Joseph Alois Schumpeter, an Austrian economic theorist, just in time, in 1932, emigrated to the US and got a professorship at Harvard University where he developed the concepts of the economic cycles, innovations and entrepreneurship. Now he is prized as one of the greatest economists of all time. However, Schumpeter was not a dedicated economist always. He graduated the Vienna University and started his scholarly career at the University of Chern[o/i]vtsy, then an Austrian and now-a-day Ukrainian town in the region of Bukovina. This experience much influenced his early thinking and in 1918–19 he authored the essay that stays far away from all his later economic studies. Its title is “The sociology of imperialisms” (in plural). No doubt, it was the Great War, that forced Schumpeter to launch the analysis of the nature of imperialist war, an aggressive armed conflict, a phenomenon intrinsic to human history not lesser than the cycles of economic crisis and recovery, which made him famous later. It is possible, the most striking of Schumpeter’s paradoxes, the idea of “positive destruction” was born not in the chamber study of the capitalist economy but facing the appalling ruins of Central Europe in the aftermath of WWI’s imperialistic aggression.
Schumpeter researched aggressive wars of conquest, the people who initiate them and their objectives. Doing that, he produced the most prophetic and enigmatic of his treatises. Now, in a time of newspapers and TV packed with warfighting, Schumpeter’s analysis of war is actual and challenging. And it is highly productive for the exploration of the Early Modern Time, period of history when national states were born, the type of polity responsible for war today.
Military history studies not only the course and outcome of armed conflicts but also their reasons, targets, property and meaning. It is a disappointment that most of the war scholars avoid unveiling them and propose abstract and obscure explanations like the “geopolitical competition,” “traditional animosity,” “partition of territories and resources,” dynastic quarries and ideological confrontation. None of those affords to track the influence of the personal incentives of war’s decision-makers on the start and turns of conflicts. It is evident that the urge to fight is the personal decision of the rulers and generals, and the crucial events of any conflict are determined by their personalities more than the ratio of resources that the historians prefer to calculate. Schumpeter speculated on the “dogs of war” and proposed the pattern for the personal analysis of every one of them individually and all of them all together as a social class.
From the very beginning of his analysis, Schumpeter specified two types of war; the first of them, a war in pursuit of the real needs of the belligerent nation, he considered a minor scholar interest and put it aside. The second type of war intrigued him much more, that of war produced by the social structure of aggressive states. He did not dare to reveal the latter in the European states of WWI and explored it with the example of the ancient Persian empire.
Schumpeter’s concept of aggressive warfare is a sociological masterpiece. It determines war as the pure social rush to power by the means of armed violence. War does not have true objectives and consequently, nobody is responsible for its outbreak. However, the concept is void as historical knowledge. Human history consists of the people’s actions and a historian has to tell the names behind the events and reveal the personal motives of the decision-makers. A historian has to disclose the ratio of the personal will and social imperative in their mission and find a way how the two incentives interplay. It is especially important when a historical study is devoted to the understanding of the current epoch.
In the Early Modern Time, from the 15th to the 17th centuries, Eastern Europe was the region of the consolidation of the same nation-states that are co-existing and often quarrelling here today. They emerged in the contest over the territory and political domination over the subcontinent, expansionist aggressive wars were the prime tool of the contenders. Russia (Muscovy), Poland, Sweden and Ottoman Turkey were the main of them. Undoubtedly, their national interest was the immediate incentive to wage war, it was the task to gain bigger territories and better conditions for their nation-building. All of them had the upper martial class committed to war as its social action. Is it possible that those two factors of war, determined by Schumpeter, have their joint agents, the people who started and waged war combining the national interests and social action as their motivation? Could a historian detects those “dogs of war” and track their warmonger path?
The Ottoman Empire had its influence on international affairs in Eastern Europe from its inception. It directly entered the region’s power-play in 1475 when the amphibious force under Gedik Ahmed Pasha conquered the Genovese colonies in the Crimea and subjugated the Tatar Crimean Khanate. The Ottomans established their domination in the Northern Black Sea region in 1484 when their army and fleet under Sultan Bayezid II captured the port-fortresses of Chilia and Akkerman at the mouths of the Dniester and Danube. The Black Sea became the “Ottoman Lake,” the Crimean Khanate became the junior ally of Ottoman Turkey, and Moldavia and Walachia (now-a-day Romania) became its tributary vassals. The Ottomans more or less guided the actions of all Muslim states of the region, – the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, Grand and Nogay Hordes. However, the Ottomans remained more like the powerful observer than the direct participant of the East-European contest.
The Ottomans’ position changed since 1578 when their army under the commander-in-chief, serdar, Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha overran the Transcaucasia and Caucasus with the cities of Tiflis, Shamakhi, Baku and Derbent. In October of 1583, the army of Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha crossed the Caucasian ridge, swept away the Cossacks’ patrols from the fords of the river Terek and marched over the Kuban steppe in the smoke of its burning dry autumn grass. The Ottoman troops marched over the miraculously frozen Kerch strait and in the spring of 1584 Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha overthrew the selfish Crimean khan. He transformed the Crimean khanate from the junior partner of the Ottomans into their subserving protectorate. The achievements of Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha became the basis of the Ottoman expansion in Eastern Europe that clashed with the Russian (Muscovite) and Polish ambitions in the Ukraine soon, in the second half of the 17th century.
Was Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha carrying his brave ventures on behalf of the Ottoman dynasty and Turkish national sentiments that started to ferment? Yes, he was, no doubts. Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha was rewarded for his commitment by the course of events when in July of 1584 he shipped his army from the Crimea to Istanbul, overthrew the feeble imperial government and was propelled by his seasoned troops to the grand vizier’s office. However, besides the dynastic and national commitment, Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha had the deeply personal reason to conquer the Transcaucasia and Caucasus and suppress the Crimean selfishness. Unlike most of the Ottoman elite of the 16th century, he belonged neither to sultan’s slaves educated in the palace schools nor to the ancient Turkish nobility of Asia Minor. He was born in the family of an Egyptian mamluk, Ozdemir Pasha, who switched his allegiance after the Ottoman conquest of Egypt. Ozdemir Pasha conquered for the Ottomans Sudan, the shores of the Red Sea, African Horn and Yemen. Ozdemir Pasha descended from a Dagestan-born warrior, one of the Caucasian slaves that were purchased by the Egyptian rulers to be brought up as the military class. His son Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha rallied the Ottoman army and marched it to the Caucasus, Dagestan and Azerbaijan, the land of his ancestors.
The personal addiction of Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha determined the geographical directions of his campaigning and influenced the composition of the armies that he led. During the contest with the Iranian Safavids over the Transcaucasia, Northern Iraq and Iran he reformed its recruitment, command structure, weaponry and combat technique. The gravity of the Ottoman forces under his command shifted from the mass of territorial cavalry of timariots (the military body of the Turkish hereditary nobility) and Istanbul janissary foot (the military embodiment of the kapikulu palace slave class) to the bands of commonfolk mercenaries trained in firearms, sekbans and levends. The latter fought not due to their social position or tradition but for a living as the professionals of military craft. They were similar to their leader, Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha.
When Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha get the office of the Grand vizier, he refused the marriage advances of Sultan Murad III sister, the beauty Esmehan Sultan, considering her too prodigal and voluptuous, not the features he esteemed in ladies. Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha hanged a couple of the Jewish financiers, mates of the rejected bride, onsite in the harem of the sultan, where they had hidden, condemning them for the debasement of the Ottoman coins. He scared the sultan and his lovely sister to death and departed to conquer Northern Iran.
Did Feriha Ecem Calik, acting as Esmehan Sultan, or Giulio Ewing on his oil painting, express the features that enraged Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha in ladies? The “old war-dog” rejected the marriage advances of the sultan’s sister, hanged a couple of her mate financiers and marched to conquer the Transcaucasia.
Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha passed away during the fighting over the Iranian capital of the time, Tabriz. However, his path of war and drive for power continued. Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha became the first in the number of the Ottoman rulers in the capital and provinces who seized the power by the ruthless force of arms. And he was the pathfinder whose personal warfighting addiction was strong and evident.
Was the warmonger career of Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha exclusive in belligerent Eastern Europe of the Early Modern Time? No, it was not. It was the common pattern. Historians repeatedly portray Jan Zamoiski, the Grand crown hetman of Rzeczpospolita (that have the arduous name Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the historiography), as the close associate of victorious King Stephen Bathory. In their opinion Jan Zamoiski repelled the imperial ambitions of the “bloodthirsty” tsar of Muscovy, Ivan the Terrible, from the Eastern Baltic’ Livonia and Western Rus’ (now-a-day Belarus’), established the Polish position in the Eastern Baltic contesting Sweden and denied the Polish throne to Hapsburgs after the death of his master, King Stephen Bathory. The abundant studies of those achievements narrowly conform to the reality of the epoch. However, there is a page in the biography of Jan Zamoiski that is strangely unattended in the same way as the Caucasian origin and mercenary lineage of Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha.
Jan Zamoiski was born in Western Volhynia, a piece of the Halych and Volhynia Grand principality (or kingdom) in South Western Rus’ (now-a-day Ukraine). It was captured by Poland in the middle of the 14th century during the partition of the Halych and Volhynia Grand principality between Poland and Lithuania while Eastern Volhynia was annexed by Lithuania. Western Volhynia was the first region of former Rus’ where the Polish masters changed the martial estate of landowners, allotting lands to the Polish Catholic gentry and magnate emigree instead of ingenious Russian Orthodox boyars and princes. The ancestors of Jan Zamoiski belonged to that imported stratum of the West-Volhynian society alien to its old-Rus’ peasantry and townsfolk. The social animosity inside Western Volhynia was projecting outside to whole Western and South Western Rus’ as the Polish expansionism.
The Polish nobles and gentry longed to grab the Lithuanian parts of the Ukraine, and push out its native Russian and Lithuanian Russified landowning nobility. their dreams were the agricultural colonization of the Ukrainian rich soil and unrestricted exploitation of the Ukrainian peasantry. The hungry market for food products in Western Europe allured them, the trade avenue of the river Vistula and the Baltic ports was in the Polish hands. The international policy and military campaigns of Jan Zamoiski as the crown hetman, commander-in-chief of the Polis-Lithuanian army, and the Commonwealth’s chancellor, head of the government, were directed, first of all, to achieve this priority. The Baltics dispute with Muscovy and Sweden, and the dynastic quarrel between the Swedish House of Vasa and the Austrian Hapsburgs over the Polish throne, remained of secondary importance for him. The abstract greatness of Poland was his off-time objective only. The highest achievement of Yan Zamoiski’s political and military career was the confrontation of the 50,000-strong Polish professional army under his command against the fabulously 130,000-strong Ottoman invasion army across the river Danube in 1590. Many of the soldiers of that Polish army belonged not to the Polish gentry or Central European mercenaries, its familiar recruits, but to the Ukrainian registered Cossacks, the novel military hireling estate that Jan Zamoiski was bringing up under the patronage of King Stephen Batory for the expansion in the Ukrainian Wild Steppes frontier.
In 1590 the confrontation of the Ottoman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was a military stalemate. However, in the following truce, the Crimean khan abandoned the legal instrument, actual from the 14th century, the khan’s charter allotting the Western and South-Western Rus’ to the Polish kings and Lithuanian Grand princes as the usufructs in exchange for the tribute. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s monarch became the sovereign of the Ukraine and immediately started to distribute the steppe frontier lands, properties and business charters to the Polish magnates and gentry. The Polish-led colonization of the Ukraine started. Jan Zamoiski entered Polish politics at the beginning of the 1570s as the proprietor of four small villages and by the end of the 1590s, he possessed a few dozens of towns and a few hundreds of villages, most of them in the Ukraine. This property aggrandizement was the personal “Ukrainian” interest of Jan Zamoiski in the Polish grandeur from the Black Sea to the Baltic.
In East-Baltic Livonia (now-a-day Latvia and Estonia) the rush of the Polish magnates (Jan Zamoiski was prominent between them) confronted the Swedish drive to the Baltic empire. Similar to the vocation of Grand vizier Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha in the Transcaucasia and mission of the chancellor and Crown hetman Jan Zamoiski in the Ukraine, the Swedish rulers and generals had the personal motivation for their East-Baltic drive that strengthen their commitment to the Swedish imperial grandeur.
Historians consider that the Swedish Baltic empire was founded by King Eriс XIV. In 1568 he was declared insane, overthrown and killed in a prison, however, during eight years of his reign he established the fabulous Swedish regular army and fleet and engineered the exemplary Swedish fiscal-military state, the pattern for all European nations in Modern Time. While going crazy, Eriс XIV defeated Denmark in the Northern Seven Years’ War over the primacy in the Baltic Sea, invented the naval concept of the sea domination, and captured most of now-a-day Estonia and Latvia, the former in the contest with Muscovy’s tsar Ivan IV the Terrible and the latter in the contest with Sigismund II Augustus, the king of Poland and Grand prince of Lithuania. In all his great achievements King Eric XIV had his close associates and it is significant that many of them, although not the close relatives, had the clan surname Horn.
Klas Kristersson Horn af Åminne managed to capture Reval (now Tallinn), from the grab of Ivan the Terrible and Sigismund II Augustus. During the Northern Seven Years’ War, he led the Swedish fleet from one victory to another, destroyed the Danish fleet and established the Swedish domination over the Baltic Sea. Klas Kristersson Horn was the offspring of the serving gentry, not of the land aristocracy or city patriciate, it was natural for him to promote the state-possessed specialized navy instead of the traditional fleet of rented commercial ships and feudal marine militia.
Henrik Klasson Horn was not a blue blood aristocrat but a career commander and official as well. In the office of the governor of Reval, he secured for Sweden most of Estonia and Eastern Latvia. Over there he authored the Swedish model of the integration of Livonia in the kingdom of Sweden. He enlisted the land gentry of the collapsed Livonian Order into the Swedish noble estate and lifted the Estonian and Latvian peasantry, which the German feudal lords treated only a bit higher than working cattle, to the social position of the legally able Finnish peasantry. The reformed former Livonian estates became the social base of the Swedish merge of Livonia and excellent recruits for the Swedish army fighting against the Muscovites, Poles, Lithuanians and Danes. Three centuries later they composed the Estonian and Latvian nations.
Both of Horns were natives of Finland that Sweden conquered in the 12th–13th centuries. The Swedish nobility colonized it and turned the Finnish peasants into their serfs, the ancestors of both Horns were allotted land estates in Finland, the military service to the Swedish king was their responsibility. The military nature of the Swedish nobles’ lordship in Finland and its frontier geography on the border with the Russian dominated Karelia, the possession of the Novgorod Republic, generated the expansionist, imperialistic mentality of the Horns and other clans of the Swedish gentry settled in Finland. Finland became the main social base of the Swedish Baltic imperialism. Enlarging the Swedish empire, the serving Swedish gentry of Finland raised its social position equal to and superior over the Swedish feudal aristocracy, received lucrative offices and get the management of the state resources. Swedish aggressive wars in the Baltic and Eastern Europe, in the same way as the expansion of the Ottoman Empire and Poland, were not the abstract drive to the imperial grandeur. They were advocated, prepared and run by the rulers and generals with the personal militarist ideology and objectives.
When in 1552 Ivan IV the Terrible, recently crowned as the tsar of Russia, marched his army to Kazan the third time (his two previous expeditions were unsuccessful) Prince Aleksander Gorbaty was its chief leader under the tsar. Gorbaty was an offspring of the Suzdal princely clan of descendants of Prince Andrew, the younger brother of the Russian national hero Prince Aleksander of the Neva, the victor of the famous “ice battle” on frozen Lake Peipus against the army of the Livonian Order in 1542. The principality of Suzdal and another domain of the Suzdal princes, the principality of Nizhny Novgorod bordered the territory of the Early Medieval Muslim Turkic principality of Bulgar in the middle river Volga’s region. The Suzdal princes pressed the Bulgars under political dependence, however in the second third of the 13th century both the principalities were destroyed by the Mongols. The Suzdal princes became tributary vassals of the Mongolian empire of Northern Eurasia, the Golden Horde; Bulgar fell under the direct Mongolian administration and became their base for the raiding into Russian principalities. Suzdal turned into the Russian frontier to the nomadic steppes, its losses and devastation from the Mongol and Tatar raiding were most heavy. That position produced the frontier mentality of the Suzdal princes; when the table of history turned and North-Eastern Rus’, united by Moscow, rose over the declined Golden Horde, they led the aggression of emerging Russia against the successors of the Golden Horde. The Khanate of Kazan, established on the territory of former Volga Bulgar, became its first target.
During the Moscow siege of Kazan in 1552, the troops under Aleksander Gorbaty destroyed the Kazan relief army that harassed the Russian siege works. After the successful ambush, the troops of Alexander Gorbaty advanced on the base of the Kazan relief army in the fort of Arsk and stormed it. That victory determined the fall of Kazan and the annihilation of the Kazan Khanate. It was not surprising that Alexander Gorbaty was one of the first Moscow generals who effectively applied the foot with firearms in offensive combat. He considered the foot fight as the kind of combat where Russians were superior over the Tatars, traditional horsemen, and the firearms as the weapon that brought to Russians the battlefield superiority over the Tatars with their composite bows.
Prince Michael Vorotynsky was a scion of the Rurikid House ruled in the frontier Chernigov (Chernihiv) principality of South-Western Rus’ bordering to the nomadic steppes. The Mongolian devastation of the 13th century and the following Tatar raiding were extremely severe there and the Tatar tribute was ruinous. One of the ancestors of Michael Vorotynsky, Prince Michael of Chernig[o/i]v was killed in the headquarter of the Mongolian khan Batu for his refusal to worship the pagan idols at the entrance of the khan’s pavilion. His other ancestor, the prince Yury of Novosil and Odoyev was famous for his victories over two of the weakening Golden Horde’s khans, Baraq and Khudaydad (Kuydadat) in 1422 and 1424. That was the time when the Russian victories over the Tatars were rare and a prince who dared to oppose the khans was considered reckless. The ancestors of Michael Vorotynsky were driven by the frontier warrior morale of belligerent survivors. The Tatar nomads of the Northern Black Sea steppes were their hated enemies. After the disintegration of the Golden Horde, they composed its successor polity, the Crimean Khanate, under the Ottoman protectorate, and the frontier warfare in the lands of the princes of the Chernig[o/i]v House escalated.
Michael Vorotynsky distinguished himself in the siege of Kazan in 1552, however, his star’s highest ascension happened twenty years later. Unsurprisingly it was Mikhael Vorotynsky who led the Muscovite army in the grandiose battle of Molodi, at the river Lopasnya, in 1572, the decisive Russian engagement against the Crimean Khanate. Just one year before the Crimean army accomplished the breakthrough across the Muscovite defences, raided as far as Moscow and burned the city. Muscovy’s independence and domination in Eastern Europe was at stake in the battle of Molodi. Michael Vorotynsky achieved the stunning landslide by the decisive deployment of the foot with firearms and cavalry charge of the reiter pistoleers regiment recruited in the Muscovy-conquered East of Livonia. However, both of the westernized Vorotynsky tactical innovations relied on the wagon-camp, the traditional array of the Russian troops against the nomadic horse, perfected by his ancestors.
The attentive study on East European warfare in the Early Modern Time reveals that Schumpeter was twice right in his essay. The armed conflicts were initiated by the nobility of the emerging nations that utilized war as the leverage to maintain their privileged social position and gain authority over the population and wealth of their nations. However, they always have their personal story behind those sociological objectives. Not the abstract grandeur of their states but their ideology and commitments determined where and when they planned and waged their wars, how they built their armies and utilized them.
Schumpeter authored his essay “Sociology of imperialisms” as a sociologist and could afford the abstract generalizations. However, the historians researching on the armed conflicts of the past and present possess abundant information on them, they can specify the names, motives and objectives of the decision-makers of war. Why do they often avoid doing that? Most of them have ideological reasons similar to the reasons of Schumpeter to build his sociology of aggressive imperialistic war on the data of the ancient Persian empire. Historians are afraid of the current policy. And there is another kind of historian who strives to drag into the public opinion the conclusions going against the substance of history. But if the substance of history looks like a fluid pool of words, it is an illusion. The rock does not exist harder than it. Like a stone out of the sand, the substance of history is the truth that gets out of falsifications inevitably.
Read about the people who made the decisions of war, their motives and objectives, and practice of armed violence in my books:
Vladimir Shirogorov. War on the Eve of Nations. Conflicts and Militaries in Eastern Europe, 1450–1500. Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Lexington Books, 2021
Vladimir Shirogorov. Ukrainian War. The Armed Conflict over Eastern Europe in the Sixteenth – Seventeenth Centuries. V. 1. The Melee of Rus’; V. 2. Turkish Onslaught: Balkans – Black Sea – Caucasus; V. 3. Head-to-head Offensive: Baltics – Lithuania – Steppes. Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya, 2017, 2018, 2019 [in Russian]
Vladimir Shirogorov 