The imperial rivalry between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg monarchy is widely recognized as one of the defining conflicts of early modern Eurasia. Until recently, historiography has focused on wars and seemingly intractable differences between them, although their shared history is equally marked by communication and pragmatic efforts at mutual understanding. Drawing on the cultural history of diplomacy and theories of Orientalism, this study examines the seventeenth-century Habsburg monarchy’s concept of the Ottoman Orient within the empire’s highest decision-making forums, based largely on unpublished archival documents. At the center of this inquiry is the Aulic War Council (Hofkriegsrat), the institution responsible for Eastern affairs in the monarchy. As a starting point, the study presents the specific geopolitical context in which the Habsburg image of the East covering Eurasian space developed. It then provides an overview of the Habsburg diplomatic apparatus within the War Council, explaining its structure, key actors, and operational mechanisms. Focusing on a specific diplomatic genre—the final report—it also shows how decisions regarding the Ottomans and the Eastern world were made, emphasizing the role of knowledge accumulation, strategy-building, and overarching political objectives in shaping Habsburg policy.

Motivated by the existential threat of Ottoman expansion, Vienna required a constant flow of information from Constantinople as early as the first half of the sixteenth century. Following the establishment of a resident embassy in the Ottoman capital in 1547, Vienna soon built a dense network of diplomats, Sprachknaben, and other agents, enabling the Habsburg monarchy to develop a sustained system of information production on the Ottoman Empire. By the early eighteenth century, the original urge to achieve, through diplomacy, a near certainty about prospective political or military developments in the Ottoman Empire evolved into a full-fledged knowledge ecosystem, which I term the “Habsburg diplo-Wissen regime.” As this article demonstrates through three case studies of record-keeping and archival preservation from 1682, 1699–1700, and 1719–20, the distinctive quality of this diplo-Wissen regime lay in an asymmetrical flow of information from Constantinople to Vienna, which remained unmatched on the Ottoman side until the early nineteenth century.

This article examines Ottoman grand vizierial correspondence as a central yet understudied medium of early modern Ottoman-Habsburg (and Ottoman-European) diplomacy. While scholarship on Ottoman diplomatics has extensively analyzed the philological, grammatical, structural, and material features of high-political letters, what we name the diplomatic textuality of grand vizierial correspondence, consisting of rhetoric, linguistic tone, emotional register, and any politically meaningful communicative content, remains insufficiently explored. Building on recent observations concerning the rich subtext of Ottoman epistolary practice, we argue that grand vizierial letters were not merely stylistically ornate products of chancery conventions nor “empty bombast”; they constituted the principal working interface of Ottoman diplomacy in the absence of permanent embassies abroad. Through a serial reading of the correspondence between Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha and the Habsburg emperors Maximilian II and Rudolf II, we demonstrate that these letters functioned as dynamic instruments of negotiation, hierarchy-making, and diplomatic communication between Constantinople and Vienna. We argue that a diachronic and serial analysis of early modern grand vizierial correspondence may reveal previously unexamined correlations between shifts in international politics, changing balances of power, and transformations in Ottoman-European diplomatic language.

During Czechoslovakia’s first decade, the state promoted public health reform and sponsored research surveys on healthcare and social welfare resources. Czechoslovak government leaders and healthcare professionals embraced a rhetoric of American progressivism and de-Austrianization to portray their country as forward-looking, democratic, and rational. Through the work of President Tomáš G. Masaryk’s daughter, Alice G. Masaryková, Czechoslovakia developed partnerships with American organizations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Young Women’s Christian Association, which provided funding, training, and personnel. A major undertaking of the early 1920s was the Social Survey of Greater Prague, a massive study based on American sociology methods, which helped determine state priorities in health and welfare. Yet, this strategy of partnering with American professionals and organizations obscured key continuities with the Habsburg era. Despite the influence of American health professionals in Czechoslovakia, the new state’s public health system developed within a centralized bureaucratic and legal structure inherited from Austria. As the capital of a centralized state, Prague replaced and even exceeded Vienna’s former role as the arbiter of health and welfare policies and practices.

The study of early modern diplomatic relations between the Central European Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman Empire has a robust tradition based on the analysis of a rich body of primary sources preserved mostly in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv of the Austrian State Archives. This introduction provides a brief overview of the historiography, the place of the present articles in this tradition, and suggests several directions for future research.

In the first third of the fifteenth century, the University of Vienna actively resisted Wycliffism and Hussitism in various ways. This study explores the early skepticism of Viennese university masters toward peace negotiations with the Hussites, focusing on a previously unknown exhortation in which the Bohemian-Austrian nobility urged King Sigismund to take decisive action against the heretics. The only known manuscript dates the text to 1419, but this early date seems unlikely. Various clues suggest that the letter was written within the University of Vienna as a protest against King Sigismund’s conciliatory policies in the summer of 1429. By that time, the monarch had initiated negotiations for a general truce with the Hussites in preparation for his planned coronation journey to Italy. Given that the author employed literary fiction and symbolic communication to influence the king in a politically sensitive moment, this study also examines innovations in communication and textual media amid the late medieval ecclesiastical crisis (1378–1449). It additionally includes a critical edition of the exhortation’s Latin text, accompanied by an annotated English translation.

This article explores the secretive practices of Habsburg envoys in Constantinople during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. While recent scholarship has focused on the highly visible, ceremonial aspects of Habsburg-Ottoman relations—such as grand embassies, ritual gift exchanges, and public audiences—this article shifts the focus toward the “hidden dimension” of diplomacy: secrecy. During the seventeenth century, diplomatic ties between the Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman Empire became institutionalized, leading to a significant and sustained transfer of knowledge as the imperial court in Vienna increasingly required reliable information on Ottoman affairs. The author argues that secrecy was a core component of this diplomatic work, involving espionage, coded messaging, strategic deception, and the manipulation of information. Using an actor-centered perspective, this study examines how diplomats themselves understood and applied secrecy in their professional repertoire. The analysis highlights how these covert communicative practices were functionally embedded in the envoys’ interactions with both the Ottoman and imperial courts. Ultimately, this work aims to illuminate how clandestine activities were just as integral to inter-imperial relations as their well-documented public counterparts.

The creation of a Slovak literary standard to serve as a “national language” can be analyzed not only as part of intellectual history but also as part of the social history of rising literacy: a demographically significant population trained to write according to any particular literary standard forms a social interest group generating ethnolinguistic nationalism. Textbooks are interesting sources for both approaches. Focusing on the 1850s as a key moment in the history of Habsburg educational policy, this paper examines four Slovak grammar books written in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution. While the ideal of a “Slovak language” was gaining ground, the continued heterogeneity of literary practices and the persistence of Czech teaching materials suggest that a uniquely Slovak social interest group was much slower to form.