DANFront: An Environmental History of the Early-Modern Ottoman Military Frontier in the Middle and Lower Danube
Onur İnal & Deniz Armağan Akto University of Vienna
The DANFront project seeks to examine the role of the Danube River in the Ottoman military expansion into Central Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries and the effects of this expansion on the riverine environment. It aims to examine how the Ottomans used the Danube for military and socio-economic purposes to expand their influence in southeastern and central Europe. The project is hosted at the University of Vienna, Austria, and funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF-Österreichischer Wissenschaftsfonds).
As part of the project, historical data from various Ottoman sources will be extracted, datasets will be created, and the datasets will be visualized graphically.
This analysis portal contains 586 records on Ottoman garrisons. The data spans from 1454 to 1662 and covers 210 garrisons. Analyses are presented across multiple dimensions, including provincial distribution, personnel by military category, and temporal trends. Analysis features the following components: Hierarchical categorization; system; year-based analysis and comparison; interactive visualizations; logarithmic scale analyses; provincial comparisons; temporal trend analyses.
Onur İnal is Senior postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna, Department of Near Eastern Studies. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 2015 on the urban and environmental history of Ottoman Izmir. He is a board member and general secretary of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH). He served as the regional representative for Turkey from 2017-2025.
His research focuses on the urban and environmental histories of the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey. His monograph “Gateway to the Mediterranean: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Izmir” was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025
Deniz Armağan Akto (Ph.D., Bilkent University, 2025). He received his Ph.D from Bilkent University with a thesis entitled “The Ottoman Military, Socio-Economic and Administrative Order in the Lower Danube (From the Mid-15th to the End of the 16th Century): The Cases of Vidin and Niğbolu”. His work focuses on the socio-economic and military history of the early modern Ottoman Empire, with a geographic emphasis on southeastern Europe.
He is a member of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) and the Early Modern Ottoman Studies (EMOS) group. He has published articles in peer-reviewed journals, such as Archivum Ottomanicum and Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes (WZKM).
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