The Last Muslim Conquest

Reviewed by: The Last Muslim Conquest: The Ottoman Empire and its Wars in Europe by Gábor Ágoston Douglas Howard Gábor Ágoston. The Last Muslim Conquest: The Ottoman Empire and its Wars in Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. 688 pp. Paperback, $39.95. ISBN: 9780691159324. Gábor Ágoston's new book is an outstanding, highly readable study of the Ottoman military, a calm defense of the emphasis on Europe and on conflict on the European frontier in Ottoman historiography, and a work of deeply informed, mature scholarship. This is very good history and, I need to emphasize, supported by excellent maps. The only thing of comparable breadth in Ottoman studies is Virginia Aksan's Ottoman Wars, and taken together, these two books give us a thorough understanding of Ottoman military history from its beginnings until the eve of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78. It would be a mistake to regard this book (or Aksan's) as military history only, for it is a history of the Ottoman Empire seen with its military capacities in the forefront. Part III, "Sinews of Empire," shows this especially well. This substantial section of the book (265–403) analyzes how the Ottoman military worked, describing its institutions of recruitment, its structures of war financing, its intelligence gathering, and its effective diplomacy. Ágoston argues that the success of the Ottoman Empire over several generations was built upon the superiority of its financial and manpower resources, on the deployment of available technology, on skillful use of military tactics such as the tabur or wagenberg in key battlefield encounters, and on powerful social institutions, especially the provincial structure of the timar institution and the kul-based standing army of the palace. The book avoids cliches and simplistic interpretive shortcuts such as "classical age," and "decline," and instead demonstrates perpetual change over time. "The Ottoman military," Ágoston writes, "developed gradually and continually adjusted to the needs of different tactical environments" (283). Among other interesting arguments he settles in the book, Ágoston persuasively demonstrates that the Ottomans were involved in physical border demarcations long before the Karlowitz treaty. He stresses the importance in success and, later, in failure, of [End Page 370] the numerical superiority of the Ottoman forces, and the crucial role of strong leadership. At the end of the period covered, the disappearance of numerical advantage, and the elimination of five grand vezirs in the twenty years after the 1683 siege of Vienna (and within ten pages of the book, 494–504), is telling. One of the highlights of the book is Ágoston's ability to use the primary sources and the scholarly literature in both Turkish and Hungarian (besides other relevant languages). He gives an excellent description of the janissaries based on Kavanin-i Yeniçeriyan, for example; a good bit of the detail on Ottoman guns is based on his own primary research in the Ottoman archives; and his analysis of the Battle of Mohács (159–70) is informed by the Hungarianlanguage historiography. Ágoston is thus able to reconstruct the specifically central European setting of Ottoman history with a depth of insight not found in other Ottoman histories. The improved understanding brought by Ágoston's knowledge of the Hungarian literature is displayed also in his discussion of the entry of the Habsburgs into Ottoman politics, from the first Habsburg King of Hungary, Albert (1437–39), to the treaty of Wiener Neustadt (1463), which set the stage for what happened after Mohács and the election of Ferdinand by one faction of the Hungarian nobility. The description of how this happened is one of the best passages in this book (170–78). And again, in the treatment of Transylvania, whose peculiar tributary relationship with the Ottoman government gets a short, lucid description (473), and where several lesser-known characters emerge in colorful detail. Friar George (George Martinuzzi, d. 1551), a former Paulist monk and "the most influential politician in eastern Hungary," defended Buda from Ferdinand in 1540, daringly outmaneuvered Emperor Ferdinand and Grand Vezir Sokollu Mehmed, and held castles that were the defensive keys to the whole region east of the Danube. Similarly, the schemes of György II Rákóczi

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