Abstract

This chapter examines military building activity in the region in the light of Ottoman sources preserved in the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archive in Istanbul and memoirs written by the senior bureaucrats of the Empire. It aims to assess whether the military building programme of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued in later periods in the same spirit as in the earlier time of conquests and expansion, or if the empire only supported repairs of existing strongholds. The issue was noted by numerous Ottoman writers as early as the Koçi Bey Risalesi in the seventeenth century. This chapter examines four frontier areas of the Ottoman Empire: the Hapsburg borderland in Croatia; the frontier between Montenegro and southern Herzegovina; the fortress line on the banks of the Danube in Wallachia; and the Danube Delta region near the Black Sea.