num_pages: 456
description: Distinguished scholar James D. Tracy shows how the Ottoman advance across Europe stalled in the western Balkans where three great powers confronted one another in three adjoining provinces: Habsburg Croatia Ottoman Bosnia and Venetian Dalmatia. Until about 1580 Bosnia was a platform for Ottoman expansion and Croatia steadily lost territory while Venice focused on protecting the Dalmatian harbors vital for its trade with the Ottoman east. But as Habsburg-Austrian elites coalesced behind military reforms they stabilized Croatias frontier while Bosnia shifted its attention to trade and Habsburg raiders crossing Dalmatia heightened tensions with Venice. The period ended with a long inconclusive war between Habsburgs and Ottomans and a brief inconclusive war between Austria and Venice. Based on rich primary research and a masterful synthesis of key studies this book is the first English-language history of the early modern Western Balkans. More broadly it brings out how the Ottomans and their European rivals conducted their wars in fundamentally different ways. A sultans commands were not negotiable and Ottoman generals were held to a time-tested strategy for conquest. Habsburg sovereigns had to bargain with their elites and it took elaborate processes of consultation to rally provincial estates behind common goals. In the end government-by-consensus was able to withstand government-by-command.
language: English
title: Balkan Wars: Habsburg Croatia, Ottoman Bosnia, and Venetian Dalmatia, 1499–1617
publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers