The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe by Andrew Wheatcroft

The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe



Download The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe




The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe Andrew Wheatcroft
Language: English
Page: 382
Format: pdf
ISBN: 0465013740,
Publisher: Basic Books

From School Library Journal

Wheatcroft (director, Centre for Publishing Studies, Univ. of Stirling, Scotland; Infidels) offers a richly detailed account of the 1683 Ottoman siege of Vienna and subsequent battle with the Hapsburg central European forces. Although focusing on a single military campaign, Wheatcroft draws on decades of his own research on the Hapsburg-Ottoman conflict to provide needed historical context for the events of war. As Wheatcroft aptly states in his introduction, his is in fact a broader study that seeks to understand "Europe's fear of the Turks" within the frame of a specific Ottoman-Hapsburg military clash. Much of Wheatcroft's detail comes from European accounts of life in the Ottoman Empire and first-person descriptions of war, but the inherent bias in these sources is always acknowledged. As a result, Wheatcroft is able to move beyond tales of the "Terrible Turks" to provide a realistic portrayal of Ottoman leadership, a political context for the Hapsburg-Ottoman conflict, and a description of the shifting balance of power between these two dynasties. This is not a work of popular history for the casual reader, but scholars and students of history would benefit greatly from this well-researched account of 17th-century Ottoman-Hapsburg political power.—Veronica Arellano, Univ. of Houston Libs. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From

Four centuries ago, the West really was involved in a seminal “clash of cultures” against an aggressive Islamic power, and that struggle reached its zenith at the siege of Vienna in 1683. Wheatcroft has written a fast-moving and exciting account of this sustained conflict and the history-turning siege that may well have preserved the Christian character of Europe. Since their smashing defeat of the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071, Turkish nomadic warriors had threatened Europe, but the Ottomans had harnessed the power of an efficient state to their superior logistics and mobile cavalry. On the front line opposing the Ottoman advance were the forces of the polyglot Hapsburg Empire. Wheatcroft indicates that the Hapsburgs had their own particular assets, including a superbly trained infantry, and an effective, largely Polish cavalry. Relying to a large extent on contemporary Hapsburg sources, Wheatcroft offers an outstanding blow-by-blow description of the siege, which in the end was decided through a combination of luck and several critical Ottoman blunders. --Jay Freeman

MORE EBOOKS:
Fundamentals of Numerical Computing download ebook







Tags: Download The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe ebook
Download The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe ebook pdf
Download The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe ebook djvu
Download The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe ebook epub
The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe ebook
The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe download
The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe download book
The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe ebook pdf
The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe ebook djvu
The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe ebook epub
Andrew Wheatcroft ebooks