The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

32 ~ THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE WORLD AROUND IT ~
centuries, it will at times be necessary to refer to studies covering a slightly
earlier or else a somewhat later decade. Available research does not always provide
the best possible coverage for those years most convenient for our purposes,
and more importantly, there are major gaps in the surviving primary sources. Particularly
where the middle of the sixteenth century is concerned, but elsewhere as
well, the ‘mental pictures’ proposed here pertain to a decade or two rather than to
a single year. Last but not least, events from the years selected here often can
only be explained if the period under discussion is extended to a greater or lesser
degree.
~ The 1560s/967–77
Introducing the major ‘players’ of the 1560s/967–77: the
Habsburg possessions, France, Venice and Iran
As is well known, the Ottomans expanded in the Balkans from the midfourteenth
century onwards. By this time, the ‘Latins’, that is, the various Roman
Catholics of western European background, had already been present in the
peninsula, and especially in the territories of what is today Greece, for hundreds
of years. By the fifteenth century, a number of European states, including France,
Hungary, Poland, Venice and Genoa, had significant political interests in the Balkan
peninsula. 20 However, by the mid-1500s, Genoa had withdrawn to the
western Mediterranean, and the time in which the Polish kings actively attempted
expansion into the Black Sea region also was long past. Between 1526/932–3
and 1541/947–8, Hungary had been largely conquered by Ottoman armies. As a
last remnant of medieval Hungary, a strip of territory in the west was governed
by the Habsburgs, which included Poszony/Pressburg, today’s Bratislava; the
dynasty paid tribute to Istanbul for this possession, and the Ottoman–Hungarian
frontier was situated only a few miles east of Vienna. 21
Within the European context as a whole, by the mid-sixteenth century the
Habsburg royal family had come to constitute a major power. This was a dynasty
of Swiss-Austrian origin whose members since the later thirteenth century had
occasionally been elected ‘emperor’ in the Germanies, a title which by this time
implied prestige but only limited power. By the second half of the fifteenth century,
the head of the Habsburg family had acquired a traditional claim to the
‘Holy Roman Empire of the German nation’. This same dynasty also controlled
the Netherlands (present-day Belgium and Holland). Moreover, by a sequence of
cleverly organized dynastic marriages, Charles V, of Spanish, Habsburg and Burgundian
descent (r. as emperor 1519–55/924–63), had been crowned king of a
but recently unified Spain. Throughout the period concerning us here, both Austrian
and Spanish Habsburgs, tied together by a – from the medical standpoint –
excessive number of marriages, were to form the major opponents of the Ottomans
in south-eastern Europe and the Mediterranean.