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

In this highly original work, Catherine Wendy Bracewell reconstructs and analyzes the tumultuous history of the uskoks of Senj, the martial bands nominally under the control of the Habsburg Military Frontier in Croatia, who between the 1530s and the 1620s developed a community based on raiding the Ottoman hinterland, Venetian possessions in Dalmatia, and shipping on the Adriatic.
Drawing on a broad range of sources, including the archives of the Dalmatian communes under Venetian rule and military frontier records, Bracewell provides the first comprehensive analysis of the uskoks as a social phenomenon, examining their origins, their military and social organization, their plunder economy, their mental world, and their relations with other groups in this borderland between three empires. The uskoks lived on the frontier where Christian Europe confronted the world of Islam, and they invoked the struggle against the Infidel to justify their often bloody deeds. As Bracewell demonstrates, however, uskok actions were also shaped by the maze of local political and economic rivalries, social conflicts, and ethnic and confessional antagonisms, which to this day affect the region's tumultuous history. In pages that test the concept of the social bandit, the author analyzes the motives that guided the uskoks and distinguishes these from the factors that impelled various elements of the local population to support them. She concludes that whatever the aberrations of their behavior, the uskoks provided a channel for popular protest, a means of voicing grievances for which there were no other outlets.
Moving beyond a narrow focus on these brigand communities, Bracewell uses the uskok experience as a prism through which to view a much larger subject: the collision of cultural systems which influenced European history for centuries and continues to reverberate in the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean. Her book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the process whereby the peoples of interstitial societies forge and maintain concepts of identity and community.