EUCOM Battle Knowledge Centers

This volume examines the thousand year ascendancy of political Islam from the Arab conquests to the zenith of Ottoman expansion under Suleiman the Magnificent. It argues that it was with the emergence of Islam that the combination of geopolitics and religion reached its most volatile form.

It describes how the Ottoman Turks, a small band of nomadic soldiers, managed to expand their dominions from a small principality in northwestern Anatolia on the borders of the Byzantine Empire into one of the great empires of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe and Asia, extending from northern Hungary to southern Arabia and from the Crimea.

Focusing primarily on the evolution of the Ottoman military organization and its subsequent impact on Ottoman society in a period of change, the book redresses the historiographical imbalance in the existing literature, analyzing why the Ottomans were the focus of such intense military concern.

The siege of Vienna in 1683 was one of the turning points in European history. So great was its impact that countries normally jealous and hostile sank their differences to throw back the armies of Islam and their savage Tartar allies. The consequences of defeat were momentous: The Ottomans lost half of their European territories, which led to the final collapse of their empire, and the Habsburgs turned their attention from France and the Rhine frontier to the rich pickings of the Balkans. That hot September day in 1683 witnessed the last great trial of strength between the East and the West-and opened an epoch in European history that lasted until the First World War.