The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry, and Holy War in the Sixteenth-Century Adriatic.

The uskoks of Senj were irregular soldiers of the Habsburg Military Frontier in the sixteenth century, who lived by warfare or banditry, depending on the occasion and the perspective, and acted from their Adriatic base at the borders of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Venetian empires. The irregularity of their role and the liminality of their position render the uskoks rather challenging as an academic subject, and Catherine Wendy Bracewell meets that challenge with an array of languages, an impressive mastery of several archives, perfect intellectual balance between competing archival perspectives, and real courage about taking on big historical questions. Bracewell considers how the uskoks fit into the diplomatic and political picture of southeastern Europe, with its rival empires, but she also studies the society and culture of these frontier soldiers, posing and answering delicate questions about their customs, values, and identity. A glance at the sixteenth-century map, which shows the geopolitical position of the uskoks of Senj amid Habsburg Croatia, Venetian Dalmatia, and Ottoman Bosnia, suggests the relevance of this book for studying the demographic, cultural, and political conflicts, which have made the history of the South Slavs so urgently important for the history of early modern, modern, and contemporary Europe.

Bracewell is especially accomplished in bringing different historical approaches to bear upon the subject of the uskoks, with chapters that explore hard military, political, and economic issues, for instance, on "Border Military Systems," on "The Raiding Economy," and on "Military Authority and Raiding." Other chapters study subtle social and cultural issues, for instance, on "Motives of the Uskoks" and on "The Uskok Code." Especially important is Bracewell's discussion of the relation between ideology and the raiding economy, that is, the sense of religious mission on the Ottoman frontier and the distinction between licit and illicit objects of plunder. A long chapter on "Allies and Victims" is a fascinating, mosaic work of historical context, in which the uskoks are carefully fitted into the puzzle of neighboring communities, nations, and empires. The concluding chapters on "The Final Decades" and "The Dispersal of the Uskoks" brilliantly analyze the big issues that hinge on the turn of the century, from the sixteenth to the seventeenth; Bracewell demonstrates that the history of the uskoks belonged to a particular moment in the historical development of the early modern state and economy, as well as a particular matrix of ethnic and religious factors that influenced the evolving nature of cultural identity in the sixteenth century.

Bracewell's powerful analysis of the sixteenth-century Adriatic arena as a whole, with all its interlocking parts and pieces, makes this a worthy study in the tradition of Braudel's Mediterranean. In fact, it fills in a corner of the Mediterranean map which Braudel only sketched, and which is now very well served by Bracewell's richly comprehensive treatment. As a study of the South Slavs the book is also one of the most important works on the history of early modern Eastern Europe to be published in recent years, and its importance comes in part from its intellectual integrity in refusing to concede any artificial or anachronistic distinctions between "Eastern Europe" and "Western Europe." The uskoks are studied in the context of the Habsburg, Venetian, and Ottoman empires, and the economic and strategic significance of the Adriatic receives analytical priority, rendering unnecessary any reductionist geopolitical distinctions. It is a tribute to Bracewell's challenging historical vision that her study of the uskoks must also be taken as a significant contribution to Venetian intellectual history, drawing as it does upon the writings of Paolo Sarpi, among others, in elucidating Venice's perspective on its own Adriatic position.

"Senj was the home of the Uskoks," wrote Rebecca West in 1941, in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. "These are not animals invented by Edward Lear. They were refugees. They were refugees like the Jews and Roman Catholics and liberals driven out by Hitler." They were "Slavs of blameless character who fled before the Turks," who settled at Senj and "chased the Turkish ships up and down the Adriatic," and who ended as "poor wretches" with "no means of living except by piracy." West's well-intentioned account suggests the extent to which the uskoks of Senj, with a name that was odd and unfamiliar to English ears, might be redeemed from the realm of Learish creatures only to be pressed into the free-floating service of naive and ahistorical romance. Fifty years ago West looked to the uskoks for relevant moral lessons. Bracewell, as an historian, rightly studies the subject without regard for moral lessons, and her full account of the various grievances expressed by the uskoks, their neighbors, their enemies, and their patrons, really rules out for the reader any retrospective, righteous, partisan engagement in the warfare of the sixteenth century. Issues of political allegiance, cultural identity, and irregular military engagement in Adriatic Europe are by no means irrelevant to the twentieth century, but Bracewell's work demonstrate above all the rich complexity of their sixteenth-century significance.

"The perpetual warfare of the frontier; the lack of effective control by the central governments; the irrelevance of political boundaries to the social, ethnic, and religious divisions in the border population and the resulting difficulty in identifying differences between raider and victim," writes Bracewell, "have caused historians to regard the warfare of the border as essentially chaotic and anarchic." She rejects such evasions of the historian's charge, and observes that "the uskok phenomenon derived from the complex reality of border life, acted on by social, religious, national, economic, political, and military forces, each modifying the others." She admits that "disentangling this web of possibilities is a daunting task." Yet, from that web of possibilities she has created a fascinating work of sixteenth-century patterns, achieving the highest standard of historical solidity and subtlety, and challenging us to recognize the significance of the uskoks of Senj for the history of early modern Europe.

Larry Wolff Boston College