ABSTRACT
From the standpoint of international relations in a strict sense it may seem unnecessary to give the Ottoman Empire separate discussion in the history of the sixteenth century. As earlier chapters have shown, it was always a very important factor, potential if not always active, in the relations between the monarchies of Europe. The rulers of France from the 1520s, the Dutch rebels intermittently from the 1560s, Elizabeth and her ministers in the 1580s, all hoped to use the Ottomans as a weapon against Habsburg Spain. The frightening Ottoman conquests in south-eastern Europe and the Danube valley became the greatest military preoccupation of the Austrian Habsburgs and had significant implications for the progress of the Reformation in Germany with all its international repercussions. Yet it is difficult, and would be misleading, to treat the Ottoman Empire as an international player quite like France, Spain or England. Its view of the world and the assumptions on which it was based, both the strengths and weaknesses of its government, the fact that it was an Asiatic power to which Irak, Azerbaijan and the Caucasus were at least as important as the Balkans or the Danube valley, even its size and heterogeneity, all marked it out clearly as unique. It was a great force in international relations, but one with its own peculiar character. It therefore demands at least some degree of separate treatment.
