Abstract:

Recent interrogation of Eurasian imperial violence of the 1750-1850 period suggests that the old question of the role of the barbarian horseman (the Turk or the Bashibozuk) on the battlefield is underway among military historians. Studies of mobility, transhumance, horses, and raiding activity in a global context reveal long communal histories of native, ethnic or clan violence once considered primitive or barbaric. This paper aims to reconsider the Ottoman context to ask how such communities were (or were not) reshaped by the imperial contest in the eastern Mediterranean up to and including the Crimean War. The sources consulted include a wide variety of archival, personal narratives and military histories. Under the Ottomans, prominent local communal and military leaders and their agents sustained the appearance of loyalty to the sultan only when awarded contracts and control over provincial tax revenues. The system allowed powerful individuals and their ideas to preserve and/or destroy the Ottoman social contract of a loose set of fragile networks, as they managed unbounded, deliberately ill-defined territories. Such habits of rewarding local ethno-cultural allies, their warbands for hire and renegade technical expertise undermined the imperial practices of both the Habsburg and the Ottomans. This was most obvious in the different imperial attitudes to cavalry on display in the Crimea, hence the title of the talk, representing the European versus the Ottoman conceptions of cavalry formations. Mobile warriors took diverse forms, over time moving from smaller scale tribal formations into imperial guards to cavalry units, or regular armies, or not, as determined by the contracting Ottoman border and the negotiated terms with the sultan, thus sanctioning a way of life for the individual horseback warrior/soldier that persisted into the twentieth century.