The Ottoman Military Organization in Hungary

Book excerpt: This book is the shortened and revised version of the authors? volume ?Fortresses and Fortress Garrisons in Ottoman Hungary I?III?, published in Hungarian by the Institute of History, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest, 2007). This revised version contains considerable alterations in order to suit better for the needs of non-Hungarian readers. However, the book maintains the original structure: the first part is a monograph about the Ottoman border defense system and its garrison troops, the second part is a data collection concerning Ottoman fortresses. This collection is based on a wide range of sources like Ottoman pay lists (mevacib defterleri) that are kept in archives of Vienna, Istanbul, Berlin, Budapest etc., records of the treasury house that contain pay accounts (hazine defterleri), estate records (icmal defterleri) and tax censuses (mufassal defterleri).0The border of the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Kingdom of Hungary remained a battlefield during the sixteenth?seventeenth centuries. Fights persisted even in-between officially declared wars, effective truces were absent in those decades in Hungary. The parties strove for expanding their influence over greater territories and above all to collect taxes. Garrison troops were assigned to ravage the other?s lands by both parties therefore the significance of these fortresses remained high even in times of formal peace.