Klaus Peter Matschke, Das Kreuz und der Halbmond. Die Geschichte der Türkenkriege, Düsseldorf 2004

The Turkish Wars are commonly referred to as military conflict between the Ottoman Empire and several European states from the 15th to the 19th centuries, although their beginning and end are disputed among scholars.  An entire history of this epoch-spanning conflict is therefore an ambitious project that would be a challenge to any author. Klaus Peter Matschke, an emeritus medievalist and Byzantinist, comprehensively retells the story of the early Turkish wars in 12 chapters on nearly 400 pages, beginning his account with the Crusades of the 14th century and ending it with a brief outlook before the end of the Great Turkish War in 1699. This may seem confusing to some scholars since the age of the great Turkish wars was just at the beginning. However, it also represents a unique feature in research on the Turkish Wars, which rarely comments on their background in the late Middle Ages.

The exposition is repeatedly supplemented (or disrupted) by mostly biographical excursions, which illustrate the pan-European dimension of the Turkish Wars once again. The author does not give any footnotes or bibliographical references in the text. The appendix, however, provides several maps, an index of locations and persons, as well as a comprehensive bibliography for each chapter of the book.

There are several reasons for Matschke’s unusual early approach in time. On the one hand, his focus as an expert for late medieval Byzantium lies primarily in the 15th and 16th centuries, and on the other hand, he points out that the Turkish Wars, because of their narrative as a fundamental clash between Christian Europe and the Islamic East, are clearly standing in the tradition of the medieval Crusades. Repeatedly, Matschke takes up the importance of the crusade idea for the Turkish wars in order to illustrate their increasing decline in relevance. He justifies this process of dissolution primarily with the changes in warfare during the transition to the early modern period. The battlefields were no longer dominated by mounted knights, but by strongly organized Infantry units.

In addition, the conflict lost its dynamism when Central European states attempted to secure their borders against Ottoman expansion by building a fortified military frontier. Mercenary and a new community of resettles refugees replaced the traditional crusaders as a new personnel base of fighters in war. The ideological clash increasingly became a border conflict. Neither Jerusalem nor Constantinople were still a realistic destination for military campaigns. The religious polemics that now propagated the ‘Defense of the Christian Europe’, however, remained present for centuries, according to Matschke.

In conclusion I would like to point out that the author once again retells the story of the Turkish Wars from the perspective of exclusively Western sources and scholarship. After the extensive debate on Saids Orientalism, this is highly problematic. At least a slightly more reflective approach to narratives and discourses would have been appropriate. The dichotomy between East and West, which even Matschke cannot completely resist, is thereby not abolished or questioned. Nevertheless, the author has successfully written a coherent overview of the early Turkish Wars which theses on the ideological roots and the changing military character of the Turkish Wars can basically be agreed on and which also offers interesting biographies and side stories here and there.