Project Details
Projekt
Military cultures of v iolence, as characterised by the two ‘Great Turkish Wars’ (1683 1718) The Habsburg and Ottoman armies in comparison
Subject Area
Early Modern History
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 407133841
From the perspective of military history, t he period of the Great Turkish Wars between 1683 and 1718 b oasts particular characteristics that make them highly significant for the questions posed by this research group. The new degree of heterogenity of the army formations, the profound transformation in the respective concepts of the enemy, as well as techni cal military and strategic changes impacted heavily on the cultures of and discourses on violence among the warring parties. The two component projects with their respective focus on the cultures of violence in the Habsburg and Ottoman armies strive to und erstand two levels from a comparative perspective. At the first level of analysis , we focus on war related discourses on violence in the Habsburg and Ottoman empires in order to establish conceptions of legitimate and illegitimate practices of violence and to actually define these as such. At the second level, the questions addressing war related cultures of violence will assume centre stage. Here, we will differentiate between three spaces with an affinity for violence in which the perpetrators of violence and their victims, as well as structures and mechanisms of violence defined as illegitimate, will be examined: spaces of actual combat, spaces within an army where violence is directed internally against soldiers, and spaces under occupation where civil s ociety i s directly affected at least periodically by war. In this way, violent practices, experiences of violence and perceptions of violence alike will be examined ‘from the inside’ and ‘from the outside’. A comparative approach allows us to view corr esponding transfer processes between the warring parties and, for the first time, to analyse structures and institutions in both early modern adversarie s for specifics and similarities.
DFG Programme
Research Units
