New Approaches to the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

Recently, a comparative trend has become popular among Ottomanists, who use comparative methodology to replace declinist assumptions about the early modern Ottoman Empire with a “positive narrative.”Footnote ¹¹ In new works on the early modern era, many scholars have transferred concepts and paradigms such as “Second Empire” or “confessionalization” from European historiography and applied them liberally to Ottoman history.Footnote ¹² However, these recent comparative approaches to the Ottoman Empire are “asymmetrical,” and, hence, argumentatively flawed. They do not pay attention to the considerably distinct historical circumstances in early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Therefore, the parallels these works draw between Europe and the Ottoman Empire are superficial and unconvincing. Ottoman historiography needs its own concepts derived from the vocabulary in Ottoman textual artifacts to overcome the shortcomings of the decline paradigm and more recent problems posed by the asymmetrical comparisons.

The roots of comparative approaches to Ottoman history may be traced back to Rifa'at ‘Ali Abou-El-Haj's seminal essay published in 1991.Footnote ¹³ Abou-El-Haj argued that Ottoman historians should look for parallels between early modern Europe and the contemporary Ottoman Empire. He was motivated by a basic observation: Ottoman historiography focused on “peculiarities, oddities, and particularism” of Ottoman history and civilization. The decline paradigm, an explanatory framework historians used for decades that assumed that the post-1600 Ottoman Empire underwent permanent structural decay, was an outcome of such an attitude. Abou-El-Haj argued, instead, that historians should approach Ottoman history as “comparable and commensurable with other histories.”Footnote ¹⁴ Two leading Ottomanists, Suraiya Faroqhi and Cornell Fleischer, wrote an introduction to Abou-El-Haj's book and generally agreed with the author's proposal. Yet they also asserted that establishing transregional connections for comparative purposes should not mean the universal application of theories and concepts designed to define a particular historical phenomenon. Faroqhi and Fleischer asserted that historical analysis is reliable only when differences are emphasized; one lesson historians learned from the intensive study of Middle Eastern texts was that the values and institutions of Renaissance Europe and the Middle East of the same period were not necessarily the same.Footnote ¹⁵

In the past decade there has been an increase in revisionist and innovative approaches to the Ottoman Empire, which I examine below. Many of these studies credited Abou-El-Haj's works as their inspiration and suggested new frameworks built upon his ideas. Such literature has abandoned the decline paradigm and charted new territory in Ottoman studies. Yet, these recent revisionist works have ignored Faroqhi and Fleischer's cautionary remarks and taken Abou-El-Haj's suggestion at face value. This has led to establishing many asymmetrical connections between early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. As a result, early modern Ottoman historiography—in particular the literature on the seventeenth century—has become an arena of contest between reductionist and misleading arguments lacking analytical precision.

Among the recent works reinterpreting the early modern Ottoman Empire, Baki Tezcan's monograph is the most notable.Footnote ¹⁶ Aspiring to create a grand narrative of the seventeenth century, Tezcan went beyond merely opposing declinist assumptions about the early modern Ottoman Empire and constructed his own version of a positive narrative. Tezcan's main argument was that the developments in the early seventeenth century marked the onset of a new era in Ottoman history, the so-called “Second Empire.” Challenging the established understanding and drawing comparisons with English history, Tezcan posed the following opportune question: “How have we been led to believe that the English Civil War, which led to the execution of Charles I in 1649, and the ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688, which dethroned Charles I's son James II, were advances in the history of limited government, whereas the regicide of the Ottoman Sultan Ibrahim in 1648 and the deposition of Ibrahim's son Mehmed IV in 1687, for instance, were simply signs of decline?”Footnote ¹⁷

Tezcan's question is legitimate, as are his observations about the new sociopolitical setting in the seventeenth century Ottoman Empire. Yet, the applicability of his terminology was arguable. Tezcan contended that the expanding political nation generally consisted of two groups, and he devised the early modern Ottoman counterparts of English “constitutionalists” and “royalists.”Footnote ¹⁸ He suggested that the expansion of the political nation marked a “proto-democratization” of the Ottoman Empire. He equated Ottoman kanun (written or unwritten government practices and traditions) with the feudal law of the European Middles Ages. Finally, he detected “modern” and “secular” tendencies in the so-called Second Empire. Most of these concepts connote developments that belong to English history and have no equivalent in the Ottoman realm. Ottoman territories spread over three continents, harboring many social and cultural idiosyncrasies and disowned attributes usually associated with premodern European political entities. These were smaller and politically more unified, with the exception of the Holy Roman Empire. Were there modern and secular tendencies, for instance, in seventeenth-century Egypt, eastern Anatolia, or the Balkans? If not, the parallels Tezcan drew between English and Ottoman history are highly questionable, along with his broad generalizations and his terminology.

A liberal application of English historical terminology per se to Ottoman history denies the Ottoman Empire any historical peculiarity. Tezcan's line of argumentation indirectly suggests that an Ottoman “positive narrative” can only be built upon English historiography. Also, Tezcan undermines the Ottomanists’ ability to explain Ottoman history with a vocabulary endemic to the empire. A recent article by Christine Philliou and Alan Mikhail is enlightening in this regard.Footnote ¹⁹ In their survey of the comparative literature on empires, Mikhail and Philliou have observed that the Chinese, Roman, and British empires are considered by historians as the quintessential imperial structures of their historical eras. According to Mikhail and Philliou, in a world-historical framework, comparative historians take the existence or absence of these three empires’ characteristics in other imperial structures as a measuring unit. In other words, the military, political, artistic, and technological conditions possessed by the Chinese, Roman, and British empires define the contemporaries of these three empires. Mikhail and Philliou determined that “such a framework presents a problem for empires that were not the Chinese, Roman, or British, since most of these other empires look like losers to varying extents.”Footnote ²⁰

By establishing his positive interpretation of the Ottoman Empire on British historical terminology, Tezcan has privileged in a like manner the terminology of British imperial historiography as the supreme authority for historiographies of other early modern empires—in this case the Ottoman Empire. This was not Tezcan's goal. Yet, such a methodology vitiated the authority of his grand narrative, which otherwise successfully revived political history as a heuristic tool for Ottoman history and illuminated the role different factions played in Ottoman politics. To overcome the terminological shortcomings of Ottoman historiography, Marcus Koller suggested that Ottomanists conduct microstudies focusing on moments rather than grand narratives interpreting eras.Footnote ²¹ Koller's suggestion was reasonable, because, although Tezcan's reliance on British historical vocabulary was primarily a stylistic preference, it was also necessitated by the insufficiencies of the Ottoman paradigmatic depository. The increase in the number of such thematically focused studies will eventually help the Ottomanist build a vocabulary specific to Ottoman history.Footnote ²²

Another new paradigm historians applied to early modern Ottoman history to fill the current explanatory vacuum in the field is confessionalization. Ottomanists refer to studies that evolved around this concept as “renewal of faith” literature. Proponents of such literature argue that Islamic pietistic revivalism dominated the social and political processes of the early modern Ottoman Empire. These scholars argue that early modern European confessionalization stretched to the Ottoman (and Safavid) domains, and, thus, the early modern Ottoman processes of state and social formation were involved in the Mediterranean age of confessionalization. Baki Tezcan's recent work unintentionally contributed to this position. One of the key characteristics of Tezcan's Second Empire was the expansion of jurists’ sphere of influence. He wrote that the empowerment of the “jurist's law” (Islamic rules and regulations) occurred at the expense of customary law, or kanun.Footnote ²³ Four other scholars were more forthright in declaring their position: According to Tijana Krstić, the conversion of non-Muslims to Islam and the debates found in early modern Islamic texts on issues, such as spiritual authority in the Muslim community, correct forms of rituals, or authenticity of the Qur'an (through a language resembling the Catholic-Protestant polemics), illustrate that European confessionalization theory and social disciplining are applicable to Ottoman history. Krstić also claimed that the principle of cuius regio, eius religio was upheld in the Ottoman and Safavid empires.Footnote ²⁴ Another scholar, Derin Terzioğlu, approved of efforts to rewrite the history of the Ottoman Empire with recourse to the concept of confessionalization.Footnote ²⁵ She agreed that the Ottomans were involved in a global experience of early modernity. Terzioğlu admitted that there were connections between what she dubbed “Ottoman Sunnitization” and “broad-based processes such as state-building, territorialization, urbanization and monetization.”Footnote ²⁶ She contended that situating the so-called Ottoman Sunnitization within European confessionalization provided an analytical framework for studies about Islamic pietism, which Ottomanists have traditionally analyzed as a timeless phenomenon detached from spatial and temporal historical contexts that likely produced—and reproduced—it. Terzioğlu also presented the proliferation of Muslim/Sunnî catechisms in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire as an indication of Ottoman participation in the age of confessionalization. Judith Pfeiffer, too, argued that the confessionalization paradigm was applicable to the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire.Footnote ²⁷ Her evidence for the Ottoman version of early modern confessional polarization was a treatise on Judaism composed in 1651 by a Jewish convert to Islam, a text based on a similar treatise written a century earlier by the famous Ottoman scholar Taşköprülüzade (d. 1561). Most recently, Guy Burak has also agreed with Krstić, Terzioğlu, and Pfeiffer. Burak posited that early modern Ottoman rulers belonged to an age when an important duty of monarchs was to defend the orthodoxy of their respective religion.Footnote ²⁸

The logic that guided the efforts to detect parallelisms between European confessionalization and the contemporary Ottoman Empire partially originates in the works of Reinhard Schulze. He had earlier attempted to establish such associations within a larger framework between early modern Europe and the contemporary Islamic world. Schulze's purported goal, as Baki Tezcan's, was to reconstruct Islamic history through a positive storyline as a dynamic and creative process to liberate Islam from its position “between Scylla and Charybdis.”Footnote ²⁹ The inspiration of Schulze, who coined the concept of an “Islamische Aufklärung” and speculated about an Islamic version of modernism, was German intellectuals’ ideas on the Enlightenment. Schulze contextualized his perspective within Horkheimer and Adorno's argument that the Aufklärung was not merely an eighteenth-century phenomenon but a perpetual human experience. He asked: “why would Islam not experience its own rationalization?”Footnote ³⁰ Schulze argued that the historiography of at least the Ottoman Empire, if not of the entire Islamic world, could benefit from insights derived from such reinterpretations and revisions.Footnote ³¹ Nonetheless, Schulze's arguments and responses to his seemingly innovative approach did not find their way into Ottomanist scholarship until the proponents of the “renewal of faith” literature draw parallelisms between confessionalization Europe and the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ³²

The historical links established through the “renewal of faith” literature between confessionalization Europe and the contemporary Ottoman Empire are historically unproven. Many major developments that were characteristic of the European confessionalization did not occur in the Ottoman Empire. Within the European historical framework, the confessionalization thesis argued that the intensive processes of early modern confession building and social disciplining gradually paved the way for the emergence of modern European states. First articulated by Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard, the confessionalization thesis produced a vast literature in which scholars rigorously tested the historiographical applicability of the concept to European history and debated numerous confession-building processes, periodizations, and terminology.Footnote ³³

The fact that there were numerous reformation and counterreformation moments and processes across Europe is well-documented in European historiography. In fact, Baer alluded to this aspect of European confessionalization, which used propaganda, censorship, catechizing, preaching, pilgrimage, and inquisitions while also triggering new processes in many areas of social and political life.Footnote ³⁴ These issues have been carefully analyzed by European historians. In Bohemia, artists and architects served the Habsburg emperor by creating a Catholic baroque landscape and constructing and renovating pilgrimage complexes and monasteries. Conversion to Catholicism created new paths for the Bohemian nobility to climb in the social hierarchy, while those in the lower strata frequently faced confession-based coercion and violence.Footnote ³⁵ Jesuit priests took influential positions—often as confessors—in Catholic courts. Many personal letters, diaries, and other types of textual artifacts document the finer details of relationships between Habsburg, Bavarian, and French monarchs and their Jesuit court confessors.Footnote ³⁶ In Prussia during Frederick William I's rule (1713–40), pietist reformists were greatly influential. Inspired by the ideas of Lutheran scholars (Phillip Spener and August Herman Francke), Halle Pietism became an important catalyst in the institutionalization of the Prussian state. Frederick William I appointed pietists to high-ranking clerical positions in Pomerania and East Prussia, by making them army chaplains. Pietists also established universities and founded small schools outside of the countries where they lived.Footnote ³⁷

Yet, confessionalization was neither a monolithic process that pursued a linear course, nor did it create indisputable social and political demarcations between religious groups everywhere in Europe. In many places, the idea of creating confessional communities in a strict sense simply did not work, because authorities, where they attempted to impose confessions on their subjects, “were often forced to negotiate and compromise.” Political survival and stability were sometimes a product of confessional plurality.Footnote ³⁸ In places where political decentralization was strong, such as in sixteenth-century Poland, a variety of Christian groups coexisted and even adopted ideas from each other. Polish Calvinists, for instance, took practices from other confessions that would have surprised the Calvinists in Geneva.Footnote ³⁹ While there existed such “confessional permeability” in some parts of Central Europe, recent case studies have also questioned the role of central governments or religious reforms in determining the confessional character of a region. There is evidence that in the bishopric of Speyer or in the rural communities of Bern's Calvinist territory confessional cultures did not evolve as a result of measures implemented by the central governments or Tridentine reform. Rather, they were enforced through “mechanisms of self-regulation and self-disciplining,” because “society required regulation.”Footnote ⁴⁰ A thorough analysis shows that in the Thirty Years’ War, a confessional conflict driven by religious fanaticism according to many scholars, the agency of militant groups who presented “a dispute about power and influence within the empire” as confessional strife was influential.Footnote ⁴¹ Thus, many case studies showed that what confessionalization literature originally portrayed as a linear, monolithic movement was in reality a multifaceted, complex phenomenon containing many contrasts and inconsistencies. Ultimately, confessionalization is a persuasively argued theme in early modern European historiography, but historians of Central Europe have also rigorously debated and tested the concept's explicative range. The Ottomanists who postulate an Ottoman age of confessionalization are oblivious to these debates.

In addition, even if one argued that conceptual and explanatory modifications of the confessionalization paradigm are possible in the case of the Ottomans, one must first deal with the problem of convincing evidence indicating an age of Ottoman confessionalization: such evidence, as of today, is simply deficient in Ottoman and Islamic history. The hyperactive Prussian mobilization reinforced by pietistic ideals was not paralleled in the Ottoman Empire, nor did an authoritarian drive toward uniformity occur as in post-confessionalization Europe. On the contrary, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ottoman history is marked by decentralization. Whereas central states were gaining ground in Europe, the Ottoman Empire was enduring the challenges of centrifugal forces. Therefore, the argument that the Ottoman Empire partook in the Mediterranean age of confessionalization is merely speculation due to the lack of strong evidence showing causal links between Islamic pietism and politics, social movements, and institutional changes as in the case of Europe. Whatever connections existed between these phenomena, they evolved in a historical and geographical setting peculiar to the Islamic realms.

Importantly, I am not denying Ottoman participation in the age of confessionalization in order to reinforce the historically stagnant and decadent image of Islam and the Ottoman Empire. That image derives not from history itself but rather from the scholarship. The tendency to prioritize paradigms and conceptualizations results in the poor evaluation and assessment of sources. Departing from this predicament, Reinhard Schulze once noted that the Islamic past still looks like a “bricolage” and has a relatively “unlesbares Bild,” whereas European history is “lesbar.” The former needs to be further analyzed; whereas the latter, sufficiently analyzed, allows for syntheses and the formulation of paradigms.Footnote ⁴² In the end, early modern Ottoman history remains a contested research field lacking its own paradigmatic depository. An “alternative paradigm that enables the fitting of disparate data into one coherent narrative thread” has yet to be produced; hence the experimental connections Ottomanists establish between early modern European historiography and the contemporary Ottoman Empire.Footnote ⁴³

Good Old Monarchy

Modern historians have often emphasized the paradoxical nature of early modern Austrian Habsburg's purported place as a great European power.Footnote ⁴⁴ Throughout much of its history, there has been a discrepancy between the achievements of the Habsburg monarchy and its limited resources. From the election of Rudolph I (r. 1273–91) as the Roman king to the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I, the lands ruled by the House of Habsburg stood at the center of European power politics. As often reiterated, the Habsburgs owed this somewhat privileged position, observed and protected in many occasions by networks of European powers, to their unique condition as neither an overly powerful nor overly weak political entity. “From beginning to end the monarchy's fate was shaped by the European practice of balance of power diplomacy, especially by the assistance of neighboring states that perceived it to be sufficiently strong to help resist more powerful enemies, yet weak enough not to pose a serious threat to their own security.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Credited to this widespread perception in early modern Europe, the Habsburg monarchy for centuries survived recurring threats posed by powerful enemies and political rivals, violent social upheavals, and severe financial difficulties. Meanwhile, the Habsburg family also gained reelection as emperors in the Holy Roman Empire until 1806, except for a short period in the 1740s. The House of Habsburg was able to cling to the imperial regalia for so long because of another dimension of the above conviction that peace within the Holy Roman Empire (Reichsfriede), so central to the balance of power in early modern Europe, could only be protected by the Habsburgs or any other royal house endowed with a similar special condition: hence the famous quote by Francis Palacky that “if the Habsburg Monarchy did not exist it would have to be created.”Footnote ⁴⁶ However, the assumed special condition of the Habsburgs did not make the monarchy a particularly successful political enterprise. In reality, the history of the Habsburg lands is also a history of political, social, and cultural crises.

A critical episode in this history of fluctuations was the second half of the seventeenth century, during which Leopold I (r. 1658–1705) ruled the Habsburg monarchy and the Holy Roman Empire. From the earliest days of his election as emperor to the end of his life, Leopold I wrestled with many political challenges and fought some of the most consequential wars in Habsburg (and European) history. Mainly due to developments that occurred during his rule, Habsburg historiography traditionally approaches the years between the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and the Treaty of Carlowitz (1699) as a major era of transition from a politically confined and insecure position to a new one marked by strong centralized government and cultural flourishing. Historians unanimously agree that it was during this period that the Habsburgs became elevated to great power status through military victories against France and the Ottoman Empire, especially between the 1660s and 1710s. Also, the monarchy achieved the ambitious imposition of Catholicism in their lands and the construction boom of the baroque style mainly in Vienna but also in Hungary after 1683. Built upon such observations, the contention that the Habsburg monarchy significantly transformed during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century in essence replicates a persistent and seldom challenged progressive assumption in European historiography that the given period was the political and cultural seedbed of what was to come next: the Enlightenment and modern age.Footnote ⁴⁷ I argue that this optimism may be traced back to German political theorist Samuel von Pufendorf's (1632–94) writings about the Holy Roman Empire in the seventeenth century. In the twentieth century, native scholars from Austria have applied assumptions echoing Pufendorf with little modification to the history of the Habsburg monarchy, which then became the norm in Habsburg studies, only to be solidified by R. J. W. Evans's monumental work in 1979.

R. J. W. Evans's tour de force, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, was a milestone in Anglophone Habsburg literature.Footnote ⁴⁸ The book's immense impact on Habsburg historiography since its publication does not require any further discussion here.Footnote ⁴⁹ Suffice it to point out in the framework of the current study that Evans was aware of the virulent intra-imperial quarrels and communal competitions as well as the disastrous military defeats the monarchy suffered throughout its existence. Yet, through an impressively optimistic narrative refuting notions about the monarchy's dysfunctionality, he convinced his readers that the Habsburg state was an efficient and successful political entity. Since Evans, such optimism has been the norm among Habsburg historians.

Notwithstanding the significance of Evans's work, I argue that his optimistic language, accentuating the efficient cohesion of conflicting social and political elements, may be traced to grand narratives published before the 1970s by leading Austrian historians. These historians believed that the House of Habsburg had been a major power in European politics since the mid-sixteenth century. They interpreted the Peace of Westphalia as a major turning point in the Habsburg monarchy's rise to great-power status. Yet, such optimistic appraisal of the history of German-speaking lands was not a new phenomenon even for the Austrian scholars who wrote about the Habsburg monarchy before Evans. For instance, there are remarkable parallels between Pufendorf's description of the Holy Roman Empire's administrative system and Evan's aforementioned optimism about the Habsburg monarchy.Footnote ⁵⁰ Pufendorf, the author of many influential treatises on the Holy Roman Empire, perceived the Reich as a structurally effective polity despite acknowledging its problems, just as Evans presented the Habsburg monarchy as an effective political body while also conceding the shortcomings of the monarchical system. In many ways, the former seems to have set for the latter some form of an exegetical precedent in a larger German framework.

In 1667, Samuel von Pufendorf published his Severini Monzambano Veronensis, an analysis of the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire (Reichsverfassung) and structure of the imperial system.Footnote ⁵¹ Pufendorf's book was not the first study on these matters, but it was the first to present a sharp criticism through a “brilliant and direct” language and acted as a catalyst for future debates on the structure of the empire.Footnote ⁵² Pufendorf's treatise attempted to answer a simple question: “Was the [Holy Roman Empire] only a state; and if so, how could it be classified among the prevalent theories of state?”Footnote ⁵³ Apparently, the confederation-like structure of the Holy Roman Empire posed a difficult problem even for a contemporary observer. In his original edition Pufendorf had notoriously called the Reich a monstro simile, a monstrosity. In a discussion that began immediately after the book's appearance, contemporary thinkers and later generations have rigorously discussed what Pufendorf might have meant by the term and how one could define and describe the actual structure of the Holy Roman Empire. In his later explanations, Pufendorf himself stated that he had not used the term to insult the Reich. His intention was to indicate the fact that the administrative structure of the empire was neither a democracy, nor an aristocracy, nor a monarchy. It was an irregular body.Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet, having received severe criticism subsequent editions of Monzambano first modified the phrase, including the term, and then eventually completely removed it entirely.

It is important to note that Pufendorf had not used the term monstro simile pejoratively, although the term indirectly suggested that the Holy Roman Empire was an idiosyncratic entity that was constantly wrestling problems emanating from its structural peculiarities. There were strict limitations on royal power due to “capitulations, laws, customs, and by the princes’ increasingly vociferous assertion of their rights.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In other words, there were legitimate reasons to think that the Reich, as an administrative body, was not a functional political entity. In reality, however, Pufendorf was one of the first to declare the institutional efficiency of the Holy Roman Empire under Habsburg orchestration while detecting deterioration in the post-1648 empire from a kingdom with clear-cut royal privileges into “an irregular system of fragmented sovereignty.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Recently, historians have noted that many contemporaries and generations of historians had misunderstood Pufendorf. His goal was only to stress the irregularity of the Reich; Pufendorf had optimistically believed that the Reich was capable of further progress and development.Footnote ⁵⁷

The similarity between Pufendorf's allegorical yet positive approach to the Reich in the 1660s and Evans's optimism about the organizational efficiency of the Habsburg monarchy four hundred years later must be more than a coincidence. Just as Pufendorf did, Evans acknowledged the idiosyncrasies of the Habsburg monarchy and the near-inevitability of political conflicts and social disputes as a result of the coexistence of irreconcilable elements and opposing forces, which required the permanent attention of Vienna. Evans, in a way analogous to Pufendorf, preferred to emphasize progress in the Habsburg monarchy and presented a considerably positive perspective. Inspired by Evans's approach, many Habsburg historians have stressed the assumed harmony among the “mildly centripetal” forces of the early modern monarchy. Such optimism, cutting across centuries, constitutes a remarkable phenomenon that awaits interpretation. It would appear to be more a product of a teleological faith in the progress of the Habsburg state. In this approach, Emperor Leopold I's rule represents a momentous era of transition by the end of which the monarchy was elevated from a regional state to a great power.

Seeking parallels between Pufendorf and Evans may seem arbitrary to some readers, but there are more direct and manifest parallels between the latter's positive interpretations and Austrian historians of more recent times. Oswald Redlich, the author of two consecutive books, is one.Footnote ⁵⁸ Redlich's works presented teleological discrepancies from the beginning. First, as Evans noted years later, there was a logical fallacy in the naming of Redlich's books, which was probably “unconscious,” because the “world power” of a given century simply could not be the antecedent of the “great power” of the next.Footnote ⁵⁹ Moreover, from the beginning to the end, Redlich's narrative in the first book negated the title of that book with recurring contradictions and arbitrary calibrations. Redlich stated early in his book that the bulk of the Habsburg lands were a loosely connected part of the Reich. Only after expanding into Hungary and Transylvania and repelling the Turks at the end of the seventeenth century did “a really new, special Austrian Great Power” emerge. Acknowledging the important role of contingencies in the longevity of the Austrian state, he wrote that “without setting such a goal beforehand … the power and grace of events and achievements” created the Austrian great power.Footnote ⁶⁰ However, Redlich differentiated the House of Habsburg from the actual Austrian monarchy. He argued that long before the “Austrian monarchy” became a great power after the conquest of Hungary, the “House of Austria” had already been a political great power since the time of Charles V due to the numerous crowns and lands the family possessed.Footnote ⁶¹ Concerning the Austrian monarchy, by the mid-seventeenth century, one could not yet speak of “an Austrian Gesamtstaat or even only implications of a Gesamtstaat idea.”Footnote ⁶² The monarchy's rise to great-power status began after the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699, which also marked the “first developmental phase of Austrian centralized absolutism,” and Austria's rise to “European Great Power” status.Footnote ⁶³ Such remarks disproved the titles of both volumes. If Austria had become a European great power by 1699, one simply cannot mention a baroque world power in the pre-1699 era. Yet, notwithstanding its numerous contradictions, Redlich's study presented an overly optimistic view of the Habsburg monarchy as a powerful political entity.

A similar optimism and a stronger progressivism prevailed in the grand narrative of Hugo Hantsch, who wrote a two-volume history of Austria. Perhaps feeling obliged to locate Austria's place in Europe at a time when the memory of World War II was vivid and postwar ideological divides were still strong, Hantsch boldly stressed Austria's Europeanness:

Hantsch wrote, echoing Redlich, that in the post-Westphalian Europe, it was Leopold I of the House of Austria who as the emperor bore the “noblest tiara” of the West. He added that despite intolerable tensions and crises during much of Leopold's rule, the foundations of the “Monarchia Austriaca” were laid, Erblande's sovereign state status developed significantly, and it achieved security while effectively halting the aggressions of the French. In addition, Leopold I's rule coincided with the birth of the age of reason and rationalism as the spiritual foundations of Europe were gradually shattering. Hantsch had no doubt that Austria was also participating in this intellectual process, which opened the door to a new world and access to hitherto hidden sources of life, closing the gap between the living standards of Western Europe and Austria. In Hantsch's perspective, the ability of the fanatically pious Leopold to fully benefit from the advice of scholars such as Johann Joachim Becher, Phillip von Hörnigk, and Wilhelm von Schröder, especially on economic issues, illustrated that the emperor was not narrow-minded. The restoration of Catholicism was not only completed during his rule, but he also initiated the monarchy's post-1683 building boom.Footnote ⁶⁵

The similarities between Redlich's and Hantsch's perspectives are not coincidental. Both Redlich and Hantsch were born in the nineteenth-century Habsburg monarchy. When they were writing their histories of the monarchy, they were constructing official, patriotic histories of their homeland. They both had witnessed how the monarchy suffered at the hands of separatist nationalists. Both were students of certain teachers and lived in a certain political atmosphere. One of Redlich's teachers was an Austro-German historian, Julius von Ficker. A keen believer in a multiethnic state as the only viable solution to the spreading nationalist delirium in Central Europe, Ficker held a positive view of the monarchy's history. In his well-known debate with Heinrich von Sybel, Ficker stressed more than anything “the coexistence and harmony of universal and national duties as the very essence of the medieval Reich.”Footnote ⁶⁶ A similar perspective was also prevalent in Redlich's two-volume history. Compared to Redlich, Hugo Hantsch was a member of a future generation of historians; yet he was also born in the late nineteenth-century monarchy and raised in Bohemia, where national strife was intense.Footnote ⁶⁷ It must have been difficult at the time for an Austro-German intellectual from Bohemia to cultivate a nuanced view of the Habsburg state and not defend it against the ambitions of Czech nationalists. The setting necessitated a progressive perspective on the monarchy's history that emphasized the harmony of diverse communities. Moreover, Hantsch was an ordained Catholic priest, which probably served as another factor strengthening his identification with the legacy of the Catholic Habsburgs. Eventually, just as Redlich did, Hantsch praised the achievements of the Habsburg monarchy. One may suggest, therefore, that the works of Redlich and Hantsch transmitted the propagandist, patriotic tones of nineteenth-century perceptions of the Habsburg monarchy to twentieth-century historiography.

A comparable optimism and progressivism guided other scholars. Adam Wandruszka's brief book on the monarchy, published originally in German in 1956, built upon a similar grandiose discourse. Echoing Redlich, Wandruszka mentioned a purported “Habsburg world power” as early as the sixteenth century, but he also venerated Leopold I as the ruler of the high baroque. He stressed the relief of Vienna in 1683 as the great political and military turning point for the monarchy.Footnote ⁶⁸ Another important study was Erich Zöllner's macro-history of Austria.Footnote ⁶⁹ Zöllner unequivocally acknowledged the “desperate loosening of the Reich's unity” in the post-1648 period and the diminishing Habsburg influence in Germany. However, those were not signs of weakening or decline; rather they signified the “shifting of the heavyweight of Austria's political, military, and financial foundations” from Germany to its hereditary lands.Footnote ⁷⁰ One could even speak of the “victory of [Habsburg] absolutism and Catholicism” after 1648 as Protestant resistance was finally broken. In addition, echoing Redlich and Hantsch, Zöllner argued that between 1648 and 1740 Austria attained great-power status.Footnote ⁷¹ For Zöllner, Austria's emergence as a great power was not merely a geopolitical phenomenon; it was economic, intellectual, and cultural, too. Zöllner's painstaking analysis discussed in detail the mercantilist policies implemented in the second half of the century in handicrafts, mines, forestry, and many other manufacturing and production sectors as well as population movements and settlement. Further passages on the scholarly, scientific, and architectural accomplishments of the time portrayed the monarchy in the second half of the seventeenth century as a land of achievements.Footnote ⁷² This progressive and optimistic narrative refined earlier approaches and assumptions in a language accessible to a general readership. The book could be interpreted as the most complete single-volume modern history of the monarchy published in German before the 1960s.

The optimism that Austrian historians have inherited from earlier generations became the norm in Habsburg studies by the 1960s, determining the general tone of Habsburg scholarship in and outside of Austria in subsequent years. Today, one can read similar ideas in the writings of Austrian scholars of later generations.Footnote ⁷³ As implied in Evans's memorable circumlocution that the Habsburg state was “a complex, and subtly-balanced organism, not a ‘state’ but a mildly centripetal agglutination of bewilderingly heterogeneous elements,” Habsburg historiography has generally acknowledged the idiosyncratic nature of the monarchy emanating from the political, social, and economic conflicts of interest among different lands and groups of people.Footnote ⁷⁴ Although these conflicts were rarely healed throughout the history of the monarchy, optimism and progressivism often overcame criticism, especially for the second half of the seventeenth century. A noteworthy example showing that progressivism in Habsburg historiography was becoming normal outside of Austria was French historian Victor Lucien Tapié’s grand narrative. In his chapter concerning the period in question (1648–83), Tapié asked whether the period was a “dark age,” as referred to in Czech historiography, or an era of “baroque glory.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Tapié was a scholar of the baroque and an expert in the Bohemian baroque. To him, the answer was obvious: the artistic manifestations of the time illustrated the glory of the baroque age. Tapié presented the Bohemian baroque mostly as a timeless phenomenon alleviating the burdens of tragedies, miseries, revolts, and inequalities. Such evils “may have been more acute in [Danubian] countries,” he wrote, “but, even so, they serve as the measure by which to judge the compensations provided in the Baroque ideal.” Tapié agreed that 1683 was a turning point for the monarchy, yet he put forth a different claim. The evolution of the monarchy after that year was not visible in economic and political developments or great military victories; it was reflected in triumphal Danubian baroque art.Footnote ⁷⁶ Decades later, another French historian and a student of Tapié, Jean Bérenger, repeated his mentor's arguments and highlighted baroque's centrality in the achievements of the early modern Habsburg monarchy. The victory at Kahlenberg highlighted “the end of the Turkish peril” and the beginning of “economic prosperity and the rebuilding of the capital on new foundations.”Footnote ⁷⁷