30YearsWar: #7 - "Turkish Delights, Habsburg Disasters"

When Diplomacy Fails Podcast

Zack Twamley

Phd, International Relations, Korean War, European History, 17th Century, 18th Century, Politics, 20th Century, Thirty Years' War, History, 19th Century, War, First World War

4.8 • 773 Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2020

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Do you know what is truly delightful? My new historical fiction series, Matchlock! Matchlock is set during the Thirty Years' War, beginning in 1622, when Matthew Lock lands in Europe to investigate the brutal murder of his parents.

Order your copy of Matchlock and the Embassy by clicking here.

In this episode, we look at an oft-forgotten theatre of the Thirty Years War, the east. Specifically, we examine the Habsburg border with the Ottoman Empire, and assess the conflicts and slights which the two radically different powers had committed in previous years. The conflict wasn’t merely religious, or opportunistic or political – it was also a matter of pride, since both the Turkish Sultan and the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor laid claim to that banner of tradition: the inheritor of Rome. The Turkish Sultan had earned this by conquest, the Emperor through the Pope, but both argued fiercely that theirs was the more legitimate, and battle had a way of simplifying the question.

Interestingly, the urgency of war lends us some fascinating examples of realpolitik in the early modern era, as the enemy of my enemy is my friend was bought into wholly. While the Turks enjoyed healthy relations with all the traditional enemies of the Habsburgs, the latter were not above contacting the Islamic foes of the Sultan, Safavid Persia. With this border to the east effectively resembling a militarised wasteland, the Emperor would need every wile in his possession if he was to turn his attentions westward. In this episode, we examine how this balance was managed.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to When Diplomacy Fills' series on the 30 Years' War, and this is episode seven. In previous episodes, we've introduced rivalries which were bound to tear Europe asunder, and we also examined the major theatres. But something which we
0:56.5	haven't really talked about, a major omission from all of these stories, was the theatre in the
1:03.0	East, where the Ottoman Empire loomed large and terrifying. And for those of you unfamiliar with
1:10.0	the Ottoman Empire, first of all, you're missing out,
1:12.4	it's a very fascinating state in of itself, but it can be hard to imagine something as terrifying
1:19.0	and as all-encompassing as the Ottoman Empire. Particularly because of the lands that it occupied, coming out of modern day Turkey and extending
1:30.1	into the Balkans and south-eastern Europe, it was quite a sight to behold. But it wasn't
1:35.7	just a site, the Ottoman Empire dominated the concerns of the Habsburgs, right up until at
1:41.7	least the middle of the 18th century.
1:45.9	In this episode, our task is to examine a much less personal, but no less weighted conflict.
1:52.9	The emperor didn't have to worry about his Protestant subjects in this case, but he did have to
1:58.6	worry about a power which was perfectly capable of
2:01.4	coming to his capital and storming its walls. In fact, an Ottoman Empire army had been at the walls
2:08.2	of his capital less than a hundred years before. And as circumstances were to prove, it was by no
2:14.9	means impossible for the Ottomans to mobilize such a force again.
2:24.5	These two powers first came into contact with the conquest of Hungary by the Turk in the early
2:29.4	16th century, and upon that momentous occasion, the Ottomans and Habsbergs would share a common border permeated by smugglers, towering fortresses, and upon that momentous occasion, the Ottomans and Habsburgs would share a common
2:34.6	border permeated by smugglers, towering fortresses, and unruly vassals. These ingredients
2:40.5	proved critical to facilitating the outbreak of a war in 1593 between the two powers. This conflict has
2:49.4	long been termed the Long Turkish War, and sometimes the 13-year war based on the amount of years that it lasted.
2:57.2	Coming into the 17th century, still at war with its formidable eastern foe, the Austrian Hasbergs hardly gave the impression that they would be ready for the 30-year-s war within a decade.
3:07.5	And yet, the war against the Turk, expensive and inconclusive, though it largely was,
	...

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