Homefront Experiences of the Habsburg-Ottoman Wars, 1470-1620: Engaging the Hereditary Enemy

At the Academy, Johnson will work on a book entitled “Homefront Experiences of the Habsburg-Ottoman Wars, 1470-1620: Engaging the Hereditary Enemy.” Through the histories of soldiers, refugees, and homefront communities, she explores the complex social and cultural consequences of the Holy Roman Empire’s long conflict with the Ottoman Empire—in localities ranging from secular and episcopal principalities to imperial cities, and from nominally subject territories to Habsburg-controlled lands. Drawing on the evidence of manuscript chronicles, military reports, muster lists, troop levies, state correspondence, judicial court records, account books, captivity narratives, ethnographic descriptions, and collection inventories, Johnson’s approach to the sixteenth-century military revolution moves beyond armament, fortification, and finance to the fostering of new identities grounded in war’s systemic and nonsystemic violence within the homefront. More concretely, her project historicizes the construction of the Ottomans as the Germans’ hereditary enemy by tracing the practices and rhetoric of military service and captivity that shaped civic ideologies of masculinity and Christian responsibility. These overlapping practices and vocabularies reveal not only degrees of political and religious commitment to the Holy Roman Empire, but also how they shaped early modern knowledge of the non-Christian “Turk” and defined the experiences of Ottoman subjects living among German-born citizens in a confessionalized Holy Roman Empire.