The Last Muslim Conquest: The Ottoman Empire and Its Wars in Europe.

• Author: Imber, Colin

The Last Muslim Conquest: The Ottoman Empire and Its Wars in Europe. By GABOR AGOSTON. Princeton: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2021. Pp. xv + 664, Ultra. $39.95, [pounds sterling]35.

This book does exactly as the title suggests. It is in essence an old-fashioned political, military, and diplomatic history, with a focus on Ottoman expansion in Europe, and the empire's confrontation, and occasional alliances, with European powers. It covers the period from the foundation of the empire in the early fourteenth century until the early eighteenth when, despite some very limited success in regaining territories lost in the course of the War of the Holy League-between 1683 and 1699, the age of Ottoman conquest definitively came to an end. Large-scale conquests had in fact ceased by the early seventeenth century, when Shah 'Abbas I's victories led to the loss of all the territories the Ottomans had won from the Safavids of Iran in the Caucasus and Azerbaijan during the war of 1578 to 1589, and when the "Long War" with the Habsburgs of 1593-1606 showed that militarily the Habsburgs were now the equals of, and in some respects superior to, the Ottomans. Nonetheless, despite relative decline and despite the multiple crises that beset the empire, the Ottomans remained a formidable power throughout the seventeenth century. Even during the War of the Holy League and the concurrent loss of territories, the empire ultimately survived simultaneous assaults from many enemies on several fronts.

A reader might be tempted to say that all this is well known and there is no need for another book on the subject, but this would be entirely wrong. Gabor Agoston's book is in fact unique in several respects. At the most basic level, the chronological sections are remarkable in combining a high level of detail with a remarkable clarity of exposition. He has, for example, successfully sorted out the tangled politics of the Balkan peninsula during the period of Ottoman advance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and--perhaps most welcome of all--he gives a clear exposition of the formation and subsequent history of the principality of Transylvania, created after the Ottoman annexation of central Hungary in 1541 and then caught between Habsburg and Ottoman claims of overlordship. Another area of confusion that the book disentangles for us is the issue of "cohabitation" in Hungary, where Habsburgs and Ottomans each collected taxes in areas claimed by the other. His...