The Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire were at war for much of the second half of the seventeenth century. There is significant research on the diplomatic and military history of these years. However, little is known about the impact these wars had on the people who fought them. This paper shall offer a bottom-up view at the Venetian-Ottoman encounters by investigating the military career and crisis of a Venetian officer, Colonel Francesco Muazzo. It describes the life of a soldier fighting the Ottomans across the Eastern Mediterranean and shows that Muazzo’s experiences of violence and mobility challenged his ideals and loyalties. These experiences eventually led him to write a history of the first Morean War, which contains some autobiographical elements and can be read as an ego-document. Francesco Muazzo’s active military service in the Venetian army put him on the path to sheer endless mobility from one theater of war to the next: Venice and Italy, Crete, Dalmatia, the Peloponnese, Athens and the sea and land passages connecting those places. This Transottoman mobility heavily imprinted on Muazzo’s biography and shaped the path of his life. The wars he fought brought him into contact with various people, both friend and foe, of different languages, religions, ethnicities and social backgrounds. Being exposed to many different ethnic idiosyncrasies, religions, traditions and value-systems helped Muazzo sharpen his own value-system and clarify his soldierly principles. He differentiated according to his values, not according to some version of “belonging”. Whenever his “own” prove to be incompetent, lie, cheat, or violate humanity, they are exposed and critizised scathingly - be they Muazzo’s fellow fighters in the army, Venetian noblemen, or his direct superior in the chain of command. The repeated violations of his principles and values led him into a process of estrangement: While Muazzo never lost his loyalty to Venice, his disappointment with the increasingly unprofessional conduct of war led him to a complete loss of confidence in the Venetian oligarchic ruling class and political system. Thus, an analysis of his work sheds light on many aspects of military mobilities in the Transottoman space in the second half of the seventeenth century.