5 - Conclusions

Summary

Abstract

In this concluding chapter, the problem of war-associated environmental change in pre-modern Hungary is revisited. It is argued that the Ottoman- Hungarian wars had important impacts on the landscapes of Transdanubia and elsewhere in the Carpathian Basin, but the most important landscape transformations were hydrological changes and not the loss of forests, as has been argued.

Keywords: Environmental history, Kingdom of Hungary, Ottoman Empire, landscape change, forest history, water history

The present book has aimed to deepen our understanding of what kind of environmental legacies a pre-modern war left and how one can demonstrate the environmental transformations that occurred in areas that were probably more fundamentally changed in the centuries to come after. The case studies tried to demonstrate how the changing political situation and the lasting military conflict in the Carpathian Basin in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries affected environmental conditions. Two factors were considered in detail: first, the war's impact on water management and its resultant fluvial landscapes and local farming possibilities, and second, how forest cover and the exploitation of this resource were affected by the war. This chapter has provided some general remarks on the specific context and on the possibilities for studying the environmental legacy of pre-modern warfare in general.

From the very beginning of the military activities in the Carpathian Basin in the early modern period, the Habsburg-Hungarian armies systematically utilized the features of the landscape in their military strategy. Although the documentary sources for the Ottomans are less abundant or rather less exploited, for as far as we know, their military elite seems to have made major efforts to understand the local environmental conditions. Hence, by the time they took possession of the central part of the Carpathian Basin, they already had considerable knowledge of the geographies of the area. However, at this point, there is no data available from the Ottoman Empire suggesting the existence on the Ottoman side of a similarly complex defense system based on the landscape, or at least not in this part of the Empire.

The defense of the Kingdom of Hungary, as the previous chapters have demonstrated, was designed with the systematic use of landscape features, most significantly the marshes and rivers in the lowlands.