Az oszmán „katonai lemaradás” problémája és a kelet-európai hadszíntér
The problem of Ottoman “militay backwardness” and the East European theatre of war

Summary/Abstract: The paradigm of the Ottoman “military backwardness” and of the inability of Muslim societies to modernize their armies in the early modern period has been recently questioned by Gábor Ágoston and Virginia Aksan. As far as logistics, provisioning of troops and gunpowder production is concerned, the Ottomans were still able to match the Western challenge at least until the end of the seventeenth century. This paper raises another problem connected with this matter. The different character of various theatres of war on which the Ottoman armies were engaged, forced the Porte to a more conservative attitude towards “modernization.” The heavy artillery and infantry, developed in Central Europe during the Thirty Years' War and during the long-lasting Habsburg-Ottoman confrontation, was still of little use in the vast East European steppes, devoid of important fortresses and lacking an adequate network of roads. Often accused of insufficiently developing infantry and artillery, the Ottomans could not give up expensive cavalry troops, because these troops were still indispensable in the East European war theatre. The best illustration of this dilemma is the confusion of the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa, who did not expect to meet the Polish cavalry at the walls of Vienna. In 1683 the besieging Ottoman army was not prepared for a cavalry battle, in which Sobieski was a master.

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