Page 408 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

Peter the Great as Victor. Peter the Great wished to westernize Russia, especially in the realm of technical skills. His goal was the creation of a strong army and navy and the acquisition of new territory in order to make Russia a great power. He is shown here as the victor at the Battle of Poltava in an eighteenth-century portrait attributed to Gottfried Danhauer.
attention. Advancing up the Danube, the Ottomans seized Belgrade in 1521 and Hungary by 1526, although their attempts to conquer Vienna in 1529 were repulsed. At the same time, the Ottomans extended their power into the western Mediterranean, threaten- ing to turn it into an Ottoman lake. However, the Spanish destroyed a large Ottoman fleet at Lepanto (in modern-day Greece) in 1571. De- spite the defeat, the Ottomans continued to hold nominal control over the southern shores of the Mediterranean.
By the beginning of the seven- teenth century, the Ottoman Empire was being treated like any other Eu- ropean power by European rulers seeking alliances and trade conces- sions. In the first half of the century, the empire was a “sleeping giant.” Occupied by domestic bloodletting and severely threatened by a chal- lenge from Persia, the Ottomans were content with the status quo in eastern Europe. But under a new line of grand viziers in the second half of the seventeenth century, the Otto- man Empire again took the offen- sive. By 1683, the Ottomans had marched through the Hungarian plain and laid siege to Vienna. Repulsed by a mixed army of Austri- ans, Poles, Bavarians, and Saxons, the Ottomans retreated and were pushed out of Hungary by a new Eu-
dream: by the time of his death in 1725, Russia had become a great military power and an important actor on the European stage.
The Ottoman Empire
After conquering Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Turks tried but failed to complete their conquest of the Balkans, where they had been established since the four- teenth century (see Map 15.3). The reign of Sultan Sulei- man (soo-lay-MAHN) I the Magnificent (1520–1566), however, brought the Ottomans back to Europe’s
ropean coalition. Although they retained the core of their empire, the Ottoman Turks would never again be a threat to Europe.
The Limits of Absolutism
In recent decades, historical studies of local institutions have challenged the traditional picture of absolute monarchs. We now recognize that their power was far from absolute, and it is misleading to think that they actually controlled the lives of their subjects. In 1700, government for most people still meant the local
370 Chapter 15 State Building and the Search for Order in the Seventeenth Century
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Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow/The Bridgeman Art Library