military Afffairs in the Age of Süleyman the Magnifĳicent

Gábor Ágoston Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. [email protected]

From the mid-15th century through the early 18th century the Ottomans were an important player in European power politics, the only Islamic empire that challenged Christian Europe on its own territory. The Ottomans were a constant military threat to their Venetian, Hungarian, Polish–Lithuanian, Spanish and Austrian Habsburg neighbours and rivals. Ottoman expansion, itself a consequence of imperial ambitions and responses to geopolitical challenges, led to imperial rivalry with the Habsburgs in the Mediterranean and Hungary, and with the Safavids of Persia in Azerbaijan and Iraq. Ottoman conquests in the 16th century reshaped geopolitics in a vast area from Central Europe and the Mediterranean to Greater Syria, Egypt, and Iraq. By the middle of the 16th century the Ottomans consolidated their conquests against both their Habsburg and Safavid rivals, and the empire’s borders in Hungary saw only minor adjustments until the end of the 16th century. The fĳirst section of my study compares the sinews of power of the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy. In the second and third sections I address Ottoman and Habsburg military commitments. These sections show that the Ottomans enjoyed military superiority against their Habsburg rival during Süleyman’s reign. While the Habsburg Monarchy did not have a standing fĳield army until after the Thirty Years’ War, Ottoman military pressure in Hungary forced the Viennese government to establish along the Habsburg–Ottoman border in Hungary and Croatia a permanent border defence force, which could be considered the fĳirst permanent army of the monarchy. Since the Habsburg government fĳinanced, supplied and administered the anti-Ottoman border defence in Hungary and Croatia in cooperation with the Hungarian, Croatian, Bohemian and Austrian estates, the Ottoman challenge profoundly shaped the evolution of the Habsburg Monarchy’s military, fĳinancial and state institutions.

Sinews of Power

Süleyman’s successful war in Hungary against Ferdinand was due in large part to Ottoman superiority in resources and military power. By the early 16th century the Ottoman Empire emerged as a major military power in control of the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Black Sea littoral, the eastern Mediterranean, and most of the Middle East. While modern sociologists do not consider the Ottoman Empire a world power, for it could not claim to be a seaborne empire, for contemporary Europeans it seemed “the most powerful” empire.1 The Ottoman Empire held this image by virtue of its geopolitical situation, its enormous territory and population, its wealth of economic resources, and a central and provincial administration capable of mobilizing these resources to serve the interests of the House of Osman. The vast empire of the Habsburgs possessed human and economic resources comparable to that of the Ottomans. However, unlike Süleyman’s territorially contiguous “well protected domains”, the Habsburg brothers ruled over a discontinuous empire with territories loosely arranged and scattered all over Europe and overseas. The division of the Habsburg domains into a Central European Habsburg Monarchy and a Spanish Empire further limited the resources available for fĳighting the Ottomans in the Danube basin. Ferdinand – the Ottomans’ main antagonist in Central Europe – possessed only limited resources. In the words of one scholar, Ferdinand’s Central European monarchy was “not a ‘state’ but a mildly centripetal agglutination of bewilderingly heterogeneous elements.”2 Although geographically contiguous, the Austrian Habsburg lands were much smaller than Süleyman’s domains. The territories under direct rule of the Austrian Habsburgs had shrunk from about 450,000 square kilometres in the 1520s to about 350,000 square kilometres by the 1550s. Counting the territories of the Holy Roman Empire (estimated at 500,000 square kilometres), the geographical extension of the Austrian Habsburgs reached only about one third of that of Süleyman, whose realm by the end of his reign had grown to 2.3–2.5 million square kilometres. The population of Ferdinand’s Central European realms around 1550 is estimated to have been about 6.5 million, which was only about half of the estimated 12–13 million people who inhabited Süleyman’s domains in the early years of his reign. Charles V’s three wealthiest lands (Castile, the Kingdom of Naples, and the

1 Lucette Valensi, The Birth of the Despot: Venice and the Sublime Porte. Ithaca, 1993, 24–29. 2 Robert J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700: An Interpretation. Ox- ford, 1979, 447.