The Venetian Army on Ottoman Soil 1684-1718: Translocalisation, Experience of War, TransculturationTransculturation

Andreas Helmedach
The project explores the war experiences of soldiers in the Venetian army in Ottoman Southeastern Europe, that is in those territories of Dalmatia, Albania and Greece, which were conquered, occupied, and for the most part lost to the Ottoman Empire during the Morean (or Peloponnesian) Wars of 1684-1699 and 1715-1718. Military journeys are a core topic of migration history; the history of such mobility in the context of the Morean wars will lead towards a better understanding of transcultural processes in the Southeast European region. Similar to other forms of travelling, military journeys not only link up points of departure and arrival, but they also mean crossing through given spaces and territories. It is here that translocalisation and transculturalisation happen. Such processes in fact have always been constituent elements of soldiers’ and combatants’ war experiences. A central question is in which ways the circumstances of military campaigns in Ottoman Southeastern Europe molded the soldier's daily routines, perceptions, and experiences of war. The focus is on the life-worlds of officers, sergeants and ordinary soldiers. The project explores their daily routines during their voyages towards and away from the theatre of war; their service in the garrison, the camp, and the field; their encounters with civilians (not least with women); and how they came to terms with combat and violence, with desertion, imprisonment, slavery and (if the occasion arose) ransoming; with illness, wounds, disability, and death. The backdrop of these men’s experiences, imaginings, and discourses about their experience of “migration as transcultural entanglement” was the Ottoman Empire. From their socialization in their home countries they had to match new modes and patterns of interaction and cooperation both with their peers, who constituted the ethnic and religious heterogeneity of the Venetian army, and with the "locals", who also were heterogeneous as far as their ethnicity, religion, and social origin were concerned. The framework of early modern times seems particularly fitting to explore the transcultural processes involved, as it forced upon the men a particular intensity of interaction as such, but especially, beyond the battlefields, a cooperation with the “other”, with individuals who were considered „enemies“.