The War of the Holy League 1683–1699

Abstract

The War of the Holy League 1683–1699 stimulated huge interest in the Turks in England including a large volume of historical writing.¹ Stretching from the siege of Vienna in 1683 to the peace of Karlowitz in 1699 this conflict marked a major watershed in Ottoman military power in central Europe, but also a radical shift in European perceptions of the Ottoman Empire. Not only did the loss of territory suffered by the Ottomans redraw the border from east of Vienna to west of Belgrade, but the turn of the eighteenth century also inaugurated a new era in European attitudes towards the Ottomans. This change evolved over the late decades of the seventeenth century and the early decades of the eighteenth. The historical writing of the War of the Holy League therefore stands at a point of transition, reflecting substantial continuities with the preceding period, but also prefiguring some aspects of what was to come. In the face of a critical Hapsburg-Ottoman military confrontation English authors and translators produced works in many ways similar to those that had characterised the responses to earlier times of crisis such as the Long War 1593–1606. Indeed many of these works continued to be shaped by the pattern, forms, and tropes of the established discourse on the history of the Turks. Nevertheless, while the structure and rhetoric of these works followed familiar contours, the dramatic defeats suffered by the Ottomans in this period were reflected in a striking shift from the perceptions of the Turks that had characterised the writing of the preceding century-and-a-half.