New article by Tobias Graf: “Knowing the ‘Hereditary Enemy’: Austrian-Habsburg Intelligence on the Ottoman Empire in the Late Sixteenth Century”
Throughout the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire presented the most formidable challenge to the House of Habsburg’s predominance in Europe. This imperial rivalry and the military conflict which it generated made it vital that the Holy Roman Emperors and their advisors were kept informed about their powerful adversary to receive advance warning of impending attacks. Drawing on documents kept at the archives in Vienna, a new article by Tobias Graf argues that intelligence was woven into the very fabric of the institutions created to deal with the Ottoman challenge to Austrian-Habsburg interests militarily as well as diplomatically. In particular, the expenditure accounts of the Imperial ambassadors in Istanbul from the early 1580s reveal that the business of intelligence was pursued by the Habsburgs in a more professional and orderly manner than historians usually acknowledge.
The article has been published in the Journal of Intelligence History and is available online as Open Access thanks to the support of the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.