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These things keep getting to sent my inbox so…

…              :o) Thank you

 

Firearms and Military Adaptation: The Ottomans and the European Military Revolution, 1450–1800

Historians usually acknowledge the Ottomans’ successful early adoption of firearms, and some even term them a “gunpowder empire,” suggesting that firearms played a crucial role in the Ottoman wars of emergence. However, others maintain that the Ottomans soon lagged behind the paradigmatic states of the “military revolution” and became dependent on European military technology and weaponry. Based on a large body of unpublished source material, this essay challenges both views. It demonstrates the Ottomans’ continued flexibility in adapting and improving upon new weapons, and Istanbul’s self-sufficiency in weapons and ammunition production. Using selected sieges and battles, I argue that, in addition to firearms, factors such as good intelligence, resourceful leadership, a large and disciplined professional army, superior supply and logistics, the combined use of field artillery, infantry firepower, wagon fortresses, and cavalry charges were all important in Ottoman military successes. Regarding the possible relationship between firearms and the growth of the army, older Ottomanist literature explained the increase in the number of musket-bearing infantry janissaries with Istanbul’s need to counter Habsburg infantry volley-fire in the war of 1593-1606 in Hungary. New evidence indicates that the growth of the janissary corps was part of a general military expansion that started in the mid-sixteenth century and accelerated during the Ottomans’ “Thirty Years War” (1578-1611) against the Safavids and Habsburgs.  This expansion reflected both military and socio-economic changes, and cannot be explained simply by “the challenge of the European military revolution,” indeed a reductionist reasoning bordering on technological determinism.