Venice, Austria, and the Turks in the seventeenth century, and: Western hostility to Islam and prophecies of Turkish doom (review)

Reviews 111 sometimes mass, concern for individual and social purification as an essential avenue towards salvation. The Satanic attack on Christendom takes many forms: temptation through women (chs. 2 and 6), threats from heretics (ch. 3), witches (ch. 4), Jews (ch. 5), homosexuals (ch. 7) and lepers (ch. 8). All these topics are seen to be deviations from norms considered desirable for salvation. While it is true that Richards's detailed treatment of these topics sometimes creates the impression that the details are ends in themselves, overall one is kept aware of the larger world-view which lead to the creation of so many stigmatised minorities. The book is an excellent introduction to its subject and the illustrations, mostiy late medieval or early modem, add some interest. John O.Ward Department of History University of Sydney Setton, Kenneth M., Venice, Austria, and the Turks in the seventeenth century (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 192), Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, 1991; cloth; pp. 502; R.R.P. US$35.00. Idem, Western hostility to Islam and prophecies of Turkish doom (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 201), Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, 1992; cloth; pp. vii, 63; R.R.P. US$10.00 Setton's Venice, Austria, and the Turks in the seventeenth century is a continuation of his magisterial Papacy and the Levant, 1204-1571, 4 vols. (Philadelphia, 1976-1984). The last of these volumes had gone beyond Lepanto and Setton picks up the trail again in 1753, when the Venetians left or, as their enemies charged, 'betrayed' the Holy League and made a separate peace with the Ottoman Empire. The narrative starts in detail in 1592 with the beginning of the so-called 'Long War' (1592-1606) and goes down to the Peace Treaty of Passarowitz (Pozarevac) in 1718. It is afittingconclusion to a story that had started with the Fourth Crusade. As Setton makes clear, the Papacy spent huge sums subsidizing Habsburg, and to a lesser extent Polish, efforts to roll back the Turks through a series of Holy Leagues whose spiritual ancestry went back to the Latin capture of Constantinople in 1204 and ended appropriately with Christian arms triumphant in Hungary, in the northern Balkans, and in the Morea and Aegean Islands. In Setton's books we thus have the beginnings of the so-called 'Eastern Question': the problem created by the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the various arrangements made by the Great Powers and their Balkan client statestofillthe vacuum created by the gradual withdrawal of the Turks from southeastern Europe. This process was of vital importance for Europe as a whole. 178 Reviews Setton divides his narrative into three recognizably distinct sections: part one dealing with the 'Long (Turkish) War' and the Thirty Years W a r to the peace treaties of Westphalia in 1648, part two covering the long Candian War (16451669 ) between the Venetians and the Ottomans for the possession of Crete (Candid), and part three going over the period 1670 to 1718. The last encompasses the Second Siege of Vienna by the Turks in 1683, the so-called War of the Holy League (1684-1699), and renewed war between the Habsburgs and the Turks on the one hand and the Venetians and the Turks in 1715-1718 on the other, which started with the Ottoman invasion of the Morea and ended with the Turks being swept out of the last remnant of Hungary, the so-called Banat of Temiswar (Timisoara), by Eugene of Savoy. Thus approximately half of the book is devoted to events of 1683-1718, which is entirely justified given the significance of the struggle for control of southeastern Europe for European history as a whole. Setton makes an unfortunate decision to include a rather substantial coverage of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) which, while valuable in itself, does not justify its inclusion in the present study since it does not add significantly to the large body of literature on thetopicand its relationship to events in Southeastern Europe is only peripheral. Originally, as he states it in his Preface, it was his intention 'to pursue certain questions in the Haus-, Hof- und Staats-archiv in Vienna . . . , but...