•Volume III, Head-to-head Offensive
The UKRAINIAN WAR series.
The world political system, as it is now, was established in the 16th – 17th centuries. In Eastern Europe, it was the time of the conflict over Rus’ – the conglomerate of territories that remained after the early medieval state of “Kievan” Rus’ was destructed by the Mongol invasion of the 13th century. The North-Eastern part of them was subdued by the Golden Horde (Ulus Jochi), a mighty Mongol super-empire of Frontal Eurasia. Western and most of South-Western Rus’ were conquered by the Grand Principality of Lithuania. The Westernmost slice of South-Western Rus’ was merged by the kingdom of Poland. The Southern steppe part of Rus’ was devastated and converted into the wild nomadic grassland.
The irretrievable decline of Lithuania and the Golden Horde after the civil wars in the second third of the fifteenth century led to the conversion of the large area of Western and South-Western Rus’ into the transitional region of the military contest and partition. Named in multiple languages of the region as the Frontier–Ukraine it emerges as a prey for the ideas, will and actions of the powers around. The destiny of its geographical wings, the eastern Baltics and northern Black Sea shores depended on the future of this heartland.
The almost simultaneous rise of Moscow as the new centre of power in North-Eastern Rus’; strengthening of Poland due to its merge of the Teutonic Order; advance of Ottoman Turkey on the Crimea and Northern Black Sea shore; renewal of the Swedish Baltic expansionism, – determined the directions of confrontation that crossed over the Frontier–Ukraine. The struggle developed as an armed contest including the build-up of forces and military conflict with its background of state-formation and nation-building. The economy, ideology and human potential of the newborn national states of Eastern Europe were dedicated to war. The Frontier–Ukraine, lion’s share of former Rus’, was its prime objective.
When the confrontation began, nobody was able to predict that its stake was not a partition of Rus’ heartland of Eastern Europe but the long-term regional domination. The struggle of the new international centres of power over Rus’ turned into a clash over the hegemony in Eastern Europe. It was impossible to foresee that relatively small and weak Moscow annihilates much more resourceful Lithuania and Grande Horde, sweeps equally dynamic Turkey, Poland, Sweden to southern, western, northern backyards of the Frontier-Ukraine, and suppresses for centuries the emergence of the self-made polities onsite. At the turn of the 15th–16th centuries, nothing favoured Moscow to become the universal master of the subcontinent and establish its imperial rise as the great world power on its East-European domination.
The contest over the East-European domination in the 16th–17th centuries, embraced from its inception to its outcome, was an all-in-one military conflict, – Ukrainian War. It demonstrates ideologies, societies, leadership and military of the involved nations in detail.
The objectives of the conflict were over-important, its consequences are of a global scale. But the Ukrainian war was never researched as the prolonged multi-side surge of the armed actions which spread over two centuries to change Europe and the World. The transformation of the Early Modern West-European warfare, labelled as the Military Revolution was never revised applying the course of the conflict over the East-European domination. The UKRAINIAN WAR series is committed to filling the gap
Volume I, The Meleé of Rus’
It tracks the conflict through the formation of states and nations, development of armies, battles, raids and sieges, ideas and deeds of history-making figures, – under the will of Providence, – to the middle of the 16th century. The continuation follows.
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Content
•Between the hegemony and the partition
•The Military Revolution of combat or statistic?
•The war and the armed struggle
•The composition of the research
•Long-range naval and river campaigns
•The aggressive combat and sedative statistics
Between the hegemony and the partition
In the dawn of Early Modern Time, Western Europe was the multi-power competitive matrix. The Holy Roman Empire and the Roman See were legal and spiritual elders but not powerful overlords for the number of political entities interweaved in the complex network of authority and status.
Eastern Europe was different. It was dominated by the undisputable power hegemon – the Golden Horde (Ulus Jochi). It had its nomadic heartland in the wide belt of Eurasian steppes from Middle Asia and Southern Siberia to the North Caucasus and the Northern Black Sea region; its political centre roamed in the lower reaches of the river Volga at the Northern Caspian Sea region. The tributary principalities of Rus’ in the North-Western fridge of the Golden Horde were under its harsh sovereignty. All power relations between different polities, which were in Western Europe “international”, in Eastern Europe were “domestic” – expressed as intrigues around the throne of the Great Khan of the Golden Horde. Not only nomadic entities of the Horde itself but settled polities inside the Horde’s zone of hegemony (Russian principalities, emerging Lithuania and Moldavia) and in its immediate outskirt (as Poland, Hungary, Ottoman Turkey in the Balkans and the Teutonic Order in the Eastern Baltics) were overwhelmed by the military might of the Golden Horde and played under the dictatorship of the Golden Horde. However, by the eve of the 15th century, the Horde decayed.Eastern Europe became opened to two perspectives at once. The first one was the partition of its territories with the transfer of power to multiple heirs and successors of the Golden Horde, emerging inside or preying from outside. Another one was the reconstruction of the super-power of the Golden Horde and the recurrence of the hegemony.In Western Europe, the second geopolitical game was never tried in Early Modern Time, but in Eastern Europe, it soon became the only game possible. Today this conclusion is clear as the rear-view, but at the turn of the 15th–16th centuries, it was the mystery of the future.
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A mystery of Moscow
Nobody (besides mystic visionaries) could predict that the tiny and obscure principality of Moscow grows during two centuries into the next hegemon of Eastern Europe and builds on the ground of its East-European domination its ambitions of European and global superpower. Russia did not exist when the contest over Eastern Europe started, it emerged in the struggle over the territories of Eastern Europe and developed in the clash over the East-European hegemony.
In the decay of the Golden Horde, the principality of Moscow wasn’t between favourite pretenders for its territorial and power heritage. The Grand Principality of Lithuania and the Tatar successors that split from the former empire (the Grand or Volga Horde, the Crimean and Kazan Khanates), Poland and Turkey were much more resourceful and prominent. Sweden and Ottoman Turkey from North and South looked more dynamic. The principality of Moscow became the nation of Russia and achieved East-European domination in the fierce competition with them.
By the end of the 17th century, the game was over. The Grand Horde and Kazan Khanates were annihilated and merged by Russia, the Crimean Khanate was pressed to the brink of survival, Turkey and Sweden were curbed to the Black Sea and Baltic Sea shore strips, Lithuania was torn apart and existed only as a ghost inside Poland and Poland itself was beaten into a second-rate power. Together with Sweden and Turkey, it became the next prey of Russian expansionism in the 18th century.
Eastern Europe is the giant subcontinent from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea and from the Vistula to the Urals. Was the competition over the partition of such huge territory divided into some local pockets or it was integrated? Had it the stable core or its focus rolled from one limit to another? Was the hegemonic drive in the power struggle over Eastern Europe determined by its geographical specific or it followed the ideological rush and statesmen’s ambitions?
Did the “pro-Moscow” outcome of the armed struggle over Eastern Europe at the end of the 17th century become the setting of the accidental events or the arrival of some pivotal tendency and predestination?
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The heartland-frontier
When in the second half of the 15th century the power hegemony of the Golden Horde in Eastern Europe declined, the different “historical functions” of its subregions became apparent.
The second half of the 15th century was the time of the decay not only of the Golden Horde but also of the polity in the opposite angle of the political spectrum – the theocratic Teutonic Order in the Eastern Baltic. Similar to the Golden Horde, the Order weakened not due to the struggle of “oppressed people” or aggression from outside but due to the inner reasons intrinsic to either the nomadic or religious polities. It was the maturing of their subjects.
In the case of the Golden Horde, it was accompanied by the still unexplained general move of the nomadic population to the East – across the southern Urals and Siberia via the Northern Caspian region into Middle Asia. In the case of the Teutonic Order, the maturing of its subjects was influenced by the burning out of the crusader fever in Europe on the eve of the Reformation, the disarray of Catholicism and the Holy Roman Empire, – two patrons of Baltic crusaders.
The third phenomenon of the epoch was the crumbling of Lithuania – the still under-researched composite state “between the [Golden] Horde and the [Teutonic] Order” embraced the territories from the Northern Black Sea steppes to the Eastern Baltics. Lithuania was the bright but short-lived pagan empire built by Lithuanian military opportunists without the precise ethnic core and the harsh submission mechanism which are necessary for a long-lasting empire-state.
The century after its foundation in the middle of XIV c. under the Golden Horde’s brutal patronage in the Western lands of former Rus’, Lithuania split up to principalities of Lithuania proper under the Polish merge and Lithuanian Rus’ endangered by rising Moscow. Looking for a “third way” the grand prince of Lithuania Jogaila chose to rebaptize himself in the Catholic faith and merge Lithuania to Poland becoming Polish king Wladyslaw II Jagiello. He succeeded to found the new dynasty for Poland but the Polish-Catholic alternative didn’t work for Lithuania as a whole.
After some stabilization under his cousin Vytovt (Vitold), in the second quarter of XV c., Lithuania fell into the civil war driven by the national and religious rift. Its military forces and regional status as the dominating power of former Rus’ were undermined and the dynastic solidarity of the House of Gediminid (after the founder of the Grand Lithuania Prince Gedimin) were compromised. At once, pretenders emerged for territories, embraced by Lithuania, and its lost status. They were the same polities that aspired for the heritage of the Golden Horde in the Black Sea steppes and the Teutonic Order in the Eastern Baltics, – Poland and the Grand Principality of Moscow or Muscovy.
The crumbling of Lithuania together with the decay of the Teutonic Order and Golden Horde created a tremendous subregion of the power vacuum – the territories from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea over now-a-day the Baltic states, North-Western Russia, Belarus, Westernmost Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and South-Western Russia. The opportunities for the new political entities appeared to capture the territories for their state-building and nation-building. It was the time when the geopolitical map of Eastern Europe was determined by the military means for centuries ahead.
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The Military Revolution of combat or statistic?
War was the main field of competition between Early Modern states. The principality of Moscow became the East-European overlord because it mastered the armed struggle better than competitors with its military foundation more solid, its armies more victorious, its generals more successful, its troops more effective in the fighting.
The rise of Moscow-Muscovy-Russia happened in the period from the last third of the 15th century to the first third of the 17th century and coincided with the vividly discussed “Military Revolution.” Was the rise of Moscow linked to the Military Revolution and what is a link? The question couldn’t be answered without reappraisal of the Military Revolution conception.
The concept of the Military Revolution is vividly researched as the change of the balance of infantry and cavalry, firearms and cold steel in the forces; inflation of their numbers and the new geometry of the forts; “simplification” of the recruitment and bureaucratization of the military management. However, the different approach to define the Military Revolution in warfare transformation of the Early Modern Time exists as well. It is tracking of new means and agents to gain a battlefield victory. What is more important in the Military Revolution: either the course of combat or the sociological and technical values?
Although war is the most unpredictable field of human activity, the results of a military conflict are always clear and undisputable – they are the victory or defeat in the fighting.
When grand historical processes are expressed by war, such as state-formation and nation-building, construction of the international order and other “long waves” of history, it means that the outcome of combat (always unpredictable and rarely explainable) gets the fundamental importance. It affords to settle the phenomena arguable in other ways, in measurements by statistical or technical assessment. While the traces of the “classic” Military Revolution are obscure and contradictory in Eastern Europe in the 16th–17th centuries, there are the evident chains of fighting results in battles, sieges, raids, standoffs of attrition, the lines of military reforms and build-up of armies which were driving the transformation of the subcontinent.
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The war and the armed struggle
In the absence of the common moral authority (as the Roman church in Western Europe before the Reformation) and of the universal legal authority (as the Holy Roman Empire in Western Europe before the Hussite Wars) the competition for the territories and domination in Eastern Europe could be decided only by the armed force. Considering that the struggle was multi-sided it is necessary to research and compare the military capabilities of all main pretenders.
It means to research the armies (numbers, compositions, weaponry, supply systems, morals, disciplines, strategic culture, etc.) and to follow them in the only possible field of the comparison – fields of battle. The collision of armies judges their military effectiveness. And the military effectiveness of armies mirrors the potential of states to wage war. The armed struggle emerges as the omniscient stratum of history.
The notion of the armed struggle was proposed by Soviet military theory in the 1920th-1930th abounding with innovative war concepts, philosophical and practical. Since WWII it entered the international military science and the thinking of practitioners of war.
The armed struggle is the notion that embraces the immediate clash of forces and events directly connected to it by the causal and consequence links. It is the phenomenon of individual fight, tactics, operational level of the fighting, strategy, the organization of armies, the weaponry and the military logistics, the moral and the discipline of troops, the chain of command and the decision-making of commanders.
War is the notion much more capacious, besides the armed struggle it includes economic and demographic balances, social movements, ideological rivalry and geopolitical scene.
War imposes the potential of nations and international agenda on the armed struggle.
The notion of the armed struggle is ordinarily used to analyse the spread of military events over different levels of modern conflicts. Applying it to the study of war and competition of states in the Early Modern Time should be not lesser productive.
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The composition of the research
The study starts with the essay on the armed struggle in Western and Central Europe in the period from the end of the 15th – to the second half of the 16th centuries. The task of the essay is not to write down, in brief, the war history of the regions but to find in researched events the main phenomena of the armed struggle of the time which should be applied as “ideal types” to the study of the military history of Eastern Europe. For this purpose, only events of undisputed organizational and combat values demonstrating the trend of the epoch are engaged. They are generalized as the axial warfare trend of the Early Modern Time.
The material of Western and Central Europe was used for this empirical-theoretical preparatory work because it is now researched and generalized in more detail than materials of all other main “war regions” (the Far East & China, the Middle and Near East & Turkey). The concept of the Military Revolution that became central for the military history of the Early Modern time was invented researching primarily West- European data and applied to explain West-European events.
Shaping the “ideal types” of the military history of the Early Modern Time I tracked the military build-up (linked to the state-formation and nation-building), the development of the composition, organizational and command structures of forces, the changes of their weaponry. I picked them up in the showroom of the “Italian wars” and “Habsburg-Valois” wars addressing (when necessary) events of the Hundred Years’ War, Hussite Wars, Habsburg-Ottoman Wars.
Ideal types of the Early Modern military history established with the West- and Central European material are synchronized with the qualifiers of the theory of military science.
When frames and lines of the research are established, the study goes to the next three chapters. Each of them is dedicated to the capacity to wage a war of the main three pretenders over the partition of Eastern Europe and the domination over the subcontinent. They are Moscow (or Muscovy) which moved to merge other polities of Rus’ and some neighbouring territories, Lithuania (which was falling apart) and Poland (which tightened and moved to merge Lithuania).
The materials of the history of the Kazan Khanate (the Eastern geopolitical rival of Moscow until the middle of the 16th century) are involved in the research of Moscow’s military history. Sometimes the research goes to grasp the roots of some Moscow ideas and innovations in warfare via the history of Byzantine Empire (the donor of most of the Moscow legal and ideological forms) and of the Middle Asian “World Conqueror” Tamerlane or Timur (the referent polity to the statecraft and military art of the Mongol–Turkic–Muslim ecumene).
The materials of the Crimean Khanate are included in the research of the Lithuanian military history, because the Crimea, together with Moscow, was the military predator behind the collapse of Lithuania in the last quarter of the 15th – the first decade of the 16th century. Facts of Lithuanian clashes with the Teutonic Order in the 15th century are applied to reveal some particular properties of the Lithuanian military organization.
The materials of the Teutonic Order and Hungary are involved in the research of Polish military history. The long age of Polish-Teutonic wars from the “Great War” (with Grunwald-Tannenberg battle of 1410) to the “Riders’ War” (with the Order secularization of 1525) was one of the three main fields of Polish military development. It is analysed thoroughly. Two other main fields: the Tatar wars and the Moldavian wars are observed in detail too.
The bulk studies of the military potential of main contenders over Eastern Europe are alternated with on-case battlefield researches. Six of the regional conflicts dominated the fighting landscape of Eastern Europe at the turn of the 15th–16th centuries:
– the war between Moscow and Lithuania allied with Poland of 1499-1503 accompanied by the clash between Lithuania and the Crimean Khanate in the Middle Dnieper and between Moscow and the Livonian Order in the Eastern Baltics;
– the war between Moscow and Lithuania allied with Poland for the control of Smolensk in 1513-1521, accompanied by the “Riders’ War” between Poland and the Teutonic Order;
– the war between Moscow and the Crimean Khanate of 1521 followed by wars between Moscow and Kazan of 1524 and 1530,
– the wars between Poland allied with Lithuania and the Crimean Khanate of 1512, 1519, 1527,
– the war between Poland and Moldavia of 1531,
– the war between Moscow and Poland allied with Lithuania in 1534-1537.
They consolidated the first cycle of the armed conflict over Eastern Europe in the 16th–17th centuries. Their outcome determined its course, participants and objectives further on.
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A play of numbers
The new Early Modern geopolitical situation in Eastern Europe was produced by the actions of armies. But in what kind of a way it influenced the armies?
The “classical” growth of the size of armies and the change of their inner composition was the first consequence. The grand prince of Moscow Vasily II had in the battle at Suzdal in 1445 the court horse of 1 000 fighters and 500 fighters of land militias; in the battle at Rusa in 1456, his army consisted of 5 000 horsemen of the Household regiment and 3 000 mounted archers of Tatar mercenaries. In the decisive operations and battles of Ivan III like the occupation of Novgorod in 1477, the standoff with the Grand Horde at the river Ugra in 1480, the armies 30 000 – 50 000 men were deployed but the active part of them excluding the territorial and communal militias was still 5 000 – 10 000 men.
In the decisive battle over the partition of Lithuania at the river Vedrosha in 1500, the army of Ivan III consisted of the same 20 000 – 25 000 men but all of them were the active part, – new commissioned regular horse of the territorial companies. Lithuanians had around 30 000 men but most of them, besides some 5 000 Polish mercenaries, were the traditionally sourced levy, magnates’ retinue and gentry land militia. The Lithuanians were defeated crucially.
The Polish king Casimir IV lost the battle of Koniz in 1454 with the levy of 16 000 – 25 000 gentry fighting against the Teutonic army of around 15 000 mercenaries. His best general Peter Dunin won the battle of Schwetz in 1462 with 2 000 men, – 1 000 men of the commissioned Polish regular horse and 1 000 men of the foot mercenaries.
The decline of Polish numbers is elusive, it means only total useless of the levy, the forces of Dunin were the new model Polish army in its inception. With them, he got the upper hand over the equally meagre troops of the Order. But in the clash over the Bohemian Crown against the mercenary “Black army” of the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus in the 1470s the commissioned and contracted mercenary parts of the Polish army numbered up to 20 000 professionals.
The last Polish enterprise to mix politically important levy and military effective hired troops fell in the shame of the Kozmin forest flight in 1497 when the Polish army of 50 000 gentry horse and 5 000 – 7 000 mercenary foot under the king John-Albert was wiped out by the Moldavian voivode (prince) Stephen III. When the struggle with the rising Moscow over the partition of Lithuanian Rus’ came in the first decade of the 16th century, the Polish army of the regular model fought well on its own despite the levy’s absence.
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The army-society relations
The militarization of armies was the first change as they were losing their traditional social organization and adopted the special military composition. The change processed the prime fighting force of the Middle Ages, – the levy of the landowning martial class, – into the regular professional cavalry. The rearrangement of the court retainers of princes brought first permanent troops as the French Compagnies d’Ordonnance, Moscow Gosudarev Dvor and Polish Choragwie Nadworne.
The commission and the contract models appeared as the all-European phenomenon to draft the militarized armies instead former personal obligation of vassals and servicemen, the chartered obligation of communes and other traditional conscriptions. The Antique legacy, differently accepted in Western and Eastern Europe, helped the reformers to regulate the innovations. According to the Roman Republican and Imperial models, there were the contracted troops of foreign mercenaries and commissioned domestic hirelings in Western and Central Europe and according to the Byzantine bureaucratic model, there were domestic servicemen supported by the income of assigned land-tenures in Eastern Europe.
Civil administrations managing the military affairs besides the proper fighting appeared here and there. They ran the mobilization, organization, supply and finances of troops, contracts and commissions of their providers, they appointed the commanders and mustered forces to control their preparedness to campaigning. The split of the fighting command structure of armies from civil administration of the military affairs changed the army-society relations. The military force lost its property of social action and its property of the political agency of violence prevailed.
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Wrestling the impetus
Soon after the Vedrosha debacle when the army of Lithuania was inexistent, the mercenary Polish horse and Czech foot poured into Lithuania and stopped the penetration of the Moscow forces on the line of Smolensk and Polotsk. In 1501 the grand prince of Lithuania Alexander was elected as the king of Poland and signed the full acquisition of Lithuania to the Polish regnum. The Lithuanian gentry levy and troops of magnates were hurriedly reorganized according to the Polish pattern.
The first success came soon, while not contra Moscow forces but contra raiding Crimean Tatars. In 1506 Alexander was deadly ill and hid from castle to castle near his capital Wilno hunted by the Crimean marauding parties. In despair, he decreed nobles of the Lithuanian Seim gathered in nearby Lida to be his army. He appointed Michael Glinsky just returned from the imperial service to command them and handed him his royal court troops of the Polish horse and Czech mercenary foot.
In the battle of Kletsk Glinsky deployed them together with the reorganized Lithuanian levy in the deep counterstrike position. While brave levy attracted the charge of the Tatars, the assault Polish horse jammed them with the circling move to the defensive wagon-camp of the Czech handgun men. Tatars were destroyed and fled. In the battle of Kletsk, Glinsky found the innovatory tactics combining various types of troops. And he revealed the striking potential of the semi-armoured hussars which became the pattern of the Polish cavalry for two centuries.
Glinsky soon headed the pro-Moscow riot in Lithuania and was exiled, but his inventions were successfully applied by the Polish generals. In 1508 Nicholas Firlej with 1 000 of the professional horse and 5 000 of the mercenary foot deployed in the wagon-camp pushed the Moscow troops from Minsk in the Lithuanian heartland and border Orsha. In 1512 Nicholas Kamieniecki in the battle of Lopushno with 1 000 footmen and 6 000 – 7 000 horsemen destroyed the Crimean raiders jamming them between the fire of the wagon-camp and assault of the armoured horse.
By the second decade of the 16th century, the Moscow army found itself inadequate against the new Polish military model of professional troops and their tactics of wagon-camp. It required urgent reforms despite its unrivalled efficiency just a decade ago.
Six years before the encounter with Firlej near Minsk and Orsha, in 1501, the Moscow army met the forces of the Livonian Order, the ally of Lithuania, in the battle of the river Seritsa. The Moscow army consisted of the Pskovian city militia and regular horse companies of Tver’ and Novgorod. The master of the Livonian Order Wolter von Plettenberg deployed the huge forces of 8 000 footmen and 4 000 horsemen; he applied the tactics of the massive pike square supported by the handgun men in the loose ranks. He used his heavy horse as the striking reserve. Moscow troops were routed with heavy losses.
Soon near the castle of Helmet in Livonia Moscow forces under Prince Patrikeyev-Schenya in their best composition of the Household regiment and the personal division of the Kazan khan Muhammad-Emin reversed the success. But in 1502 in the decisive battle at lake Smolino the Patrikeyev-Schenya’s troops couldn’t gain victory over Plettenberg’s army. The outcome of the battle was unclear, however, strategically it was the fault of Moscow because in the critical years when Lithuania could be overrun best Moscow troops bogged in tiny Livonia.
After the collision with the Polish army of Firlej in 1508 and the unsuccessful siege of the key city of Smolensk, the weakness of the army was understood in Moscow. The government of Vassian Patrikeev (one of the best Moscow generals of the 1490s turned a monk) and Michael Glinsky (escaped from Lithuania) was hurriedly looked to improve its fighting capability. The leverage was found in the formation of the conscripted handgun foot.
It was drafted in the culturally advanced cities of Moscow, Novgorod, Pskov, equipped with the arquebuses imported or produced domestically, trained and put under the command of assigned nobles. Soon the conscription was amended to the hired service and instead of communal self-support, a wage to the footmen was introduced (together with the relevant tax on the communities).
Moscow received an army of multiple types of troops. In 1513 Pskovian arquebusiers stormed the stronghold of Smolensk but were repulsed. Two other sieges of Smolensk followed in 1513 and 1514. They were the showcase of the new Moscow foot and artillery train. At last, the city was compelled to surrender after the heavy bombardment threatened by the storm and sack. New Moscow grand prince Vasily III immediately rushed the best of his forces into the depth of Lithuania.
However, at Orsha in 1514 they were intercepted by the Polish-Lithuanian army racing to save Smolensk. The looser of Vedrosha 1500, hetman Ostrogski escaped from the Moscow captivity to lead it. The ambitions of Moscow clashed with the Lithuanian charge to survive and the aspirations of Poland. The famous battle was played along with the same tactical scenario as the battles of Kletsk and Lopushno (where Ostrogski assisted Kamieniecki). The Moscow army had inferior foot and artillery, it fought stubbornly but was feigned into the Polish fire trap, confused and destroyed by the shock of the Polish heavy horse.
Moscow expansion was abruptly stopped. Poland saved the western half of Lithuanian heritage and started to reconstruct it according to the Polish state pattern and ideological line.
It was the historical moment when the rift emerged in the former wholeness of Rus’ predicting the forthcoming division of Rus’ for Russia, Ukraine and Belarus sections.
And it was the historical moment when the armed struggle over the partition of Eastern Europe transformed into the competition over the hegemony over the subcontinent.
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The warfare system
The first third of the Sixteen century was the period when in Eastern Europe, like in Western Europe, armies raced ahead to adopt inventions they collected in the armed struggle empirically and theoretically. The empirical part consisted of the practice of fighting and intuition of commanders. The theoretical part was found in the learning of the Roman-Byzantine past and the thinking of visionaries. The task was to generalize combat accidents and the theory in some kind of warfare system applicable to gain permanent battlefield superiority.
The generalization of the practice and the theory in the system was the sign of the Early Modern approach to human activity. It was different from the Medieval approach consisting in looking to precedents. Similar generalizations were underway in art and science, public administration, religion, international relations etc.
In Western Europe, the first generalized Early Modern warfare system was developed under the Spanish king and Emperor Charles V. The “Spanish” system started in the decrees of his predecessor King Ferdinand II who established the regular horse Las Guardias de Castilla in 1493 and the semi-regular conscripted-commissioned La Infanteria de la Ordenanza in 1496 instead of the Reconquista mix of the Caballero gentry levy, Hermandad townsfolk militias, private troops of Grande magnates and religious orders.
Leading the new army “Grand captain” Gonzalo de Cordoba gained sound victories over the French forces of Cerignola and Garigliano in 1503.
Cordoba played the Cerignola battle in the late Medieval design of the foot defensive position fortified with earthworks against the French heavy horse charge. The difference with the past consisted of the arquebus fire of his foot instead of the Medieval bow or crossbow shooting and in the array of self-sustaining fighting units, squadrons, instead of the traditional wings and centre.
In Garigliano engagement, Cordoba used both those innovations profoundly. He deployed his foot of arquebusiers and pikemen, his Jinetes light horse and Italian armoured Condottieri horse in the operational sequence of marches and combats against the French heavy horse and Swiss foot. French forces in Italy were destroyed and expelled.
The Spanish array at Cerignola was the facility of the Past and the French army effectively dealt with it using the strong artillery in the battle of Ravenna of 1512 when the Spanish tried to copy the Cerignola design without a big imagination. But the Spanish array at Garigliano was the breakthrough as the famous battle of Pavia in 1525 demonstrated. At Pavia, the similar combined offensive operation of different types of troops annihilated the French army.
The Spanish-Imperial array at Garigliano-Pavia wasn’t a replica of Late Medieval formations. It was not a variation of the Czech tabor or the Middle Asian Tamerlane – Ottoman Bayezid I – English Henry V position fortified with earthworks and stakes. It was the body of infantry strengthened with the innovative combination of pikes and arquebus fire and deployed in self-sustaining battlefield formations. The latter was the tactical key to success. The deployment, named squadrons, was mobile, flexible and independent in action from other types of troops as the cavalry and the artillery both in the defence and offensive. The innovation was solid with the big future, the modern concept of the battalion as the tactical combat unit is its immediate successor. It was not the firearms on their own and not the professional composition of the Spanish foot that overran battlefields but their squadron tactical organization.
The Spanish-Imperial superiority in warfare was regulated by Emperor Charles V in the system. Spanish army combined different types of troops, it had a special military organization (the Tercio for the foot) and the command structure. It was arranged in squadrons on a battlefield – the flexible combat units shaped by the objectives of the action.
Charles V built his new army in Italy and he imported some of its key components from the Condottieri armies of Italian city-states like Milan, Florence and Venice. He combined their contracted composition with the Spanish commission and German mercenary tradition. He was impressed by the Italian city-states administration of the military affairs separate from the strictly fighting matters and reproduced it as for his Italian acquisitions as for his Spanish and German holdings.
He favoured absolutist ideas of former Milan leaders like Visconti and Sforza to govern through bureaucratic offices, suppressing Medieval rights of estates and corporations. He achieved the level of resource mobilization for his military enterprises unsought before.
With this innovative warfare system, Spain and the Empire got the upper hand in the Habsburg – Valois Wars (and in the contest over Italy as their episode), deterred the Ottoman Turkey in Central Europe after the collapse of Hungary, and dominated in the Western Mediterranean. The achievements were of first-rate geopolitical value.
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To grasp and fix
In the armed struggle over Eastern Europe, the first fixation of the Early Modern warfare system was achieved in Poland. As the Spanish-Imperial system centred in the tercio-squadron array, the Polish one centred in the adopted oboz deployment of a wagon-camp. Crown hetman Jan Amor Tarnowski was the general of the concept.
He developed its theoretical and legal framework in his manual Consilium Rationis Bellicae and military charters Artykuły Wojenne. He perfectly applied his system in the confrontation of 1532 with Moldavia culminated in the battle of Obertyn and the Starodub war of 1535-1537 against Muscovy.
As in the battle of Obertyn as in the siege and storm of Starodub the oboz wagon-camp array was the main facility of the Tarnowski’s tactics.
In the battle of Obertyn he placed inside the oboz not only the artillery and foot but the horse as well. He manoeuvred inside the wagon-camp, defended it and charged from it. The foot of Tarnowski was as active as his horse, it attacked Moldavians by shot and pike. Acting in the wagon-camp he twisted the Moldavian array, created the weak point which he destroyed by the charge of his armoured horse reserve.
In the siege of Starodub in 1535, the oboz wagon-camp served as the artillery position for the bombardment of the fortress, and then it worked as the trap for the Russian garrison when it attacked from the doomed town to escape. Tarnowski believed that the garrison has to be demolished, he pushed Russians back into the fortress and annihilated them by the storm.
Tarnowski developed his warfare system during the “Riders’ war” of 1519–1521 when giant Poland wasn’t able to cope with the tiny stub that remained of the Teutonic Order in Eastern Prussia. Just returned from the aristocratic travel over Europe, he was invited by the Polish queen Bona Sforza to plan the campaign for her royal husband Sigismund I the Old. The plan was the disaster and its implementation became the bigger one due not to the fall of Tarnowski’s gifts but the surprising superiority of the Teutonic professional mercenaries.
Poles had good cavalry but their foot was obsolete if compared with the best imperial infantry imported by the Order on Moscow subsides. After some unpleasant defeats, Sigismund I accepted the conversion of the Order into the hereditary dukedom of its last High Master Albrecht von Hohenzollern and appointed Tarnowski to amend the Polish army.
The need was urgent. The Turkish sultan Suleyman the Magnificent heavily pressed Hungary, another Jagiellonian kingdom and the Polish strategical “underbelly”. Everybody in Europe understood that Hungary perishes if invaded and Poland looked like the next possible target of the Ottoman predation.
To implement his battlefield ideas Tarnowski needed other infantry than the Czech and Silesian mercenaries the Polish crown contracted. He turned to the Polish national foot introducing for it the same arrangement which occurred such efficient in the horse. He filled the foot with rank-and-files of the Polish origin preferring mercenaries as commanders with the specific experience. He introduced pikes for the Polish infantry, he trained it for the cohesive charge in tight open formations outside the wagon-camp and he required of it to fire by ranks directly into the enemy instead of the crossbow-style shooting by the hinged trajectory.
The warfare system of Tarnowski demonstrated the Polish rush to power domination in Eastern Europe in the best way. Moldavians were defeated decisively but Moldavia was the small principality under Ottoman pressure and couldn’t resist the Polish might.
The war with Russia was a different story. Russians had the advantage in the agility of their horse as well as Poles had one in its assault capacity. The Russians resorted to the raiding war in the borderland and cut the Polish success. They found an asymmetric tool to counterweight Tarnowski’s system in applying their handgun men differently. It was the stationary defence.
Besides the storms of Smolensk in the sieges of 1512–1514, the first mission of the Russian handgun men was the defence of field positions on roads of the Tatar invasions denying them access to the country’s heartland. The perilous Crimean incursion to Moscow suburbs in 1521 when the Tatars swept out the Russian horse and forced the fords over the river Oka demonstrated the necessity to defend them relying not on mobile but stationary forces. The field artillery and the handgun foot were developed as the best facilities for it.
The main position was constructed on the bank of the river Oka – the natural barrier between inner Russia and Tatar steppes. The fords of the Oka were traversed with the sharpened stakes, its bank was strengthened with wooden ostrog fortifications and earthworks. The foot was trained to defend them primarily by fire denying crossing to the Tatars. The arrangement was named Bereg, it was not only tactical but also the operational system consisting of the foot in the frontline defence and horse counterstrike reserve, it was deep with the fall-back positions and reconnaissance far ahead in the steppes. The Moscow-designed operational system of defence against the Crimean raiding was much more effective than the parallel Polish-Lithuanian system of the frontier troops deployment regulated by the Rules of Lvov of 1520. The Polish frontline position consisted not of the stationary defensive line but of the vanguard professional troops, mostly horse, committed to restraining the raiders until the massive reserves of the levy move from the deep rear. The system allowed the Crimean raiders the space and time for their predation, and they used it to extort the large volume of slaves and spoil from the southern half of Poland and Lithuania.
Russians applied their Bereg operational arrangement in the frontier region of the Starodub War against the Polish tactical combat superiority. They built numerous small earth-wooden forts in the key points of the contested territory (road crossings, river fords, etc.) and tenaciously held them. They used the distributed defence as the operational base for the deep raids into the Polish and Lithuanian rear. The Polish army wasn’t trained and equipped to deal with the distributed stationary defence. It could invest one-two impregnable strongholds like Starodub but it wasn’t capable to capture the entirely fortified territory. The Starodub War finished with the zero-sum of gains and losses.
At the same time, Russians hurriedly adopted the oboz wagon-camp array for the tactical use, trained their foot for action in it and their horse to attack from it. The Moscow operations at Kazan in 1524 and 1530 demonstrated that they were good learners.
However, until the 1540s the Moscow tactical warfare was not so sophisticated as the Spanish or Polish systems. Russian army tried different patterns, some of them were innovative in the organization (like a semi-permanent commissioned horse) and operations (like distributed territorial defence). But in the battlefield tactics, Russians ran behind the Poles, they did not grasp their victorious solution.
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The application of forces
According to the concept of the Military Revolution, it developed hand-in-hand with nation-building, transforming the territorial and dynastic composite states of the Late Middle Ages into the nations. In agreement with the Theory of Hegemony, the Military Revolution in the Early Modern Time brought the escalation of conflicts over the international domination. The objectives of the armies, which were before the tools of dynastic and corporative conflicts, changed although their weapon and equipment, composition and tactics remained Late Medieval. However, the very important component of warfare changed much faster than the armies developed. It was the application of forces.
The application of the military force is an under-determined notion and a case that is much more difficult to study than the weaponry and composition of troops. It is evident that when the armies of the Early Modern time were born by the Late Medieval armies, their difference was not in their composition and weaponry, it was in their application. The examples of the tactical warfare systems of Spain and Poland and the operational system of Moscow-Muscovy-Russia are among the evidence of this thesis.
There was nothing new in the armies that overturned the international situation in Western and Eastern Europe in the last quarter of the 15th – first half of the 16th century. But their achievements are fantastic and they are based on the “revolutionised” application of the military force.
Almost at once, the armies grew able for more than to settle dynastic disputes. Everywhere in Europe politicians turned to them for conquering and merge of other states and not to bite their pieces or to press them into vassalage and tribute. The war received another meaning and scale, the phenomenon of war returned on the international scene as great as it was in the epoch of the great Early-Medieval conquests.
It was the first quarter of the 16th century when the new weapon abundantly pouring to the forces was realized as the tool to match new ambitions of war. The militarized composition of the armies as the specially organized professionals afforded to adopt it. The first national military systems of mobilization, organization, tactics and operational art channelled its application.
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Long-range naval and river campaigns
The striking potential of the new armies, their discipline and logistics opened for military leaders unsought before prospects in the scale of the campaigning. In Eastern and Western Europe, they were utilized first of all in the long-range amphibious operations.
For Western Europe, the expeditions of Charles V in Tunisia in 1535 and Algeria in 1541 are examples. For Eastern Europe, they are the expeditions of Moscow forces to Kazan’ of 1467–69 and 1487, 1506, 1524, 1530. In all of them, the marine vessels of the Spanish and Imperial fleet and river vessels of Moscow flotilla served not for war on waves (although the battles on waves happened here and there) but as the tool to gain remote objectives and to move forces in the manner to overwhelm enemies. Fleets shipped thousands and tens of thousands of troops, hundreds of guns and hundreds of tons of materials with the agility and speed impossible for overland transportation.
Long-range naval and river campaigns trained military leaders to plan the war and to apply the forces with the operational scope.
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The edge of the tactics
The philosophy of the war was leading the warfare transformation; the organization and command structure of armies ran close after it abreast with the tactics and operational design; and the hardware of new warfare, – weaponry, ships, fortifications, – followed in the rear.
The de-socialization of forces and elaboration of special models to mobilize and organize them brought the opportunity to build more numerous armies of different types of troops. The strength of professional armies multiplied. Simultaneously the strength of communal militias and levies went down.
The military reforms were focused on combat efficiency. Different types of troops grew under requirements of action and were applied to diversify the tactics. The deep battle array and complicated operational games were elaborated. Playing them with the social command structure of armies was impossible so the special military chain of command was introduced.
The tactical edge of the troops sharpened, they learned to fight more imaginatively and decisively. However, the soar of tactics was short-lived. As Habsburg – Valois, Habsburg – Ottoman, Moscow – Poland conflicts demonstrated the appearance of militarized and diversified armies brought decisiveness to war only for the first quarter of the 16th century. Soon the momentum was lost. War again numbed in expensive sieges, marauding raids and paralyzing confrontations of huge forces, as it was in Habsburg – Valois Wars in Picardy and Provence in 1536–1537, in Habsburg – Ottoman Wars in Austria and Hungary in 1529 and 1532, in Moscow – Poland conflict over Western Rus’ in 1536–1537.
The deadlock of war became an unpleasant surprise for the military reformers. It reminded that the breakneck dynamic of the military development in the Early Modern Time was much different from its slow evolution in the Medieval past. The keeping of the combat superiority required of fresh solutions to be more innovative and faster than before.
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The aggressive combat and sedative statistics
The Military Revolution was not the linear increase of the armies’ fighting might. The offensive capabilities and aggressive potential of troops were growing explosively. This rule brought a sharp edge to the campaigning of the last quarter of the 15th – first half of the 16th century. But as soon as the defensive capabilities caught up the campaigning became futile until the third quarter of the 16th century when the new wave of combat innovations came.
This uneven race of the defence–offensive capabilities is the explanation of the strange intervals between the periods of the grand surges of the armies’ numbers and their technical potential. The seemingly slow periods of the growth of armies and their technical advance are the periods of the development of new forces’ application.
The combat innovations in forces’ application run ahead of the statistical development of their numbers, weaponry, fortifications, equipment, etc. They brought first breakthrough results in the defence-offensive race.
The statistical and technical innovations come later to feed them. Often, the numerical, organizational and technical innovations are conservative in comparison with the innovations in forces’ application.
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The operational dimension
The rise of strategical warfare opened the gap between the tactics-centred approach of generals and political objectives. Simple tactics weren’t adequate anymore for the new task of armies. Conquest and forced merge of another state required to fight the operations upon combats. The level of military thinking appeared combining multiple engagements into the joint outcome.
The rise of strategical warfare opened the gap between the tactics-centred approach of generals and political objectives. Simple tactics weren’t adequThe offensive and defence in the battle, manoeuvring, raiding, occupation of the territory, siege and hold of a fortress were distributed over the broad space and waged together to achieve the victory of the strategical and political dimension. It was the time when the operational level of war appeared as the connection between tactical actions and political objectives. Military leaders learned to prepare the battles of more or less predictable results by the concentration of forces and smaller actions. They mastered to exploit the battlefield victory into the campaign superiority and to combine the results of multiple actions into the strategic will. By the middle of the 16th century, the operational level became the solution that supported the efficiency of war despite the tactical deadlock of the race of defence–offensive capability.
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Volume II, Turkish Onslaught
From its inception to the end of the 16th century, Ottoman history was the demonstrative interplay of state-formation and military phenomena. Usually, the latter is treated as a value of pure tactics or troops’ organization. But in fact, it ascended to the decisive social and political meanings.
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Content
• Society-tactics-power pyramids
•The structure of the research
The tactical state
The story started with the rise of the founder of the Ottoman state, bey Osman, from a paltry obscurity of a mountain semi-nomadism and petty plunder of his Greek neighbors to the status of the pivotal danger for the Byzantine empire in Western Anatolia.Conquering Bithynia, the bey led not only his clan mounted militia and his private host of Mongol-style horse nökers but also the urban infantry of the yayarun brotherhoods of nearby Muslim towns. The infantry became his anchor during the blockade of Nicaea in 1301 and gave the weight to his army in the following battle of Bapheus in 1302 where Osman crushed the Constantinople amphibious expedition.After the battle of Bapheus, both nomadic warriors of the Turcik tradition and the urbane estates of the Persian inheritance became fundamental for the development of structures, practices and ideologies of the Early Ottoman polity. The strong and clear causality of the tactics and the troop’s organization to the state-formation became intrinsic for the Ottoman way.The Ottoman Turkey of its inception was a military state due neither to its emergence as an armed gang of robbers clotted for predatory raids (the “marauders thesis”) nor to its militancy imposing Islam on “infidels” (the “gazi thesis”). Ottoman Turkey was a military state because the development of its political institutions and the social structure was determined by the course of fighting and troops’ organization in the scale and depth that it looks like the “tactical state”.
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Persons of bridges
To describe the rule and to analyze it is the objective of the Turkish Onslaught: Balkans – Black Sea – Caucasus (to the End of the Sixteen century)”. I am not planning to repeat in Russian great books of Rhoads Murphey and Colin Imber in the fields of the Ottoman military and general institutional history. My study is not dedicated to reshaping the mosaic of general and military Ottoman practices as they were combined by Halil Inalcik or Gabor Agoston as well.I follow the connection “tactics – state-formation” looking for bridge between them. The bridge is virtual but solid. It is the comprehension of warfare by the Ottoman leaders, generals and other decision-makers especially in times of upheaval. The comprehension was as analytical and theoretical as visionary and personal: I am interested in both.The comprehension of the armed struggle together with the practice of fighting was giving birth to military organization and tactical methods that formed up the army. The army required a social base and political edifice. Somebody built them. I am looking for builders.The army is an institution that is not hanging in thin air. The army is the tool of warfare and it could be understood only in warfare. For the objective of the research, it is necessary to treat the army in conflicts.The triple construction of “fighting – decision-makers – states-formation” of every specific period has to be tested in combat. The test program is the specific one: the army is tried in clashes with enemies. It helps to determine the fighting meaning of the organizational and tactical military tools, to name the authors of them and to establish their political and social position.When “the extremely effective and intelligent infidel” the Habsburg captain-general in Hungary Nicolas Palffy opened in the Long War 1593–1606 the “box” of the Ottoman might which was feared “to be full of snakes, centipedes and scorpions” – he found it “empty”. But Palffy was wrong boasting that there is “nothing at all inside”.Turkey was the complicated set of military, political, social and ideological institutions and phenomena that worked during two hundred years of its turbulent ascension.With the West-European Military Revolution at hand Palffy was a brave-heart: “snakes, centipedes and scorpions” panicked and crawled out of his vision. We need to catch and vivisect them. Because they determined the destiny of Ottoman Turkey in the Seventeen century.And they staged the armed struggle over Eastern Europe which is unimaginable without Turkey. As well as Turkey is inconceivable without the armed struggle over Eastern Europe.The last decade of the 16th century and the first two decades of the 17th century were decisive for the Ottoman history of the Early Modern time. The Ottomans fiercely fought against Habsburgs and Safavids, they dealt with domestic disturbances of an unprecedented scale and passed the severe economic crisis. Even the weather became dramatic as people walked in shock over the ice of frozen Bosphorus from Asia to Europe.And it was the decade when Turkey entered the struggle over the partition and domination of Eastern Europe. It demanded all Ottoman experience of their past and their abilities to innovate to sustain the war and win. Or as a minimum to survive.
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The survival interrogation
Despite the predominantly civil nature of the Islamic law sharia and Islamic state traditions, Ottoman Turkey was constituted as the cluster of military practices receiving the social and economic essences as derivatives of fighting. Tactical innovations directly played as social clusters and the troops’ organization was embodied as the structure of power. After they had being constituted, they returned to fields of fighting to be chopped and shot, – tested, – to give birth to the next generation of changes.Behind the fixed Arabic lexicon of Ottoman legislation and the Persian flamboyance of Ottoman literature, there was the constant torrent of “innovate or die” social and political changes sourced in the military practice. During three hundred years until the end of the 16th century, Ottoman Turkey was the best in Europe and Asia successive work of the Military Darwinism of sociologist Walter Runciman but it collapsed in the 17th century.”Why?” The answer lays not in the failure of Ottoman resources, the administrative capacity or the geopolitical thinking. It lays in the Ottoman fiasco in the historical interrogation of tactical questions and state-formation answers.”Turkish Onslaught” is paid to research the prehistory of the fiasco. It is the second volume of the series “Ukrainian War: the armed conflict over Eastern Europe in the 16th–17th centuries;” it is dedicated “to bring” Ottomans into the study of the struggle over the partition and domination that changed both Eastern Europe and Turkey forever in the 17th century.
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The Ukrainian trident
The importance of the struggle over the partition and domination of Eastern Europe could be deducted or constructed. In the deduction, it became evident that after the closing of the “Long War” of 1593 – 1606 until the final Vienna campaign of 1683, almost three quarters of the century the Balkans and Hungary were the silent territories of a small war. The “Long War” was closed by the Ottomans as the winning side. The Vienna campaign became a catastrophe for them. If not in the Balkans and Hungary, the Ottoman power had eroded somewhere else.The never-ceasing second front of the Ottomans – the fight with Shiite Iran, their main rival in the Near East, Middle East and Islamic World, was silent since the 1630s. Iran ceased to be the military or ideological danger for the Ottomans.The third region of the Ottoman military commitment and main direction of their expansion in the middle decades of the Seventeen century was Eastern Europe – Russian and Polish borderlands which had been rethought together with Tatar Wild Steppes and Turkish Black Sea shores as the integral Frontier-Ukraine.Ottoman Turkey entered the struggle over Eastern Europe in the 1590s answering to Polish Cossack raids and trying to counterbalance the Polish hegemonic ascendance after its victory in the “Livonian War” against Muscovy-Russia. They never returned. They were lost in action.The strike of the Ukrainian spike of the Ottoman geopolitical trident was so traumatic for Turkey that it collapsed at Vienna in 1683 and rolled down beyond retrieve afterwards.
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The messianic contest
In a change from the deduction to construction study, the particular rules of the competition between states in the Early Modern Time has to be taken into account.The 17th century was crucial for the aggressive state-formation in Early Modern Europe including Ottoman Turkey. All villains of the uncompromising rivalry over the geopolitical domination, resources and status jumped up and all victims were chased and pressed under a gun. However, the geopolitical robberies in Western Europe and Eastern Europe were staged differently.In Western Europe there were several villains: England, the Netherlands, France, sometimes the Hapsburgs, Sweden and Brandenburg-Prussia crowded in gangs to give the kick to one between them. The victims of robbery, – German states, Spain, Portugal, Dane, Italian states, – changing sides and manoeuvring had chances to survive. Another chance consisted of their muscle training: all of them were states with existing governance organizations and armies. They were capable of wage wars. They were not doomed.In Eastern Europe, at the end of the 16th century, only two heavies emerged: Poland and Moscow. Poland merged Mazovia, Prussia as the former territory of the Teutonic Order, Lithuania proper, Western and South-Western Rus as the parts of Lithuania, and Livonia as the territory of the Livonian Order finished in the 1560s. In the movement of the “Execution of Law” and in the Lublin Union of 1569, Poland brought all of them into the unitary state with one sovereignty, one oligarchic government and one Noble Assembly, with one regular army of hired natives and foreign mercenaries.The Moscow principality consolidated different polities of North-Eastern Rus’ by dynastic, ideological, military means and grabbed some parts of the Western and South-Western Rus from Lithuania in wars of the 1480s – 1520s. In the 1550s Moscow conquered the Tatar Kazan Khanate of the Middle Volga and moved to South and South-Eastern fridges of Wild Steppes with the “defensive” lines as pathfinders of colonization. The state of Muscovy-Russia got its shape in the 1540s when the militaries took over the power in the Shujsky coup of 1442. They spread over the country the unitary rule of administrative appointments and local self-government. They established the Estate Assembly and the joint army of the regular infantry and the gentry horse of territorial companies.In Eastern Europe, no players besides Poland and Moscow survived. or emerged during the critical decades of the nation-building of the first half of the 16th century. Coalitions were not possible. The struggle over the partition or domination of the region started as the wrestle of the two. As always in the case the contenders not only mobilized their resources and trained fighting strokes, they developed particular ideologies of the one-to-one combat – messianic ones.In Poland, it was “Antemurale Christianitatis” (the Christianity bulwark) as the special mission of Poland to be the advanced bastion of European “civilization” in the East and South-East against Russian Orthodox “schismatics” and Turkish-Tatar Islamic “barbarians”.In Russia it was the “Tzardom of Truth” as the Lord’s blessing to bring the Orthodox faith “clean” to the Apocalypse, meanwhile imposing it on “pagans” (it meant Tatars) and saving Western Rus’ from the Catholic (it meant Polish) “vicious” lordship. By the end of the 16th century, all other polities and peoples of Eastern Europe became the victims of the contest of Poland and Moscow. Western and South-Western Rus’ and the Eastern Baltics were torn apart. Even the Tatars who formerly had been enjoying the position of the East-European superpower were defeated, split to minor hordes and victimized. Their nomadic Wild Steppes became the spoil for the Polish-Moscow conquering and colonizing competition.It was the background of the great geopolitical surprise when in the last two decades of the 16th century, Sweden from the North and Turkey from the South dashed into the exclusive Polish-Moscow wrestle with equally ambitious aspirations. They were not only military strong (in the case of Sweden it became the surprise as well) they were arguing over East-European domination from different approaches. Both powers entered the scene with the core idea of the Sea Domination, – the Turks as the master of the Black Sea shores, the Swedes as the master of the open Baltic Sea.However, entering the struggle they learned the rule: contending over Eastern Europe you have to be not only resourceful and daring, – you have to be messianic first of all.Turkey had her messianic idea from long ago. It profited from the “Holy War” – gaza against infidels to robber them and suppress them as tax-paying subjects of the global community of Islam. For the struggle over the East-European domination, the “Holy War” was amended into the concept of the “hard” conquest instead of a “soft” robbery and submission. Sweden invented her messianic idea fast. It was the Lutheran Predestination of the Swedes to liberate the Protestant community of Northern and North-Western Europe out of the “satanic” grip of the Roman See. The Orthodox Russian grip suits not lesser to be destroyed as well as the Catholic Polish one.The one-to-one wrestle of Poland and Moscow became the struggle of the four. It was the clash of the geopolitical concepts of sea-based domination against the concept of hinterland-based domination. It was a messianic confrontation without compromises.If in Western and Central Europe the geopolitical struggle (including the Ottoman-Hapsburg contest over Hungary) was the competition for territories, resources and status, in Eastern Europe it was converted into the total war for the survival with the stake of the future only for the one, ultimate victor. In the East-European struggle over supremacy, the outcome was to win and survive or perish.It was the reason why the struggle over Eastern Europe in the 17th century became a matter of survival for Ottoman Turkey. By the end of the period, the outcome was determined. Turkey and Sweden were mutilated to continue as stumps of their former territories, ambitions and statuses. Poland was wounded to death. Russia emerged as the superpower.
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Visionaries of survival
Turkey was so lucky in the survival game before that its collapse in the 17th century looks highly unexpected.From the urban brotherhood infantry in the siege of Nicaea and battle of Bapheus in 1302, it became the trend that in the crucial clashes with their enemies the Ottomans had some innovative stock in advance. Ottoman military and political inventions were not a reaction to the thrusts of the enemies or the products of circumstances – they were the forecast of dangers and prognosis of opportunities. They were visionary.Emir Orhan, the son of bey Osman, started to generate ideas ahead when he unleashed the raiding across Dardanelles to Thrace. He formed it into the socio-military movement of the “torrent” – Akin. Orhan assembled militant communities of fighters akinci from his native Turkmen, the Muslim adventurers, local Greek and Slavic renegades. He channeled them into Thrace and loosed them to attack the local population without attention to political borders. The Akin was the continuation of the Anatolian gaza but it was organized differently. It wasn’t tribal and it wasn’t free. The communities of the akinci were arranged after the special charters, their leaders were appointed from “comrades” of bey Osman and emir Orhan, the raiding activity was licensed and the booty was taxed.Orhan founded akinci communities for the political game and marauding in the Balkans during the Byzantine Empire’s civil war. But it happened that in the first clash with Serbia as the Balkan heavyweight the special tactical skills of akinci brought two important victories at Maritsa river of 1364 and 1371.The akinci became the effective occupational force. They cleaned Thrace from competing pretenders, fixed the submission of the Byzantine Empire (leaving her only Constantinople) and moved the center of the Turkish state-formation from Asia Minor to the Balkans. Along with the visionary way of the Turkish development, the Akin was founded not after the clash with Serbs but before it as if the clash and the enemies were foreseen.Following the Turkish way as the tactical state, the Akin communities became its Balkan frontier organization as political as social until the end of the 16th century. Considering that most of Turkey was a frontier – it was the good military tactical and organizational invention turning to become the state-formation block.The next move came from the son of emir Orhan – Murad. He was sent to the Balkans as the heir apparent. After the death of his father, he was proclaimed to be sultan, the title of an independent king instead of emir, – Orhan’s title of a military leader, or bey, – the Osman’s title of a local lord. Murad moved his capital to Adrianople-Edirne. As soon as he established the geography and status of his realm he continued to innovate. Enemies were old ones, – Serbia with its affiliate Bosnia and backing Hungary. Nothing could press Murad I to the fundamental change he initiated. When in 1386 the Turkish akinci army was severely defeated by the Serbs under their new leader prince Lazar near the river Toplitsa and by Bosnians near the town of Bilech, akinci looked an outdated waste.But when Lazar decisively met Murad I only three years later on the Kosovo Field, Lazar’s assault troops of the heavy mailed horse and foot, who cracked akinci, were amazed to meet their Turkish twins. They were equally mailed timariot sipahi – the horsemen allotted with the timar estates. Taxed peasants of their estates paid to equip them in the manner of the “middle” mailed cavalry.In the decisive episode of the battle of Kosovo, after the assassination of Murad I by the Serbian saboteur, the timariots under his son Bayezid crushed the Serbian army, killed Lazar, strangled Bayezid’s brother Yakub and proclaimed him the sultan. Although the “former innovations” of gazi warriors, the yaya infantry and akinci horsemen were the most of the Turkish fighters, it was the counterattack of the timariots that brought tremendous victory to the Ottomans.The cavalry servicemen with different benefice forms were widespread in the Balkans (as everywhere in Europe). There was nothing new in the timatiots. The innovation consisted of their mass, unitary weaponry and armour, and their organization in the territorial companies with the strict hierarchy of command and discipline. They were decisive in the battle.After the victory on the Kosovo Field in 1389, the timariots, – military tactical and organizational innovation, – became the pivotal social and political structure of Turkis state that Bayezid I consolidated in the conquered Christian Balkans and subjugated Muslim principalities of Anatolia.The territorial troops of the timariots were settled as the body of power and the timariots’ command chain was introduced as the hierarchy of government in provinces. Two of them were established, – Rumelia for the Balkans and Anatolia for Asia Minor. It was the triumph of the tactical organization as the social and political arrangement.
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Contra omni
Constructing his Great Turkey, Bayezid I came to contra omni confrontation with everybody around. His prime enemies became Crusaders called by the Hungarians from Europe and the “World Conqueror” Tamerlane from Middle Asia.The crusaders were clever analytics; they estimated the low fighting discipline of the Turkish horsemen akinci and yaya footmen as a perilous weakness if compared with the Western knights trained for the cohesive fight. In the battle of Nikopolis in 1396 the Crusaders charged at home to crush the army of Bayezid I. It was their great surprise to find behind the screen of the akinci not some “crowds” of the yaya footmen but the new azab infantry equipped with composite bows and deployed in the orderly ranks behind the sharpened stakes.Under the hail of arrows, Crusaders pushed aside the stakes and crashed the azabs. The cost was their exhaustion and disarray that Bayezid I used thrusting them first by timariots and later by his new-vassal Serbs and his household guards salahdars. The Crusaders gave up saving their leader John the Fearless of Burgundy and were massacred. The change of the traditional yaya footmen to the new azabs was not a change of name. The azabs became a different infantry. They were not communities obliged to enroll for fighting but the conscripts from the Muslim urban population and sometimes also peasants. They were equipped and trained in a unitary fashion, they fought under commanders appointed by a local judge-administrators kadi.The kadi administrational districts were arranged by Bayezid I over Turkey together with the establishment of the azab infantry. They became the integral governing arrangement parallel to the timariot hierarchy. Their organization was topped with two kadiasker captain-judges for the two provinces Rumelia and Anatolia. The azab infantry was the tactical and organizational military invention, – the kadi administrators became its civilian output in the state-formation.
When Bayezid I called the Thunderbolt met the “World Conqueror” Tamerlane near Ankara in 1402, his problem consisted in the fact that he was too slow preparing something new in the tactics and the organization of his army. Bayezid I anticipated the innovation, he started to work on it but he was not able to develop it in time. It was the kapikulu army of sultan slaves consisting of the horse salahdars and foot “new troops” yeni ceri – janissary.
They flashed in the battle of Nikopolis 1396, but they were not its main participants. Bayezid I had been arranging them hurriedly before the battle of Ankara in 1402, but hindrances were too strong. He needed the time to recruit slaves over the Balkans along with the devshirme conscription of Christian boys, press them into Islam and train them to fight. Bayezid I had failed. He was crucially defeated by Tamerlane.
The “World Conqueror” split Turkey between the sons of Bayezid I, gifted his wives around and dragged the sultan in the cage to use him as the feet rack. Bayezid I died of humiliation. The fate of the Thunderbolt shows the clear lesson of what happens with an Ottoman leader who does not have the military innovation to be turned into the state-formation block at hand in time.
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Society-tactics-power pyramids
The fall of Bayezid I had the long-range consequences. Two hundred years after the battle of Ankara no one reasonable Ottoman dared to play down the innovation game. Between sons of Bayezid I, while Suleyman had been drinking and womanizing in steam hamam baths and Musa mocked his suspected followers with baked toads, Mehmed aimed to take the command over the later father’s inventions.At the beginning of the 15th century, the era of great spiritual movements spread in Europe and Asia. Mehmed used spiritual tools. He distributed the Turkish society between different “paths” – tarikats of mystical Sufi Islam, assigning one of the state building blocks to each of them. The blocks were equal to the organizational and tactical parts of the army, and the mystical Orders started to control them ideologically.After the introduction of the timariot territorial armies and azab territorial conscripted troops, the service hierarchy of land gentry and the kadi administrational network became the backbones of the Ottoman government. Mehmed appointed the Melami “humbling” Order to patronize crude timariot horsemen and the Mevlevi Order of “whirling dervishes” to patronize educated kadis.
To inspire simpletons akinci and janissaries Mehmed called for Bektashi Order of miracle-making baba teachers. Catching the hearts of akincis and janissaries was not a simple job. They had been supporting Musa a long time but at last, his extravagancies became unbearable, he was betrayed and killed. Mehmed was crowned as the sultan for both European and Asiatic provinces.Soon after his ascension, Mehmed I died. His son Murad II continued to work with the sultan’s slave kapikulu troops. He developed their fighting capacity and turned them into the new state building block – the kapikulu government.By the time when the next round of confrontation with enemies outside started, Murad II outlined the arrangement of the society as the mobilization base, the army as the fighting force and the government as the political embodiment of its tactical parts. The pyramids were following: the Muslim population – the azab infantry – the kadi administration; the timariot gentry – the timariot cavalry – the timariot territorial hierarchy; the Christian population – the janissaries and other kapikulu troops – the kapikulu central government.
When at the end of 1530s – the beginning of 1540s resurrected Hungary with her army reorganized and retrained by the genius of John Hunyadi stroke Turkey with a tremendous force, it did not crack.Hunyadi was the matchless tactician and the organizational superstar who took into account all sides of the armed struggle including the composition of forces, their training, weapons and morale, fighting methods and the operational environment, the timing and space of combat.He used professional Hungarian, Czech and Polish troops equipped with the newest editions of cold steel and firearms, motivated to fight for the Faith and Fatherland. His tactics embraced the invulnerable tabor wagon-camp just introduced by the Czech Hussites and the lance-charge of the cohesive ironclad cavalry. He supplemented them with flexible actions of the middle mailed and light horse and (it was his great personal achievement) he applied the tabor as the assault array and used the tabor-based army for deep operational raids.
In 1443 Hunyadi came to the mountain passes in the vicinity of the Ottoman capital Edirne. He was repulsed by Murad II personally in the hard fighting at the Zlatitsa pass. In the next year, Hunyadi repeated the dash to the town of Varna in Northern Bulgaria. Hunyadi seemed to be unstoppable, Murad II met him looking to fall in action as a martyr shahid.However, it was Hunyadi who was doomed. Unlike Murad II society-army-government pyramids, Hunyadi had behind his fighting genius only the diverse Hungarian Estate society lost in the squabble for privileges and tax exemptions. Hunyadi’s tactical and organizational innovations weren’t transformed into the state-formation of Hungary, they were marginalized by the estates and despised by the ruling oligarchy of magnates.After the day of hard fighting, Hunyadi forces were pressed into the defence of tabor. King Wladislas III frantically dared for the direct thrust with his heavy horse, he was unhorsed and beheaded. The next day Turks stormed the tabor and massacred the Hunyadi infantry. Pretending to rally the defecting cavalry he ran out and narrowly escaped.
The example of Hunyady demonstrates that the strong link between tactical innovations and state-formation was obligatory for the long-run success in warfare not only for Turkey. It reveals much stronger causality in the play of military and political factors than the sociology supports, either the classical models of Karl Marx and Max Weber or the loose contemporary IEMP model of Michael Mann.Both Marx’s dictate of the society over the politics and Weber’s political guidance to the society were mediated by the military factor of the fighting efficiency. Mann’s interplay of the networks of the ideology, economy and politics was managed by the military factor.The guess has to be researched in other polities. That research is not the task of this book dedicated to Ottoman Turkey. However, it has to be followed as Turkey entered the conflict with the forces much more mighty and enthusiastic to fight than Hungary or Anatolian beyliks.
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Defloration of might
Murad II’s trained son Mehmed II was successful in applying the Ottoman invention to become the indisputable master of South-Eastern Europe and the Near East. He conquered Constantinople and finished the Byzantine Empire; he merged Serbia and most of Asia Minor; he defeated the mighty Turkmen state of “white sheep owners” Aq-qoyunlu; he ringed the Black Sea as Ottoman lake and stormed Otranto as the bridgehead in Italy. Mehmed II proclaimed himself the Megas Amiras, – the Great Captain in the mixed Latin-Arabian lexicon. He looked like a semi-God.Mehmed II reconstructed Constantinople into Istanbul, – the great metropolis of the Turkish lordship and the Islamic superiority. He enslaved in his new palace Topkapi dozens of high-born offsprings of the Palaeologus imperial dynasty and lesser royal families of Bosnia, Serbia, etc. He forced to his bed some dozens of Greek and Latin princesses. He established the inner palace Enderun school where he educated and indoctrinated the new generation of his government officials and army commanders. They were his owned things as if the unlimited dissemination of himself.
But while Mehmed II enjoyed his Heaven there were great developments on Earth.The conflict for the domination in Italy moved the Hapsburgs to unite their electoral emperorship in Germany with the inherited kingship of Spain. Together with “explored” America and grabbed Italy they formed up the universal Western Christian empire with the Crusading ambitions behind horizons.The Turkmen spiritual fermentation in Iran, Iraq, the Transcaucasia and Eastern Asia Minor catapulted to the religious and state power the revolutionary order of Safevi, – “red-caps” kizilbashi followers of the great mystic sheikh Safi of Ardabil. The descendant of Safi, Ismail, emerged in the 1500s as the warrior and general, political manager and mystical poet of the charisma so bright that he was welcomed as the precursor of the Mahdi Messia of Islam’s Apocalypse or immediate Mahdi.Ismail’s momentum was so tremendous that in lesser than ten years he defeated and killed Aq-qoyunly and other enemies and subdued all Middle East. He took the ancient Persian title Shakhinshakh and based his power on the interaction of the Turkmen spiritual and fighting zeal with the prosperity and state technique of the Persian heartland. Ismail intended to switch to himself the loyalty of all Asia Minor population and to push Ottomans over Channels to Balkans.
The rise of empires on Western and Eastern borders of Ottoman Turkey was accompanied by the new threat from its Southern “underbelly”. In the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, the Portuguese surfaced with the artillery sailing ships and infantry of the firearms. They were a small gang in the scales of Asia but they applied their technologies extremely aggressively. The Portuguese not only captured sea routes of the spice trade but aimed to demolish the Islamic Sanctuaries of Mecca and Medina and, as boasted the viceroy of India Alfonso de Albuquerque “to cancel the cult of Mohammed”. The Mamluk military regime in Egypt and Syria, praised as the Sanctuaries’ custodian, was overwhelmed by the Portuguese sea-power and firepower.The triple danger requires of Ottomans to act with tenfold innovative energy. Their problem consisted of the fact that they were not able to introduce anything new without scrapping something old. It was a challenge to the Ottomans. Their society was well-arranged and their state structure was well-established. The military innovations in the tactics and organization of forces were possible but it was a painful and hard job to clean the space to introduce them in the state-formation.
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The structure of the research
The first chapter of this book is paid to understand how under the guidance of sultans Bayezid II and Selim I Ottomans coped to circumvent the requirement and to win the struggle against mystical kizilbashis of Shah Ismail and the Mamluk military and ideological might. The first chapter serves as the prologue. The episode became the starting point of the research because it was the first time in Ottoman history when the tactical and organizational military innovations were not introduced as the social arrangement and political structures in Turkey.Was it the weakness or was it the sign of historical maturity? The answers are collected in the inner comparison of the Ottoman history before its breaking point (the Chapters second, third, fourth) and the Ottoman history after it (the Chapters fifth and sixth).In the first part, I dig for the source of the visionary military innovations of the Ottomans and their ability to install them as social arrangements and political structures. In the second part, I study the causes of their impotence to continue the effective line, when they generated many military innovations but failed to introduce them into society and politics as the blocks of the state-formation.
The conclusion is brought as the outcome of the 1580s of Ottoman history in the final two Chapters, – the last part of the research. It is established as the precondition for Ottoman Turkey’s defeat in the armed confrontation over Eastern Europe in the 17th century and its general “decline” afterwards.
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Playgirls, brain-men and iron-heads
A new challenge appeared in Ottoman history in the last quarter of the 16th century. If the Ottomans intended to continue the successful state-formation, their first task was not to invent something fresh but to clean the room for it wasting something rotten and rusty. The new challenge probably became an actual one for all of Europe. The cause ought to be researched but in Turkey it was apparent. The innovations, – technical, economic, religious, social, military, etc., – at the turn of the 15th–16th centuries moved on like an avalanche. The game of rulers was not to invent but to choose between inventions and to implement them.It was the hardest game. But in the long-range run for the state efficiency and the military superiority, it was the only possible one. As always there were the people who understood the challenge and the people who did not understand it or pretended to do not understand.In the first category, there were many military commanders. They were challenged to die or win on a field of action and this kind of choice always helps to think. The necessity of social and political transformation was absolutely clear for them as the writing and the governmental activity of grand vizier Lutfi Pasha shows. But Lutfi Pasha became the prey of women, – his wife Shah Sultan, the sister of Sultan Suleyman I, and the darling of the sultan, Hurrem. Lutfi was spared of the ordinary strangulation but dismissed and died forlornly. His persecutors belonged to another party, hostile to changes.
The category consists of people with inborn horizontal or vertical court flexibility. Both flexibilities afforded them to evade the necessity of changes and to prefer the political and social constant.The horizontal flexibility was the resource of numerous play-girls who crowded Turkish houses of power since the famous “Ukrainian” captive and the favourite Haseki wife of sultan Suleyman I Hurrem-“Roxelana”. The Haseki wife of the next sultan Selim II, the “Italian” captive Nurbanu-“Cecelia” lived long after the death of the sultan and started a new category of royal dowagers Valide. The wife of her son Murad III, the Albanian captive Safiye, shared the power over the sultan as the Haseki with Nurbanu as the Valide. After the death of Murad III in 1595 Safie became the Valide of her son Mehmed III while he enjoyed his Haseki Halime who became the Valide after his death. And so on.This book isn’t a story of harem play-girls but if entering power, they are important as a political category. Women of the harem managed to adjust themselves to any relief of pillows murmuring a piece of advice to the sovereign. Together with palace eunuch-officials and court mystical Sufi-teachers they were the party indifferent to social changes. They were satisfied with their position, they acted against a scrap of the existing order. They were conservative.
The vertical flexibility was the virtue of the cleverest men such as Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, – the grand vizier of sultans Suleiman I, Selim II and Murad III. If he wouldn’t be assassinated by the undercover dervish-killer he could continue. His trick was to be afloat on the top of the power in any circumstances. He spent his wisdom to play them and not to change them. Sokollu Mehmed was a good general and a good administrator but the chameleon he was best.There were a lot of people lesser than him but same as him. They were afraid of sharp changes fearing to lose the political capital saved and the environs mastered. They considered that the state could be improved by greasing the existing elements. As always, they were supported by political scientists like Kinalizade Ali Celebi who earned from advising. They were conservative.The conservative party developed its ladder of government ascendance. The tools of the promotion were bribes, harem favouritism, mystical visions and relative connections. They managed the system; it was smooth for them.
But wars of the Middle of the 16th century demanded the changes, more and more radical ones because the politicians, who dictated from harem, and traditionalist parties postponed them. The enemies of the Ottomans invented effective tools against their might. They found how to crush or confuse the Turkish military power expressed in the Ottoman ability to execute big tactical events with campaign-decisive or strategic results.Hapsburg’s captain-general of Hungary Lazarus Schvendi and the Iranian shah Tahmasb expressed their discoveries in their writing.In his Kriegsdiskurs Schvendi proposed to destroy the striking potential of the Turkish army by the defence of the linked fortresses of the fortified districts simultaneously with the manoeuvring actions of the relief army from the rear.Tahmasb confessed his ideas in his Credo Tezkire. He advised splitting the irresistible power of the combined Ottoman army between the local pockets of fighting. The Ottoman conjunction of the horse, infantry with firearms, artillery, wagon-camp and logistics would be broken. The isolated Ottoman forces would fall prey to his light kizilbashi horse and mounted gorchi handgun infantry.
The middle of the 16th century brought the deep crisis of the Ottoman military effectiveness both in Hungary and Iran. Suleyman I and Selim II tried to solve it by the simple amalgamation of their troops but never solved it. It became evident that not only the Turkish army needs the changes, but the society and the political structure have to be transformed according to the military changes. The time of the military iron-heads came.The marine debacle at Lepanto 1571 and harsh war over Cyprus became the alarm, although not for the top politicians but field commanders. The development started in Hungary where the provincial governors hired new troops of the light horse deli, and handgun sekban and levend infantry between the local renegades, dissolved timariot fighting retinues, gebelu, with the bolukbashi gang leaders as managers. The firepower monopoly of Istanbul governmental troops fell but the Turkish army acquired the numerous handgun foot and a light horse who could be coupled tactically to wage the distributed war imposed on the Turks by their enemies.That was a great military organizational and tactical invention. It returned the Ottoman army on top of the fighting capacity. However, now it was the army (or multiple armies) that belonged not to the Ottomans but to provincial governors and military commanders. Controlling the forces and fighting, they had to switch to policy inevitably. And their new troops mastering the armed action had to switch to social activity. The cycle of the transfer of military innovations into the state-formation had to be repeated in Turkey with the lead of the Ottomans or without them.
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From the hell of Caucasus
The burst happened in 1584 when the successful front commander against Iranian Safavids (a “Son of Purest Iron”) Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha came to Istanbul with the troops of his Caucasian veterans. The career of Ozdemiroglu Osman was winding. He was not a “classical” Ottoman product of the devshirme conscription and palace kapikulu schools. And he was not a descendant of the old Turkish landowning aristocracy of Asia Minor or a religious Ulema offspring graduated from some medrese school. He was borne in the family of a former Egyptian mamluk of Caucasian origin and made his carrier in fighting. Ozdemiroglu Osman took over the command of Ottoman troops as the campaign chief serdar in the Eastern Caucasus when they seemed to be doomed and other commanders rejected the appointment. He conquered Shiraz and Dagestan while the main Ottoman army was bogged in Georgia and Armenia. He fought with the troops consisting not of central janissaries or territorial timariots but with the sekbans and levends hired in Eastern Turkey and locally between the Caucasian tribes. He effectively used the Crimean Tatars and when the Crimean Khan Muhammed-Geray II led his Horde back home and refused to return (the khan was too fatty to travel astride on mountain trails) Ozdemiroglu Osman chased him. The pasha traversed the Caucasus, pushed aside Cossacks on the river Terek fords, walked over the inflamed Kuban steppe, crossed the miraculously frozen Kerch strait and moved to the fortress of Kaffa. There he was sieged by the khan, overplayed him in the game of Tatar clans, and with the arrival of the main Ottoman fleet of the corsair Kilic-Uluc Pasha overthrew Mohammed-Geray II. The khan was hunted and killed. Ozdemiroglu Osman reformed the Crimea as the Turkish province, not the semi-independent Khanate anymore. When Ozdemiroglu Osman came to Istambul, he enjoyed the personal triumph but was threaten by intrigues of the conservative party of sultan Murad III’s Haseki Safiye and sister Esmehan allied by grand vizier Siyavus Pasha. Siyavus stamped in the Divan the decision to suspend the bonus of the Caucasian hero’s troops and authorized the coin debasement which cut their salary in half. Esmehan proposed the serdar but the old fighting horse dropped her, – the fiancee appeared to him too selfish and extravagant. He didn’t like the qualities in ladies. Ozdemiroglu Osman revolved. His troops stormed the palace. The levends and sekbans suppressed the guard (janissaries weren’t enthusiastic to defend the clique), fished out the top officials from the private apartment of the sultan and his harem, hanged some Jewish financiers found guilty in the coin debasement, fired Siyavus pasha and established their serdar as the grand vizier. It was the military coup par excellence. Ozdemiroglu Osman surpassed the ladder of promotion established by the palace party. He never paid the bribe, he refused to marry the sultan’s sister and he was indifferent to court Sufi-mystics. The disciplined firepower of his levends and sekbans was his currency. The army tried in the Caucasus hell was faithful to him more than to the sultan and his officials. They were quite happy to stay alive. Now Ozdemiroglu Osman had the indisputable power to change the Turkish state and society as he likes. And he liked to socialize and politicize his hired troops of sekbans and levends. The pyramid of military inventions to be transferred to the social arrangement and political structures had been reborn. Turkey turned the tactical state again. It could be a new era for Turkey. And could be not. It depends.
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Persons of precipices
As always in the time of the great historical changes, it depended on the personal destinies of history-makers. The military revolt of Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha in Istanbul in 1584 placed Turkey in the general East-European trend of the military grabbing the state power in the second half of the 16th century. It happened in Russia, Sweden, Poland, and now in Turkey at last. The common picture is described in the Third Volume of the research Ukrainian war. The armed conflict over Eastern Europe in the 16th–17th centuries with the title Head-to-head offensive: Baltics – Lithuania – Steppes. (In the second half of the 16th century). As everywhere in Eastern Europe the takeover of the power by the militaries opened great opportunities for the mobilization, army swell and state-formation. Under the control of generals, Turkey could become a fiscal-military state like Sweden or a bureaucratic state like Prussia, could become an “absolutist” state like France with the sultan on the top, or the oligarchic “constitutional” state like England with the ruling assembly of factions. The recharged state dynamic could boost Turkey ahead or equal in the race of the Military Revolution. The problem was that in the time of the choice almost everything is determined by the leaders of changes. Ozdemiroglu Osman passed away in 1586 fighting over the Iranian city of Tebriz. There was a generation of new military leaders going after him as the Italian aristocrat Cigalazade Sinan, former governor of Buda in Hungary Sokollu Ferhad and former governor of Kaffa in the Crimea Jaffar. They were young, they were the field commanders, and they were self-made. They had the ideas and troops at hand to promote them. Were they coming as bridges to the future or precipices to cut it off? Turkey entered the last decade of the 16th century with the question of destiny.
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Farewell, the chieftaincy
Predicting the answer, it is necessary to imagine the nature of the emergence of Turkish visionary military innovations and the Turkish ability to embody them as the social arrangement and to install them as political structures. Where it came from? The “constructivist” theory of international relations teaches us that in the Early Modern Time in Europe, it was more important how the states were divergent inside into substates and Estates than how they were divided outside one from another. In the case of Turkey, the thesis is applicable. But the sense of it has to be not «structural» but «ancestral». Turkey emerged on the very brink of the Turco-Mongolian nomadic Eurasian world. The territory for its emergence was conquered from the Byzantine word of Greek and Slavic peoples. The Persian and Arabic elements participated in the state-formation of the Ottomans from the very beginning. They were represented by the Muslim urban population of Anatolian towns and the Islamic religious and administrational Estate of Ulema. They co-worked but not mixed with the Turco-Mongolian legacy. In the Turco-Mongolian nomadic consciousness the mankind has to be arranged under a chieftain khan or bey, – the charismatic lord who knows the Will of Heaven and the Path of Predestination. It is necessary to conquer the world to arrange it according to this model. War was the pillar of the Turco-Mongolian Universe and warfare was the main function of man. The chieftain has to unite the peoples and states around himself by conquering them. Their refusal of the guidance was unacceptable but their difference and autonomy were granted as they were going together on the Path of Predestination under the Will of Heavens known by the chieftain. The resources were distributed, the power split and the low voices heard. The chieftain was the state personally, everything “state-owned” belonged to him. The Turco-Mongolian tradition was the inception of the Ottoman state and it had been leading a long time but the Persian and Arabic traditions were interplaying with it. They are radically different. The Persian tradition is a bureaucratic one, it affirms that the state is the hierarchy of authorities and the king Shah is its top symbol. It doesn’t like the local differences, autonomies of power and distribution of resources. The Arabic tradition is a communal, legalistic and messianic one. It dictates the theocratic state Caliphate as the Universal Community of the faithful Umma living under the God-given legislation of Sharia and managed by the elected or hereditary religious leader Caliph related to the Prophet. For the military or routine affairs, the Caliph could appoint sultans as the lay governors but they are responsible to Caliph and obeying to Sharia. While Turco-Mongolian tradition is a loose form of military guidance, both Persian and Arabian traditions are a harsh unitary frame. The process of the construction of Ottoman Turkey was slow if compared with the historically instantaneous built-up of its Turkic twins, – the Iranian state of the Safavids and Indian state of the Mughals. Turkey had the pace to absorb the Persian and Arabic traditions positively. They brought much to its military development and transfer of military innovations as the social arrangement and political structures to the Ottoman state-formation. But their position of “innovation donors” was not so important as their position of inner diversity. The conflict of the military, social and cosmic traditions inside Ottoman Turkey evoked the fermentation where the visionary military organizational and tactical practices received their prospect and, if successful, they were dealt as the state-formation blocks in the social arrangement and political structures. But no one vine can ferment forever. The time came when it fixes its spirit and taste. It means that the ferments inside went to equilibrium. The age of the Magnificent Suleiman I in the middle decades of the 16th century was the maturity time of the Turkish vine with the Ottoman label. Its contents became stale. The innovations sprang but died. All of the three traditions found their place in politics and social arrangement. The rivalry between them ran out. The stale contents started killing innovations. Although tolerated in the military business, they were never invited to grow as the social and political changes anymore. The 17th century came to demonstrate the domestic mechanics and international effects of this negative play between the military innovations and socio-political stagnation. The Ottoman sundown was impending. It promised to be grandiose.
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Volume III, Head-to-head Offensive
In the second half of the 16th century, the rivalry over Eastern Europe was continued as a head-to-head offensive of armies. The prime objective of antagonists, – Poland, Russia, Turkey and Sweden, – were the lands of the wide transit zone spreading from the Eastern Baltics to the Northern Black Sea shores. It included the territories of the modern Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldavia and the westernmost strip of Russia.
They became vacant of domination after the decline of Lithuania, split of the Golden Horde and decay of the Baltic Crusade Orders. Developing as the competition over the territories, the conflict evolved to much higher stakes for the contenders and became a long-run determiner on Europe as a whole.
The abstract of the book “Head-to-head Offensive” presents the structure of the research, the organization of the narration, a few conclusions and a lot of ideas to be discussed in the study ahead concerning the later historical periods.
You can buy the book on:
•Ozon
Content
•From the rivalry over the partition to the struggle of domination
•The emergence of the national schools of action
•The “Tercio” school of the cohesive pike and shot
•The “Tabor” wagon array school
•The “Yertaul” school of the combined horse and foot
•Roots and consequences of the action schools’ difference
•The amphibious leaps and the solid open sea
•The tactic climbs to operational warfare
•The coup of the Shujskys in Moscow in 1542
•The crazy militarism of Erick XIV in Stockholm in the 1560s
•The Warsaw coup of 1585-86 by the warmonger jurist
•The Istanbul takeover by Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha of 1584
•The sum of military governments and armed conflicts
From the rivalry over the partition to the struggle of domination
The following territories became prey for the strategic predators: the Livonian Order, the junior branch of the abolished Teutonic Order; Western and South-Western Rus, reluctantly included in the Polish merger of Lithuania; the Tatar Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan and the nomadic Nogay Horde, fractions of the former Golden Horde. Together with them, the giant Wilde Steppe from the Northern Black Sea shore, held by Turkey and its ally the Crimean Khanate, to the Southern fridges of Rus’, became the spoil.
The head-to-head offensive of contenders bound formerly loose territorial pockets of fighting into the integral region of war. As the intensity of the fighting grew and the swing of the operations increased, the armed conflict developed from the contest over the territorial gains to the full-scale war over the regional domination.
The aspirations of the contenders were steadily rising in parallel with the striking abilities of their armies.
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The emergence of the national schools of action
During the second half of the 16th century, the armies of the East-European states were equipped with advanced firearms and artillery, trained to use the prime tactics of the pike and shot, the serried cavalry charge, the wagon-camp battlefield array and the combined fight of the foot and horse. The national specific of the composition and organization of forces was born, it concerned the choice of arms and tactical technique, thinking of commanders and motivation of troops. It developed into the particular national ways of the armed struggle or “action schools”.
Each of them included the patterns of all kinds of actions: the attack and defence in the field battle; siege and hold of a fortress; deep raid; occupation and protection of territory; manoeuvering; and amphibious operation. Three of the distinctive national action schools emerged. All three of them trained troops for both tactical and operational warfare.
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The “Tercio” school of the cohesive pike and shot
The first action school was the Spanish-Imperial “tercio” school of the tactically predominant pike and shot infantry massed in the cohesive formations.
In Eastern Europe, the Spanish-Imperial school was adopted by the Swedish army during king Erick XIV’s reforms. The adoption by Swedes brought great prospects for the Spanish-Imperial school as the Swedish generals set it at the beginning of the 17th century and led their army to become the fighting showpiece of Europe. But in the second half of the 16th century, the Swedes only started to learn the Spanish-Imperial school and were not brilliant in its performance.
Besides the Swedish army, the troops of the Spanish-Imperial school participated in the Polish army as mercenaries. The influence of the “tercio school” spread in Eastern Europe via the struggle of the Hapsburg armies against the Ottoman forces over Hungary, Transylvania and Wallachia.
The Spanish-Imperial school treated the cavalry as an auxiliary arm. It prefers the distributed network of the bastion-type forts as a tool of territorial control. The strongholds network of the Livonian Master Gotthard Kettler in Livonia at the beginning of the 1560s was one of the best defensive creations of the Spanish-Imperial school although not so famous as the similar one of the revolted Netherlands.
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The “Tabor” wagon array school
The second national action school was the Czech-Turkish “tabor” battlefield array of fighting wagons stuffed by the foot equipped with the hand firearms and field artillery.
It was born by the Hussite Czech national revolution in the first decades of the 15th century, and it was adopted by the Ottomans in their wars against the Hungarian war-lord John Hunyadi in the middle of the 15th century. After the improvement of the hand firearms by the end of the 15th century, the Turks reequipped their foot of janissaries with arquebuses.
During their long wars against Hapsburgs in Hungary and Safavids in Iran, Iraq, the Caucasus in the 16th century, the Ottomans convinced themselves that the tabur is the best tactical array for the infantry with the firearms and the best anchor for the mailed cavalry they had in abundance. The Ottomans developed the tabur as the branch of arms and accepted it as their rule of battle.
The Czech-Turkish action school insisted on the application of the “solid” forts as the logistic bases and the cavalry as the tool for territory control.
The Ottomans became directly involved in the armed conflict over Eastern Europe at the end of the 16th century when the might of the Crimean Khanate was eroded by the Russian and Polish attacks. The Ottomans understood well the importance of the region for the future of Turkey as a great regional power and felt the danger of the competitors’ domination over there. They entered the conflict over Eastern Europe with their armies trained in the tabor school’s organization and tactics.
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The “Yertaul” school of the combined horse and foot
The third action school was Moscow “combined arms” school of the joint action of the infantry with hand firearms and cavalry in mixed formations. The “yertaul school” originated in the middle of the 15th century when the first Moscow military reforms produced the tactics of the interaction between the Russian assault heavy horse and the Tatar mercenary horse of mounted bowmen. After the improvement of the hand firearms by the beginning of the 16th century, the Russian foot with the hand firearms took over the function of the remote fighting in the tactics of the combined arms that belonged before to the Tatar mounted bowmen.
The yertaul school was focused on the division of tactical labour between the foot with hand firearms for the remote combat and the armoured horse for the close combat in offensive and defensive actions. Arranging the forces on the battlefield for the combined arms action required the time and view of the tactical situation, and the yertaul school invented the deep fighting array. Its leading division started the fighting, the reserves from the array’s depth were allocated around it. The yertaul school relies on central regional fortresses as operational bases and the cavalry as the tool for operational raids.
The yertaul school was freshest of all three ones. It was elaborated in the 1550s after the introduction of the regular foot “streltsy” with firearms and the reassessment of the former cavalry eminence in the fighting. The new tactic was necessary for the Moscow’s aspiration to become the Orthodox messianic power and to crash Tatar militant Islamic enemies such as the Kazan and Crimean Khanates.
The yertaul tactic of the combined arms worked efficiently against the Kazan troops in the battle at the Bulak stream in 1552 that preceded the decisive storm of Kazan. It served good for the Moscow corps under Ivan “the Grand” Sheremetev in the battle of Sudbischi in 1555 against the overwhelming odds of the Crimean army and Turkish elements with firearms. It was highly effective against the Swedish army in the combat at Vyborg in 1556 and so on. The yertaul tactic brought the great Moscow landslides at Molodi in 1572 and Kolomenskoye in 1591 over the Crimean army which finished the Tartar long-range raiding campaigns in Russia.
The result of the Russian military reforms was spectacular. The Khanate of Kazan was defeated and occupied; the mighty nomadic core of the former Golden Hord, the Nogay Horde, was subjugated; the Crimean Khanate although supported by the Ottomans was pressed to the brink of survival. Siberia was burst open for the Russian penetration towards the Pacific Ocean, Inner Asia and China.
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The school of opportunities
Besides three clear cut fighting schools, some mixed opportunistic techniques of action appeared. One of them was introduced in Poland. It masterfully relied on the available forces and played the disponible options. It emphasized not the composition of forces but their application and stratagems.
It adapted to the challenges of the armed struggle in the fast flood of innovations of the 16th century. It looked for the best on-case solution in the application of the troops of different schools, in the adoption and learning. The best example of the achievements of the opportunistic action school was the victory of Nicolas Radziwill “the Red” and Grigory Сhodkiewicz at Ula in 1564 over the Moscow invasion army in Eastern Lithuania.
The specific Polish-Lithuanian way of action was developed in the 1560s by such its proponents as hetmans Nikolas Sieniawski and Roman Sangushko not only in the training of troops but also in a campaign vision. They prepared the victorious Polish-Lithuanian counter-offensive on the Moscow army at the end of the 1570s.
The imaginative vision of the opportunistic action school took off the armed struggle in Eastern Europe into progressively higher dimensions by the second half of the 16th century.
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Roots and consequences of the action schools’ difference
The second half of the 16th century was the time of the learning of the Antique ideas of the military practitioners as Byzantine Emperor Leo VI the Wise, theorists as Aelian and chroniclers as Polybius. It was the time for fighting gifts of the prominent generals such as the Russian Michael Vorotynsky, Lithuanian Nicolas Radziwill, Polish Nicolas Mielecki, Turkish Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha and Swedish Klas Kristersson Horn.
It was the epoch both for the “genius” military visionaries as Swedish king Erick XIV, Russian tsar Ivan IV and Crimean Khan Sahib-Geray; bright “imitators” as Polish king Stefan Bathory; “chance catchers” as Crimean khan Devlet-Geray and Swedish king John III; and “old steam rollers” as Ottoman vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha backed by sultans Suleiman I, Selim II and Murad III.In the armed struggle it was the era both for the stubbornness and rush and for the flexibility and change.
The divergent schools of action brought the asymmetry in the armed struggle. They demonstrated the different speeds in the race for fighting efficiency, and different abilities to absorb the stream of technical, tactical, organizational innovations. All that much increased the unpredictability of the armed conflict over Eastern Europe in the second half of the 16th century.
The traditional rule of the numerical weight of forces did not work anymore; the victories and defeats became surprising; the huge efforts fell in vain and small ideas brought spectacular results.
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The amphibious leaps and the solid open sea
The growing might of armies and the changing thinking of generals pushed the war toward territorial escalation and boosted the fighting intensity. The logistical obstacles were huge, however, the East-European armies learned to overcome them. One of the first solutions to enlarge the territorial sway of warfighting was found in the amphibious operations of the land forces together with the river and naval fleets. It was linked to the total reshape of naval warfare.
The sea and river fleets became capable of moving tens of thousands men with the heavy equipment over the hundreds of miles to accomplish the decisive strike. The overwhelming logistic capability of the river fleets paid off the strategic results to Moscow when in the first half of the 1550s the two Tatar successor states of the Golden Horde, the Kazan and Astrakhan Khanates, were annihilated and annexed. In the second half of the 1550s, the Russian amphibious forces delivered their attacks on the faraway Crimean Khanate, violating its former impunity over thousand miles of the Wild Steppe.
The naval fleets switched from the board to board fighting to the artillery destruction of the enemy either on waves or on a seashore.
In the Baltic Sea, Sweden under King Erick XIV started the new era of the naval struggle. Its fleets moved to the open sea and aimed to wrestle for their masters not only the landing spots or the spoil of the trade shipping but the new status of the “dominium maris” – open sea domination. It was viewed by Erick XIV as the precondition for the Swedish great power position in the region surrounding the Baltics.
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The rise of raiding
It was the second solution to enlarge the scale of war that brought the higher dimension for the armed struggle. The push came from the new approach to the deep raids.
The raids were carried before as the technique to destroy an enemy’s rear and civilians, to soften its will and to reduce its resources. In 1581, the Polish-Lithuanian raids under Christopher Radziwill and Phylon Kmita into Moscow’s Western Rus’, and Moscow raids under Michael Katyrev and Dmitry Khvorostinin into Eastern Lithuania demonstrated the second breath of the raiding. The raids became the leverage to establish the operational conditions for gaining the breakthrough in the campaign and the favourite strategic closing of the war by the offensive (in the Polish case) and defensive (in the Russian one) actions.
The deep raids bound multiple fights over the great distances of Eastern Europe into the integral campaigning network as in the course of the war as in the consciousness of the rulers and generals, which is not lesser important.
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The tactic climbs to operational warfare
The increased meaning of raids was followed by the new tactical thinking developed, first, by the Polish opportunistic action school. Its core was the search of the tactical event of so big scale and intensity that it become of operational and even strategic importance.
The offensive of King Stefan Bathory on the Moscow army in Western Rus’ and Eastern Lithuania at the end of the 1570s – the beginning of the 1580s marked the birth of the approach.First of all, it was the choice of the target which gave the operational meaning to tactical action. Bathory targeted Russian regional fortresses Polotsk and Pskov as keys to Moscow’s control over its western and northwestern provinces.
The second point was the choice of the kind of action where the Polish army could bring its overwhelming might of tens of thousands of professional regular troops which the Russian army did not have. Bathory chose the siege fighting to apply his mercenary infantry against the Moscow strongholds and his hussaria assault horse to conquer their surroundings.
The third point of the approach was the decisiveness of action. Bathory always strove not to starve out the fortress but to storm it and not to sweep the enemy’s troops away but to annihilate them. In the battles of Sokol 1579 and Toropa 1580, after the sieges of Polotsk and Velikiye Luki, respectively, he demonstrated that not capture of a fortress but the destruction of the opposing army was the targeted culmination of his campaigns.
The armies overcame the tactical limitations and achieved the operational level of the armed struggle. They learned to combine tactical actions into the operational design and explore tactical results towards the strategical solution.
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The gathering Ukraine
The operational design of campaigning and swing of the armed struggle gathered separate districts of the contested zone of Polish-Lithuanian South-Western Rus’, Moscow-held Southern Rus’, the Wild Steppe and Tatar and Turkish Northern Black Sea shores into the Frontier-Ukraine as the integral region. The Ukraine emerged first of all not as an ethnic or political entity but as the operational region of the armed conflict over Eastern Europe.
At the same time as the armies of the neighbouring states treated the Ukraine as the cohesive region of warfighting, the new forces emerged inside it. The multiethnic hirelings of the local Polish royal troops, mercenaries of the landowning magnates, veterans of the dissolved armies and freebooters living in the Wild Steppe outside of the recognized state borders, started to perceive themselves together as the particular military Estate.
Ignited by the Orthodox ideology, equipped with firearms and trained in the tactics of riverine warfare brought to the grand Ukrainian rivers by the Moscow amphibious expeditions, they started to raid Crimean and Turkish shores. They established their communities out of reach of the Polish authorities. Soon they became interested not only to sack Tartars and Turks but also participate in the agricultural recolonization of the steppes. Named as the Cossacks they clashed with the Polish landowners and authorities.
The aggression from outside directed to take over or split the Ukraine was supplemented with the aggression from inside directed to destroy the Polish domination over it. The Ukraine was tied as the knot of aggression.
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The states of militaries
The armies were trained to wage operational warfare, – it was the evident development of the armed struggle in Eastern Europe in the second half of the 16th century. Then the armies turned to become of the prime strategical importance, they dared not only shape the territory and position of states but to determine the future of nations.
The heaviest pressure of the warfighting on the states and peoples came not from the military operations but the militaries, – the generals of armies. The generals took over the state management by the armed hand and assigned the upper power to themselves to decide the political, social and economic matters.
Eastern Europe in the second half of the 16th century demonstrated that the tools of influence of the Military Revolution on the states and societies which are still obscure for the sociologists of the 20th–21th centuries were direct and immediate. They were the authority of the generals who seized the state power.
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The coup of the Shujskys in Moscow in 1542
The widespread phenomenon of the militaries in power was revealed in Moscow by the coup of the Prince Shujskys in 1542. The army gathered in the city of Vladimir to advance on the Kazan Khanate turned back, marched to Moscow, stormed the Kremlin and overthrew the government of the favourites of young Ivan IV. The army was outraged with their corruption and negligence as they ignored the interests of small landowners who made up the army.
The Shujskys pressed the autocratic teenager to read prayers aloud at the room corner while the troops hunted down his favourites in his private apartment. The troopers deposed the Church metropolitan and established the military dictatorship with Prince Vasily Shujsky as the army’s leader in the head of the government.
Immediately after the coup, the rule of the appointments approved by the army was constituted, the gentry received the rights of the local self-government and the Estate Assembly was called to vote the main legislation and fiscal matters.
This model of government existed until the famous Oprichnina of Ivan IV when the tsar ravaged the military elite and established the bureaucratic government of his choice. However, he was not able to eliminate the appointment law, local self-government and Estate Assemblies.
After excesses of Oprichnina, Russia became the only nation governed by the civilians in Eastern Europe in the second half of the 16th century. Other nations followed the model of the military government.
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The crazy militarism of Erick XIV in Stockholm in the 1560s
In Sweden, the switch to the military regime came with warrior King Erick XIV. Allegedly insane, Erick XIV exercised carefully calculated steps to support his military and naval reforms with necessary changes in the structure of the government.
With the support of the predominantly peasant Estate Assembly, he reduced the dukedoms of his brothers, reconstructed the local administration according the mobilization needs and introduced the absolute power of the king with the new procurator office. He united armed forces and transformed them into the unitary body, promoting middle-class officers to military and civil service.
The prime figures of King Erick XIV’s military government consisted of the generals personally connected not with the heartland of Sweden but with the frontier regions, – Finland captured in the 13th–14th centuries and new conquered Estonia. The king’s favorites were Henrik Klasson Horn and Klas Kristersson Horn. They were not close relatives but both originated from the Swedish military nobles settled in Finland. Pontus de la Gardie became the third favourite, – a turncoat French mercenary and the hero of the fighting in Livonia.
The personal involvement of the leading government figures in the expansion and war became the clear pattern of East-European governments in the second half of the 16th century.
Erick XIV was deposed by his brother John III, he was claimed insane and killed, however, the new king never tried to step aside from the course of the military government and the militaries on its top.It was the government of the expansion, messianic dreams, mobilization and big blood. They follow soon.
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The Warsaw coup of 1585-86 by the warmonger jurist
Then came the turn of Poland. The breaking domestic changes were passed in the 1530s–1560s by the Polish educated jurists who led the political movement of the Law Execution (Ehzekucia Praw). In their native Poland, they applied the model of government of Ancient Rome adapted to the nobility’s egotism.
They restructured the government and codified the law of the realm to construct the unitary state with a clear hierarchy of decision-making and strict fiscal arrangement. The new political model spread not only over Poland but also over Lithuania, Western Prussia, Mazovia and Western Livonia.
With the support of King Sigismund-Augustus, the sovereignty of Lithuania and autonomy of Prussia, Mazovia and Livonia were cancelled in the Act of the Union of Lublin in 1569. The Lithuanian statehood was abolished and the provinces of South-Western Rus’ were assigned to the Polish Crown as the common property of Polish nobles.
The efficiency of the Polish government institutions rose sufficiently to enrol and equip the large standing regular army. Poland assembled much more abundant resources for war than any of its rivals in Eastern Europe.
When the time of big war came, the elected king Stefan Bathory cooperated with the government of jurist John Zamoyski who turned to become a general. He was born and had his private interests in South-Western Rus’ as well as other leaders of the military government.
In the emerging Ukraine, they found unlimited territories for colonization and agricultural production to supply the rising West-European markets with grain and raw materials. The Ukraine was the region where the regular army played under their command and where they had their private armies, towns and castles.
In the middle of the 1580s, Zamoyski applied the regular army to suppress the mutiny for the former freedoms of the lower nobility. He planned to switch the legislation process in the Noble Assemblies from the unanimous vote to the decision of the majority. Only the sudden death of Bathory stopped him.
During the next “Free Elections” (Wolna Elekсja) of the king of Poland, Zamoyski shot the opposition which supported the Hapsburg pretender by the fire of the regular foot and massacred them by the regular horse. It was a ruthless military dictatorship.
Poland was not the Republic of Nobles anymore but the “Island of Dogs” from the famous forbidden English play, – the military dictatorship of warmongers.
The personal conflict with new King Sigismund Vasa limited the swell of Zamoyski’s power. But it did not finish the military government of Poland. Before Bathory’s death, Zamoyski devised the project of the Polish hegemony in Eastern Europe. It consisted of the conquest and merger of Russia, the wrestle of Hungary, Moldavia, Wallachia from the Hapsburgs and Ottomans, and occupation of the Wild Steppe to the Northern Black Sea shore. After Bathory passed away, the project was reduced but continued.
Zamoiski applied the new military might of Poland to restrict the Ottomans in 1590. He repelled the Turkish army of invasion by deploying at the border the equal numbers of the army that was more professional and better equipped. The Turks were impressed and sued for peace.
The Poles accepted it, and the settlement became their landslide. Soon the Noble Assembly voted for the king’s right to distribute the lands of the steppes to the nobles without any restriction. Poland treated the Crimean domination under the Ottoman protection in the steppes between the South-Western Rus’ and the Northern Black Sea shore as non-existent.
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The Istanbul takeover by Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha of 1584
The fourth state that fell to the militaries was Ottoman Turkey. In 1584 the most successful general of war in Iran Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha revolved in Istanbul.
His mercenary foot of sekbans and levends stormed the sultan’s palace, hanged Jewish financiers presumed guilty of a coin debasement, deposed grand vizier Siyavus Pasha and proclaimed Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha to be the grand vizier. Sultan Murad III and the clique of his sister, first wife and mystical teacher were lucky to survive as their hostages. Ozdemiroglu Osman abolished the autonomy of the Crimean Khanate, converting it into the province under the Ottoman direct rule, repressed Christians and Jews of Istanbul and enforced mobilization and requisitions to feed the war in the Caucasus.
Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha died soon fighting over Iranian Tebriz but since his coup, the military force became the main leverage to grab the power in Turkey instead of the formerly predominant harem favouritism, court bribing and Sufi mysticism. The military governments of his successors followed his policy.
The composition of the Ottoman military government was the same as the military governments in Poland and Sweden. It consisted of the men personally interested in the territorial expansion and standing army. Jaffar Pasha, the governor of Crimean Kaffa, and Jigalazade Sinan Pasha, a renegade general of Italian aristocratic origin, were between the first followers of Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha. Both were the field commanders who climbed the ladder of power tramping the appointment rules, they became viziers and members of the Divan Government relying on their troops and fighting efficiency.
Many historians treat Turkey at the end of the 16th century as the state in the grip of the valides, sultans’ mothers. It was not. It was the epoch of the military governments coming to power by fierce force.
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The sum of military governments and armed conflicts
Everywhere in Eastern Europe, the military governments dismantled imperial, dynastic or federative states inherited from the Late Middle Ages and changed them to unitary integral states by the way of voluntary violence and merciless resources’ extraction.
It was the downfall of the local self-government, personal and corporative freedoms, Estate Assemblies and formal law. The political arrangement of the Late Medieval Time was scraped. The dictate of war triumphed.It was the end of the domain state, as a form of government, that was financed by a ruler’s income, and the birth of the fiscal state of the forced taxation. It was the inception of future nation-states of the 18th–19th centuries.
The violent grab of the state government by the militaries in the second half of the 16th century brought three radically new dimensions to the armed conflict over Eastern Europe.
The first dimension was the dictate of the generals to mobilize the human, financial and ideological resources for war in the unprecedented volume and strain. From the now-a-day point of the economical and sociological rear-view, it was the crucial novelty for the emergence of the nations. From the view of that period, it was the push to escalate the military campaigns to the operational dimension and turn the war to become strategically decisive.
The second dimension was the stake of war as the survival game for the contenders over East-European domination. The peoples and states were mortgaged to the military success. Those who would not achieve it were doomed.
The third dimension is the sum of the former and latter. Together they produced the radically new position of the militaries and armed conflict dictating over all other social structures and processes. The total war engulfed the states from outside and erupted inside them.
Society, economy, religion and culture were enslaved by war, forced to fight with unbearable strain; personal lives were raped by the conflicts’ objectives. It was the way how the armed conflict influenced Eastern Europe in the Early Modern Time.
People and persons revolted for freedom from military oppression, and the revolts were omnipresent at the beginning of the 17th century. They were brutally suppressed by the governments of militaries without an exception. The war became the master of nations.
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The composition of the research
The study tracks the development of the armies of main contenders over the partition of Eastern Europe and the regional domination. They are researched in a separate way to demonstrate their build-up in specific national conditions and in a comparative way in conflict against each other.
The research pattern is constructed of small chronological sections unfolding the conflict from campaign to campaign and from fight to fight. The pattern is designed to understand the fast development of armies and armed conflict and to do not lose the tiny details which become of high importance a few years later. The generalizations follow fights, operations and campaigns but never prejudge them on a basis of historiographical speculations.
The attention of the study is directed to the vision of the military practitioners, rulers and generals, on the organization of their armies and warfighting. The tactical skills of the armies and operational design of the campaigns are analyzed in their detail of preparation and action. The most important political trends and biographical data of the main figures are studied as preconditions of the military results.
The conception of the Military Revolution is taken as the emergence of radically new means and tools to win the armed conflict. Other developments, – social, political, technical, ideological, etc., – are involved in the research when they are linked to the armed struggle. They are put aside when the connection is a mere guess.
The teleological ideas of predestined development are omitted as analytically fruitless. The play of incidents and chances is esteemed as the gist of war.
The book is centred around the build-up of forces and armed conflicts of the two main contenders over territories of Eastern Europe and regional domination in the second half of the 16th century, – Muscovy-Russia and Poland-Lithuania. Sweden came to the game as the contender over the domination in the Baltics, especially during the struggle over Livonia and control over the open Baltic Sea.
The military and political developments of the three nations in the first half of the 16th century were researched in the first book of the series “Ukrainian War” – “The melee of Rus’ “; in the third book its discourses are omitted and only conclusions are mentioned when necessary.
The special second book of the series the “Turkish onslaught” is committed to the Ottoman military and state-building history until the end of the 16th century. Although Turkey was not directly involved in the armed conflict over Eastern Europe until the turn of the 16th–17th centuries, Turkey’s entering the scene has to be prepared and its power analysed. It is the task of the “Turkish onslaught”. The derivations of Ottoman history that are used in the “Head-to-head Offensive” are addressed in the “Turkish onslaught”.
The 17th century was coming as the decisive for Eastern Europe in Modern Times. It was the era of war as the supreme lord over the social and economic development, state-formation and nation-building. War determined the ideology and personal lives. The history of Eastern Europe became the tapestry of the intertwined domestic and international armed conflicts, the deployment of violence.
Its resources and trends were created in the second half of the 16th century, its rules were imposed on the peoples and states without exceptions.
Vladimir Shirogorov 