Waging War in the Seventeenth Century: Comparative Views on the Austro-Ottoman Wars is quite a comprehensive survey, introducing Habsburg-Ottoman military conflict in the early modern period to a francophone audience. The book focuses on three periods throughout the century: the Long Wars (1593–1606); the mid-century struggle (1658–64); and the period around the second siege of Vienna by the Ottomans (1683). In terms of geography, the Hungarian marshes are in the limelight. With a focus on both Habsburg and Ottoman parties, the author tackles questions such as how logistics were operated; how the provisioning of the armies and the alimentation of soldiers were organized; and what roles the frontier garrisons played in the imperial conflicts.

A lack of French language historiography on the Austro-Ottoman military affairs in the seventeenth century is presented as the motivation of the book in the introduction, and the author links this apathy to a slow-developing interest in military history in France due to the predominance of the Annales school in the twentieth century (22–23). Even when the French historians produced works that can be considered within the framework of a “new military history,” Bardakçı argues, they still lagged far behind their Anglo-Saxon colleagues in participating in the “military revolution” debate, a failure shared by German historiography. In the following sections of his introduction, the author changes direction to make a sweeping summary of early modern Ottoman military historiography in an effective manner (24–25). The historiographic analysis of the Habsburg army during the same period is unfortunately missing, save for a hefty footnote listing German language works produced after 1990 (25:n36).

In six chapters, the book tries to understand warfare from a grassroots perspective (41) and thereby adopts a “new military history” approach. The chapters nicely portray their arguments with a concern to give voice to both Ottoman and Habsburg sides. The first chapter is a summary of political events beginning in the first half of the sixteenth century, a political history narrative of the Habsburg-Ottoman imperial struggle over Hungary, designed to contextualize the author’s later analyses. It relies heavily on the established literature and provides readers with a fine review of the political developments during the three wartime periods under scrutiny. Bardakçı’s analysis concludes that while the Porte’s attitude in the Hungarian frontier zone was marked by “constance and firmness,” that of the Habsburgs was hesitant (95). Chapter 2 deals with the Habsburg-Ottoman military frontier across Hungary by looking at the logistics of war making as operated by both parties. Bardakçı portrays the physical features of military life, such as feeding guns and mouths (126), the garrison members in fortified areas, and gunpowder or fodder procurement. Chapter 3, “The Theatre of Operations,” addresses a large variety of issues such as sieges, (fire) arms, justifications of (holy) war, violence, and cruelty during wartime or the capitulation of the defeated. The author expounds these topics under the rubric of Kleinkrieg; which is bizarre, given the fact that the phenomenon is more representative of peacetime cross-border aggression rather than periods of open conflict, which is the book’s focus.

The fourth chapter, “The Daily Service of Soldiers,” is the most original section of the work and builds sturdily upon the French mercenary soldiers partaking in the Habsburg armies. Duc de Mercoeur’s campaigns around 1600, starting from the first recruitment of his troops until the successful siege of Stuhlweissenburg (Székesfehérvár), are vividly depicted. Count Coligny-Saligny’s role in the field battle in 1664 is also explored as a multi-act theater play. And on the Ottoman side, Tiryaki Hasan Pasha’s famous defense of Kanischa (Nagykanizsa) in 1601 poses a veritable counterpoint. With regard not only to the use of primary sources but also to its outsider’s perspective, this chapter stands out as a genuine contribution to Habsburg-Ottoman military history.

The last two chapters can perhaps be defined best as the anthropocentric episodes of the work, and they highlight human suffering: “People put to the test of war” explains the miseries of plundering and the conditions of women and children accompanying the armies on the one hand, and, vis-a-vis soldiers, methods of resistance to fighting (like mutiny, desertion, or defection to the enemy) on the other. In the last chapter, “The Prisoners of War,” Bardakçı does a commendable job in painting the grim picture of how both the Ottoman and Habsburg soldiers were experiencing the challenges and benefits of the same ransom economy: they were first captured, then interrogated; their value was determined, and they eventually became either slaves or were ransomed. The conclusion of the book is a summary recapitulation of the chapters.

Its comprehensive coverage notwithstanding, the shortcomings of the work are difficult to overlook. First, the author’s use of primary sources is heavily influenced by former studies, rendering the work’s employment of the archives rather arbitrary and, at times, even misleading. A second issue is related to the fact that the work is shaped out of the author’s thousand-page-long 2021 doctoral dissertation: even though the author has managed to fit his colossal dissertation into the book format, preserving more of the visual data already present in the dissertation (instead of just a single map of Hungary placed at the end of the text) could have served readers better. Although the main text is penned with a very strong prose free from any grammatical errors, there are occasional typos with the use of German (such as mAß instead of Maße [127]; or Verörprotokoll instead of Verhörprotokoll [335]) and Ottoman names (such as ‘adhnâme instead of ‘ahdnâme on [56, 60–61]). Last, the author fails to clarify why he recurrently refers to the Habsburg administration as Casa de Austria instead of opting for a more conventional term, such as the Hofburg, or simply, the Viennese court.

In an overall assessment, Faire la guerre is a very good review of Austro-Ottoman military affairs in French, bringing together a rich literature dispersed into German, Hungarian, and Turkish historiographies, otherwise hardly accessible to a general audience. It delivers well on its promise to offer a comparative perspective.