Balkan Wars: Habsburg Croatia, Ottoman Bosnia, and Venetian Dalmatia, 1499–1617 by James D. Tracy (review)

"Could a monarchy obliged to respect local prerogatives compete with an empire whose political arrangements offered no lawful obstruction to commands from the top?" (p. 232) This is the question the distinguished historian James D. Tracy seeks to answer in his detailed study of the struggles and conflicts, which occurred on the frontiers between three Early Modern Empires, those of the Habsburgs ruling in the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottomans, and the Venetians.

Tracy argues that the scholars of late have "tended to look away from the actual conflict" in their studies of the conflicts between the Habsburgs' and Ottomans' empires (p. 1). In the book under review, he details "a confrontation between two fundamentally different systems of government." (p. 2) Tracy does not go farther in what he calls a "descriptive account" (p. 3), but he leaves open the door for an interpretation that could argue that the confrontation he recounts could also be seen as a clash of civilizations, along the lines of those sketched two decades ago by Samuel P. Huntington.¹ In the process, Tracy often leaves the third empire, the Venetians', to the side, but given the relative weakness of this trading empire by this period and its reliance on trade with the Ottomans, perhaps this is understandable.

Tracy admits from the outset that this work is more a military and political history than an economic or cultural one. Readers should be ready for an intense analysis of battles, supply lines, settlement patterns, and strategies. He focuses most of his attention on three local units of the empires he studies: Croatia ruled by the Habsburgs, Bosnia ruled by the Ottomans, and the Dalmatian coast as ruled by the Venetian republic. Tracy uses predominantly printed evidence, including translations of Ottoman sources into European languages, as well as archival evidence now found in Austria, Croatia, France, Italy, Slovenia, and Spain. His work is divided into six chapters, of which the last is dependent mostly on secondary sources. The book includes a substantial index, nine maps, and a very important and extensive glossary, which continues for over 27 pages (!).

Tracy has written extensively on the Habsburgs' undertakings farther north in the Low Countries during the sixteenth century. He understands well the complications facing the Habsburgs in their conglomeration of fractious territories. In this book, the ways the Habsburgs had to combine their functions as Holy Roman Emperors with their related but separate functions as Kings of Hungary and Croatia are brought to the fore: Croatia was on the frontlines with the Venetians and Ottomans, but its ruling Kingdom of Hungary was similarly under threat and financially drained. Resources to support the regular, defense-in-depth along the frontier which was required had to be drawn not from that kingdom, but from the Habsburgs, their hereditary territories, and the Holy Roman Empire more generally.

The book is divided into six chapters. Their narrative moves from a period of Hungarian and Venetian defeats in the first decades of the sixteenth century, to a period of Ottoman ascendancy in the period 1527–1541, followed by irregular warfare, and then "War by Consultation vs. War by Command," "War in a Time of Peace," and then wars along an increasingly-solidified border, reaching up to 1618. Non-specialists may want to have a detailed atlas at hand for these very specific chapters and some patience as well: Tracy piles citations high, often interrupting sentences multiple times in order to reference the hundreds of footnotes in each chapter. A peculiarity includes referring to the Hungarian capital in the period as "Posonia," instead of the more familiar "Bratislava" of today, or even Pressburg or Poszony of earlier periods.

Tracy's argument revolves around chapter 4. The concept of "Beratschlagung" or consultation which he details on pages 228–230 reveals the difference between the command model of the Ottomans and the process of give-and-take...