How did the Ottoman Empire counter armies that used pike and shot tactics? From my research, I've found that they employed strategies like trenches, wagon forts, and increased artillery and gunfire, but these are broad tactics. Can you provide specific examples of battles and military strategies used by the Ottomans to counter *pike and shot* warfare? How effective were these countermeasures in practice?
>>17280206First of all majority of the era wasn't characterised by battles. The theatres at which the ottomans fought were basically all about either sieges or raiding overland supply lines, and I think the moment you think about this for a while the description you've found makes sense. If you besiege a fort you dig trenches. If you have to defend your supply line you form a wagon fort and try to fight off the attackers.
>>17280296How did this play out in major pitched battles? I know the Ottomans had a professional engineering corps capable of quickly building trenches, redoubts, and using wagon forts for their camps. How did the battles unfold? How did the Europeans counter this? From what I remember, many battles saw the Ottomans being pushed back to their fortified camps, with the Europeans attacking the camps, only for the Ottomans to counterattack and push the out. Were there any battles that went differently from this general pattern? And what did it look like when the Ottomans had to take the offensive in battles?
>>17280206They didnt, they took more losses in victory or lost battles because they couldnt adapt their own style of pike and shot warfare. Its not "countered" by anything in particular except better iterations of itself.In a way WWI ended pike and shot as prior to WWI everyone was both pikeman and shooter.>>17280393They usually didnt fight. the few times they did were typically in sieges along the Medbug coast.But most often the Ottomans never encountered Pike and Shot tactics.
>>17280206Well in the 17th century, during the Habsburg-Ottoman Wars, they oftentimes lost against pike and shot armies in the field but were still succesfull in offensive and defensive sieges - but in the end were almost In the 15th and 16th century, as you have said yourself, the ottomans relied on infantry firepower and artillery plus their often times numerically superior cavalry, with their tabors being relatively mobile strong points. Another feature of the ottoman expansion into the balkans were their light cavalry forces, which performed deep raids into the countryside and picked it clean of foodstuffs. Here they often times had an advantage of the western forces - but both sieges of Vienna that came back to bite them, as the surrounding lands of the city were already picked clean by the time the main ottoman army arrived, it had to be supplied by extensive wagon trains, which in turn were susceptible to raids as well and the poor quality of the road system (which was worsened by bad weather conditions - for the first siege the ottomans couldn't even deploy their heavy siege guns as the roads were too bad to transport them).By those times the western pike and shot formations were less developed and they had a decisive disadvantage when it came to firearms and artillery. In the 17th century this was turned around as the western powers innovated and especially with regards to lighter field pieces outclassed the ottomans. This goes also hand in hand with many state reforms, which allowed Habsburg Austria, Spain, etc. to field larger armies.
>>17280393In the 15th century it can be boiled down to a general pattern of the western forces overwhelming the first ottoman lines, in turn exhausting themselves and then being caught by the returning fire of ottoman artillery and handheld firearms, while being flanked by ottoman cavalry. The Battle of Mohács (1526) you've already posted is a good example of this, as here the hungarians were able to initially drive off the irregular ottoman forces, but then found themselves confronted with the better trained and armed janissaries (augmented by artillery), which defeated them. Additionally the hungarian cavalry was caught as well by the ottoman artillery and the ottoman cavalry performed a vast flanking manouver, sourrounding the hungarian army. For a battle when the ottomans faced a modern 17th century pike and shot army look at the Secon Battle of Mohács (1687): here the habsburg forces resisted an ottoman surprise attack, weathered the heavy ottoman counter bombardment in ad hoc defenses and succesfully counterattacked themselves, driving the ottomans off the field - leaving behind many of their heavy and immobile artillery pieces. >>17280409Pike and shot refers to the specific time frame of the 16th and 17th century, when both of those components were divided by technical necessity.
