In cooperation with the University of Potsdam, the project, which is funded by the DFG, focuses on the illegal military cultures of violence of the Ottoman and Habsburg armies in the so-called Turkish Wars of 1683-1699 and 1714-1718 from a micro-sociological perspective.
While the Ottoman Empire increasingly lost its significance as a threat in the dominion of Vienna, the sense of threat in Ottoman Southeastern Europe towards its rivals steadily increased. It is, first of all, this change in consciousness against the background of changed military conditions that raises the question of the shaping of cultures of violence in a period of transformation. In structural-historical terms, the two wars fell in a period seen as the beginning of a phase in which the "modern state" increasingly appeared as an actor of violence. Homogenization and professionalization of the armed forces are defined as decisive features in this process. This raises the question of whether and to what extent the Ottoman Empire fits into this pattern and whether structural changes in the military sphere had an impact on the shaping of cultures of violence. Historical research has dealt with this transition process in Southeast Europe mainly in the sense of classical military and diplomatic history, so that the analysis of violent phenomena or the question of cultures of violence has hardly been dealt with in depth so far. Our research project thus intends to contribute to a closer intertwining of military history with historical research on violence within the framework of a history of empire and thus to strengthen the necessary interdisciplinary exchange.
Within the framework of this concept, a distinction is made between three spaces of violence, in which the perpetrators of violence and its victims, as well as the structures and mechanisms of violence defined as illegitimate, are investigated: Spaces of the actual battlefield, spaces of soldierly life, and spaces of civil societies, at least temporarily, directly affected by the war. In addition to the official documents in the state and military archives in Istanbul and Vienna, unofficial sources, such as first-person documents, tracts, chronicles, memoirs, folk poems or captivity diaries will be considered, which enable a micro-sociological analysis of the military cultures of violence.
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Last update: Mar 29, 2022