Gabor Agoston

Ottoman military history has been Gábor Ágoston's subject since he read history and Turkish at ELTE in Budapest. He taught Ottoman, Hungarian and Balkan history at ELTE and at Pécs before moving to Georgetown's history department in 1998. Guns for the Sultan (Cambridge, 2005) examined the empire's weapons industry and its capacity to arm itself, and with Bruce Masters he edited the Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire. The Last Muslim Conquest, issued by Princeton in 2021, traces the long contest with the Habsburgs, the Safavids and Russia, giving as much room to frontier administration, dynastic marriage, diplomacy and intelligence gathering as to campaigns. He argues that the Ottoman state, for all its Turkish, Iranian and Islamic inheritance, belongs inside European history rather than beside it.