Ottoman History Podcast - War, Environment, and the Ottoman-Habsburg Frontier

Episode Date: October 28, 2016

with Gábor Ágostonhosted by Graham Auman Pitts and Faisal Husain Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Whereas military histories once focused narrowly on armies, battles, and technologies, the new approach to military history emphasizes how armies and navies were linked to issues such as political economy, gender, and environment. In this episode, we sit down with Gábor Ágoston to discuss the principal issues concerning the relationship between the Ottoman-Habsburg military frontier in Hungary and the environmental history of the early modern period. From the battle of Mohacs in 1526, through the dramatic battle of Vienna 1683, and until the Treaty of Sistova 1791, the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier was the site of fighting, fortification, and mobilization. In our conversation, we consider the environmental dimensions of these centuries of conflict and contact, focusing on how the military revolution transformed the way in which armies used and managed resources and the role of both anthropogenic and climatic factors in reshaping the Hungarian landscape. « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. Recording at Georgetown University's History Department, I'm Graham Allman-Pitts. And I'm Faisal Hussain. The theme of our podcast today is the military and environmental history of the early modern Ottoman Empire. Specifically, we will focus on the interplay between warfare and the dynamic landscapes of the Hungarian frontier. Joining us is Gabor Augustone, a leading scholar of Ottoman military history. In the English-speaking world, Professor Augustone is best known for his book

Guns for the Sultan, which has been translated into Turkish and German. At Georgetown, he has trained generations of Ottomanists, including the founders of this podcast, Emre Safa Gürkan and Chris Graydon. Welcome to the podcast, Professor Augustone. Thank you very known for telling a joke that goes, military history is to history as military music is to music. I talked to you about this before, and you sort of qualified the fact that you do a particular kind of military history. And I think maybe this is important for our listeners at the outset to say what we mean by military history. Yours is not the military history of a military academy in the United States or elsewhere. Yes, I think it's not a joke. I read

it in John Lynn's article, who wrote about the status of military history in the United States. article who wrote about the status of military history in the United States. From the 1990s, 80s, there's an emergence of a new military history. And I don't consider myself a military historian. I never did my military service, although I worked as an interpreter for the Turkish army and the Hungarian army. I'm not interested in boys and toys, and I consider myself a historian of economics, environment, and society, and a historian of the interactions of these three. New military history was born as a consequence of so-called military revolution, which means that from, the size of mobilized soldiers and war material, and the impact of war upon the economy, resource mobilization, the administration that had to marshal those resources. So I am dealing with these capabilities of the state to marshal resources

and how this impacted society's way, the conduct of war and the environment and how environment impacted the conduct of war. Great. I would like to give some background why Hungarian historians and Hungarian Ottomanists are concerned and were pioneers in looking at this new military history and the impact of wars on environment. There was a huge debate in Hungary with regard to the impact of the Turkish wars upon the population and environment. And the textbook we were reading were telling us, oh, the Turks were so cruel, they caused the emergence of the great Hungarian plain, the so-called Pusta. It's a degradation narrative. Exactly. But it had many challenges, even in the 1930s.

And of course, if you do a comparative history, you see that Hungary wasn't unique in terms of depopulation caused by wars and disease or deforestation. So what I did, and I was influenced by my own teachers and professors. own teachers and professors. My first chair was in fact a pioneer in introducing environmental history into Hungary. Another professor we work with, Geza Peries, was a pioneer on provisioning, how armies were provisioned and how it related to agricultural production, etc., etc. As you've mentioned, it's not a question that's just germane to the military as a military force, as a tactical force, right? This is something that's shaping society in Hungary and elsewhere. So you talked about the military revolution

and how the rise of more complex empires, both in the East and the West, have been able to mobilize manpower and resources on a larger scale, probably difficult to do in earlier periods of time. This must have had an impact on the landscape of the region and placed greater pressure on the environment. Can you elaborate more on how the military revolution influenced and impacted the environment? One of the important things here is the mass adoption and deployment of firearms as a tool of warfare, which dramatically changed the nature of military conflicts. And more importantly for our purposes, the ensuing arms race and the mass production

and mass employment of gunpowder weapons and the building of large artillery fortifications, which all associated with the military revolution, had a major impact on forests. Salpeter and gunpowder works, cannon foundries, and ironworks required fuel wood on a scale not seen before the so-called gunpowder era. Weapons and ammunition had to be transported on thousands of carts and aboard hundreds of ships and boats, which required timber,

as did the construction of fortresses. Larger armies and fortifications had more horses and draft animals, which depended on pasture lands. So all these had major impacts. Just to give you one example, I do not want to exaggerate the impact of gunpowder production, but the two medium-sized gunpowder works, Ottoman gunpowder works in Hungary, produced 110 metric tons of gunpowder in Hungary, which required some 1500 metric tons of firewood, or about the annual yield

of about 60 square kilometers of woodland. So we shouldn't overemphasize because if my calculations are right, the total production of the Ottoman gunpowder mills used as much wood as a city of about 200,000. That is probably half of the population of late 16th century Ottoman Constantinople, Istanbul. So I think what really mattered is the construction work of fortresses in Hungary. Almost all the fortresses were built of wood, and they had to be renewed every 10 years. And boats build a construction of boats, construction of ships.

We don't think about, when we talk about the Ottoman Navy, we think about the Ottoman Navy in the Mediterranean. The Ottomans had hundreds, hundreds of smaller ships on the Danube, the Morava, the Sava, and the other rivers. They had a huge river flotillas, and they had to rebuild it. So if you look at the mobilization orders before the major campaigns, you would see that the central government would order 200 boats or ships built here in Ruschuk along the Danube or in Silistra or in Belgrade

and other places. And we are talking about the hundreds of these ships. Just to add something, and other places. And we are talking about the hundreds of these ships. Just to add something, a note to that, the Danube is in no way my area of expertise, but in the archive when I was doing research, there is a plethora of documents dealing with various topics related to the Danube and just waiting for someone to examine them comprehensively

and write something about the Ottoman Danube, even though the someone to examine them comprehensively and write something about the Ottoman Danube, even though the Ottoman Empire was not in charge of the whole flow of the river, but even the segment that was under Ottoman control, we know so much about it thanks to the Ottoman documentation. And the same can be done for your area of research, the Tigers and Euphrates River, which was very, very important in supplying the troops fighting against the Safavids on that part of the empire. How much is this a global story, I think, where this is happening in other empires elsewhere in the world, where the human relationship to the environment seems to be changing about the time period that you're interested in? Sometime in the 16th century where this mobilization of resources is multiplying to new scales. It is everywhere. And there are offices that were created for the purposes of dealing with these issues as part of bureaucracies of empires. So there are divisions that care about

bridge building. There are divisions in the Habsburg army who are responsible for ship building. There are divisions and administrative offices whose responsibility is scouting and making sure that the troops that are marching had clean drinking water, for instance. That's a major problem in this area. And the Ottomans do the same. So river crossings. It's very dangerous to cross the rivers. So you have to know where to cross those rivers, how long it would take to build bridges, what type of bridges, and you have to make sure that all the building material is there before the army reaches that point of crossing.

I'm interested in your reference to clean water because if there's heightened concern about clean water during these times in relation to these campaigns, we might surmise that the disease ecology has changed. You have bigger armies in the field. They're manipulating the environment in new ways. They're deforesting land. I mean, do you have any evidence that the military revolution created no disease environment? What kind of responses do you see to those? There is a very interesting body of sources, about 60 or 70 sources, written in the 16th and 17th century, mainly in Latin and German, by Castanzes. These were field doctors, field physicians who followed the imperial Habsburg armies, field physicians who followed the imperial Habsburg armies,

and they described what had been one of the major concerns of the time, Morbus Hungaricus, Hungarian fever, which was a type of typhoid fever. Right. And it had to do with malnutrition and the lack of care of what they ate, how they... Dirty water, too. Dirty water and semi-cooked food, for instance, and bad provisioning. That's the 16th century. By the 17th century, both these castrons, these field doctors, and the Ottoman sources, These Castrenseis, these field doctors, and the Ottoman sources, like Evliya Celebi, commented on the fact that how much cleaner the Ottomans were, for instance, in dealing with the corpse.

So, for instance, there was an army of grave diggers following the Ottomans so that they made sure that the corpse of the fallen were buried deep enough, which wasn't the case in the Habsburg armies. And of course, that would open all kinds of possibilities for infection. But the very, very thing that you are dealing with huge masses of people in very bad hygienic situation, crammed together, malnutrition, and that's the good recipe for disease. And then these armies are marching from town to town, bringing the disease and spreading the disease with them. So supposedly, this Morbus Hungaricus was spread into Germany and then it was known as a Hungarian fever in 1542 when the imperial army was returning from a campaign against the Ottomans from Hungary. Something related to diseases because you make the case in one article you've written in 2009 that people at the time made a link between the emergence of new diseases with the expansion of wetlands at the time.

Can you talk about why wetlands at the time were expanding and did it have anything to do with warfare? Both climatic changes and warfare. We are talking about the Little Ice Age and the effects of the Little Ice Age. It was everywhere, but it had some local specialties. the late 16th centuries and the late 17th centuries, which coincided with the two major wars that the Ottomans and the Habsburgs were fighting in Hungary, had the most negative effects.

The temperature dropped, fell to more than 1 Celsius, and rainfall usually concentrated in mid-summer. This is the time when the armies were marching and campaign season. And that might lead to crop failures and, of course, higher levels of water. And we do know that I mentioned that the Lake Boletun,

which is the largest lake in Transdanubia in the western part of Hungary, the water level increased. That affected how certain villages had to move up and further from the lake. But at the same time, the huge marshes created a perfect environment for fortresses. And in Hungary, a whole type of fortresses, which we call marsh fortresses, emerged. And if you look at the Ottoman geographers and travelers who traveled into Hungary,

they described many of these fortresses as island fortresses surrounded by waters. Now, sometimes the military engineers flooded the area around the fortress so that to enhance defense capabilities. So there is the human impact and there are two sides of human impact. Previously, in peacetime, people cared about and they had all kinds of rules how to regulate the floodplains and riverbeds, etc. Wartime, you cannot do this. So nature takes over. Plus, humankind uses nature and marshlands to increase the capabilities, the difference capabilities. So it's an intentional, intentionally created marshes. Now, of course, evaporation increases. And in a marshy environment,

you have mosquitoes and other, you know, insects, which bother. You cannot sleep. You're already malnutritioned. You cannot sleep. Because of the little ice age, these casterns explain to us that it was so wet. The discrepancy between day temperature and the night temperature was huge,

and it was very cold during the night and it was very wet. They say that despite the fact that they had a double layer tent, by morning, most soldiers were soaking wet. So this all affected how people felt and how they waged wars. This is very exciting and interesting, Professor August, when we have talked about forests and wetlands and warfare and how they all reinforced each other, like the exploitation of forests and the expansion of wetlands and the common occurrence of military battles between the Ottoman Empire and its neighbors. Let us talk about cattle, because this is another theme you have written about. You have said in one article that the 16th century was the golden era of the Hungarian cattle trade. And this is very interesting because so far you have been talking about war and human suffering. So how

could cattle in this very difficult environment, a war zone, how could cattle thrive in this situation? There are many reasons for the golden age of the Hungarian cattle trade. One is economic and the sources are in Western Europe. Population increase opened huge markets and it required, you know, these people needed more staple. And Hungary provided a lot of the food, a lot of the meat that northern Italian towns and southern German towns consumed. And we do have the tax registers, customs registers, and other account books from which we surmise that by the 1570s, a total annual cattle export from Hungary could have topped some 150 heads of cattle per year. 150,000. 150,000, sorry, 150,000 cattle in one year, which were sent to Austria and Upper Germany and the rest went to Venice. But it had to do something with war as well.

Because if you have war, you invest in commodities that can be sheltered when the armies are coming. So you just can move with your cattle herds to a different place. You don't invest in physical structures because that could be destroyed. Not like a wheat field. You can't move your wheat fields when the Ottoman armies are coming. Exactly. So it did something. It had to do something with war as well. Plus, you know, this frontier, which was a major divide between Christendom and Islam, if you will, between the two superpowers of the time, the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, we are talking about probably a combined of 50,000-70,000 soldiers. They had to be fed as well. And feeding the armies

is usually a good business. And when we talk about deforestation, historians pointed to the fact how cattle trade might have affected the forests because they needed more grasslands. So there was a huge clearing of the forests because of the cattle trade. To follow up on that, some other historians who are not necessarily experts on Hungary in particular, like Professor William McNeill, he has written a book on the European steppe. the European steppe.

And so when you talk about the predominance of cattle trade and herding in Hungary, someone like Professor William McNeill, this is the way he presented Hungary, like the Hungarian landscape, as just mostly a steppe, an arid steppe dominated by cattle thieves that was not really of any major significance to what he calls the rise of the West

in the second half of the second millennium. Do you agree with this portrayal of the Hungarian landscape as just an arid steppe? First of all, the Pusta nature, you know, the semi-arid nature of the great Hungarian plain. And we are talking about a territory of probably 100,000 square kilometers, which is the size of modern Hungary. And Pusta is the Hungarian term to describe the landscape. Yeah, Pusta is the Hungarian term to describe the landscape, this semi-arid steppe. But this was not how Hungary looked like in the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries. There were more forests until the end of the 17th century. We do know that there were huge forests

around Debrecen, which is the capital of the Pusta, the Hungarian plain. And we do know this from orders that kings allowed the citizens, the town folks of Debrecen to use the forest just next to the town as building material.

But for reasons we just talked about, there's a major deforestation in Hungary, but it wasn't still, you know, Pusta or semi-arid grassland, but it was huge territories were occupied by marshes. You know, the Pusta character and the semi-errant character of the Hungarian Great Plain

had to do with the major river regulations in the 19th century. So it had more effect than the so-called Turkish wars on the nature, on the environment in Hungary. I think this is very important to keep in mind and clarifies many of the nature, on the environment in Hungary? I think this is very important to keep in mind and clarifies many of the misconceptions probably.

Number one, you make the case that the landscape was more diverse. So there was this semi-arid steppe, but also at the same time there were expansion of wetlands at the time because of the Little Ice age and because of warfare and also at the same time even the semi-arid steppe was very historical it emerged at a specific time

for specific reasons and this ecological zone of the steppe were not there forever they emerged at a certain point in this context that we are talking about now. Even Azurland, the 20th century,

we know it for ethnographical research that towns on the Great Hungarian Plain, sometimes the town folks had to go to the graveyard, to the cemetery, on boats, in territories which are on the great Hungarian plain.

And these are the examples of the pusta. These are the examples of the semi-arid nature of the Hungarian landscape. But yet in the late 19th century, early 20th century, the folks, when they had to go to the cemetery, they had to use boats because it was such a marshal. And this is an important moment to reiterate the value of environmental history because it allows us to see the dynamism of the landscape. And I would like to add another note that it's very nice that we make great generalizations. And the Hungarians were very good. In the early 20th century, mid-20th century, they collected data. There is a two or three volume work that collected data as to the temperature from written sources. And now climate historians are using that as a major database. And we know the major trends,

how the Little Ice Age affected seasons, precipitation, weather conditions, and so on. But you have to look at the anomalies. I'll give you one example. I was reading lately the memoirs of the commanders of the Habsburg armies in the 1680s. 1686 was an unusually dry summer.

So these commanders, time and again, comment that we are marching and we are camping on a territory which is usually a marshland, unapproachable, but because of this extreme dry and hot summer, we were able to camp here and we were able to cross here. So, uniqueness. And we have to be better

not to make great generalizations, but to acknowledge the specificity of time and and place this is the Ottoman history podcast we're talking to Gabor Augustone about war in the environment on the Ottoman Habsburg frontier we're gonna Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE Τι τον Ιασού με πειράζουνε Πάλι με θυσμένος είσαι, μου φωνάζουνε Πάλι με θυσμένος είσαι, μου φωνάζουνε Τα τα πιάσω να τα διρώ τα μπαγκασικά Τα τα πιάσω να τα διρώ τα μπαγκασικά Τα τα δώσω διόχαστου για να νεχάσικα We're back now, and this is the Ottoman History Podcast,

talking to Gabor Augustone about war and the environment in the Ottoman Empire. Another question we wanted to ask you about, because we talked about the Little Ice Age already, is the major work done by Sam White. His book was published in 2011 on the Ottoman Empire during the Little Ice Age, and he basically argues that it is difficult to understand Ottoman history in the 16th and 17th centuries without seeing the Ottoman Empire working and operating in the context of the ecological pressures of the Little Ice Age. His book mostly focuses on Anatolia and the Jilali Rebellion, and he gives some sporadic examples from Egypt, sometimes Iraq and Syria.

For someone like you who works on Hungary at the same time, how would you intervene, and what do you challenge in his thesis, or what do you support, and how the experience of Hungary contributes to environmental historians' discussion about the Ottoman Empire and the Little Ice Age. The connection or the possible connection between the Little Ice Age and the Jalal Rebellions is not new. It was first raised by William Griswold.

And it's interesting and I think it should be studied. My concern with the book is the relatively modest source base and database upon which a major theory is based. A second concern is the fact that the Ottoman Empire was so huge that it had many ecological zones. So certain weather patterns would affect the population in different ecological zones. I'll give you one example. If you have a very wet season, that might destroy, especially if you have rainfall and precipitation during summer, might destroy your crops, your wheat fields. But the same weather pattern is very good for your grasslands. So I think we have to be more cautious and take into consideration the many ecological zones

Professor McNeill John McNeill talks about how the Ottoman Empire had complementary environmental zones and ecological zones and that made it

made the empire less susceptible to crop failures or ecological disasters. Because if in one region you experience the crop failures, other regions could provide food to those regions. regions could provide food to those regions. But in general, the impact of the Little Ice Age in Hungary, you see it present in the sources, but it's probably just the experience of the outcomes were not necessarily similar to how they played out in other regions. It's everywhere. It's a major, and I think military historians or economic historians have to take into consideration the Little Ice Age because it affected the production. We are talking about regimes where, you know, 90-95% of the population live from agriculture. And of course, changing weather patterns affected agriculture to a great deal.

So we have to take it into consideration. But if you look at the population, because Sam White looks at the population as well, and there had been major debates among Ottomanists about the possibility of a population pressure that is up until the 16th century population supposedly increased more rapidly than the extension of the agricultural production and that

some people cited as a possible reason of the Jalali rebellions these large scale rebellions of the Anatolian countryside in the late 16th century and early 17th centuries, and Sembwight added to this the possible impact of the Little Ice Age. In Hungary, there are different trends.

In the population, up until the major wars at the end of the 16th century, population somewhat increases, wars at the end of the 16th century, population somewhat increases. But because of the long war at the end of the 16th century and the end of the 17th century, population decreased. And it ended up about the same 3.5, 3.1 million people, which was the population of Hungary at the beginning of the major wars in the 16th century. This is really important because so far, I mean, the situation is improving now, but so for a long time, environmental histories of the early modern period, especially the Little Ice Age, the works done in this field have largely ignored the Ottoman experience and I think like especially like John Richards he's written a book the an

ending frontier I think 2003 and he it's a global environmental history of the early modern period and he talks about all regions around the world North America South America China is East Asia, South Asia, even Russia, but he says almost nothing about the Ottoman Empire. And I think this work is really, the work of Professor Augustine fills a very important gap that I'm sure not only historians will be interested in, but also scientists and climatologists who want to have a better understanding of the Little Ice Age. Because from my own very short conversations with

climatologists also, the question of the Little Ice Age is still not a settled question. They're still debating whether there was really a little ice age and what it was and how important it was for various societies around the world. As we draw to a close, I'm curious about how you see the military revolution and what we're talking about is this mass mobilization and unprecedented mobilization of resources affecting relationships between classes of people in the Ottoman Empire. So what's sort of the social history of this? Are people getting rich off of producing for the war effort, or is this something that the

state's controlling? I mean, are there sectors of society that have a stake in this one way or another? Does this change the relationship between state and society in terms of conscription? Ottoman history has been very state-centered history. And we assume that wars were ordered, mobilization was done, and wars were waged by the state because of the state and according to the intentions of the state. It changes. And I think it has never been the case. In the early era, in the early conquest of the Balkans, the so-called Uç Beyleri, Marcher Lords, were as important, if not more important, than the early Ottoman sultans. Most of what was conquered in the Balkans was done by these marcher lords.

Many of the major wars started from local conflicts. The so-called Long War with the Habsburgs at the end of the 16th century started in Bosnia and grew from a small-scale frontier warfare. Now, militaries, because of the military revolution, changed a lot. In the 16th century, under Suleiman's time, the bulk of the army was the so-called Timariot, forces that were paid by these military prebends or military thieves, the so-called Timar system. 70% of a mobilized army consisted of them, and the rest were the standing forces of the sultan. You know, we always talk about the Genesis, but they were not more than probably 10% of the mobilized army.

By the end of the 17th century, these guys would comprise probably 50% of the mobilized army. So you have a professionalization of the army. You have a professionalization, but we are talking about the effects, the economic and financial effects. It's a huge burden on the treasury. Since reasons I don't want to go into detail, the Timar-Yotsipahi discovery lost its military value. So the Timar system still remains,

but it is given to provincial governors, district governors, who would have larger and larger private armies. So by the end of the 17th century, 20-25% of the army are these private armies. And there are those who realized that the state was unable to mobilize the resources to recruit enough soldiers, so they step in. These are the 18th century's local notables who would have their own private armies or who would give the Ottoman armies hundreds of horses or camels or foodstuff. And you ask whether some profited. These guys would profit from warfare because of the inability of the state to recruit soldiers and provision soldiers single-handedly because we are talking about much larger armies.

So probably the mobilized army size at the end of the 17th century is twice as much as under Suleiman. So, as at the end of the 17th century, it's twice as much as under Suleiman. So, these are the people and these local governors. And those regions also profited from war-making, supplying war, provisioning armies. So, is that something particular about borderlands in some senses? Nope. Nope. This is how it has been. One of the major criticisms of the so-called military revolution that, again, in Western European context, Geoffrey Parker pays attention of the state and the state capabilities.

And he claims that because of the major burden of warfare, there is a centralization. And the emergence of absolute states is explained by the military burden, whereas, you know, state-recruited, state-maintained, state-paid armies are an anomaly, according to Perrett, Professor Perrett, who says that these state armies existed only from the 1760s until the 1960s. Prior to that and after that, it was outsourcing, military outsourcing, that defined making wars and we see it in the Ottoman case. So we can explain the rise of the Ayans, these local notables, in a different way if you pay attention how war-making created possibilities and opportunities for these guys to amass wealth

because their soldiers and their provisions were needed for the war-making. Is there sort of an environmental component to the demise of the Ottoman military presence in Hungary? I.e. is there an environmental explanation or how did the environment play a role? After the Habsburgs reconquered Hungary from the Ottomans, the border, this is by the Peace Treaty of Karlovy 1699 so after the second failed Ottoman siege of Vienna

1683 there is a major war there is a Holy League fighting against the Ottomans and step by step they would reconquer the whole of Hungary

and the border would become again the Danube and the Sava River it had been prior to the Ottoman conquest of Hungary would become again the Danube and the Sava River. It had been prior to the Ottoman conquest of Hungary. The Danube, by the way, had been the borderline between major empires. It was the borderline of the Roman Empire, the Roman limits. It was the northern border of the Byzantine Empire, etc., etc.

So it becomes again the major borderland. And now the Habsburgs would create what they call the Militärgrenze, the military frontier based on those rivers. And, of course, it would affect environment as well because of the building of new fortresses. Now you have new institutions and new concepts of border management. The Ottomans for the very first time

would accept the territorial integrity of the other side. So you have population movement control. You have quarantines so that subjects coming from the Ottoman Empire with passports would be admitted, but also they were careful not to bring disease into the Habsburg lands. And also, after the reconquest of Hungary, they realized how desolated, how deserted, how deforested the Hungarian plain was. And there is a major initiative of reforestation. And this is when Akasia appeared in the Carpathian Basin.

And so your answer there, you distinguish between the geographical fact that is the Danube, which is a lasting geographical feature of the military geography, against environment, which is dynamic, right? You have the Habsburgs controlling disease ecologies in changing ways. And changing the environment by attempts of reforestation, for instance, and helping reinvigorate agriculture as well. This is a very fascinating discussion. I want to thank you for giving us the time to talk to you, Professor Agustun.

Thank you so much. Thank you very much. For those who are listening and want to find out more about the topic, we have a short bibliography on our website, which includes the publications of Professor Agustun and some other helpful monographs and articles. I want to thank you all for listening. Please tune in next time. Until then, take care. Thank you.