Islamic Greek state?

It really matters when you do it!!
If you do it in 1500s it would be considered relatively normal.
But if you do it in 1800s it would cause the world to act, and a wide public outrage

Same thing happened in 1500s 1600s etc. 11 Patriarchs and numerous senior Bishops were executed between 1453 and 1821 and all these massacres lead to rebellions and retaliations... So executing high ranking clergy isnt quite a good plan as Church's continuity wont be disrupted.. The way i see it there is only one way for this plan to succeed... If Ottomans managed to kill every single Bishop where there are orthodoxs before they can consecrate a successor... But that has 0 chances of success too since Ottoman Empire cannot touch Russian Bishops who can consecrate new Bishops and send them over... Plus a wide Church persecution would have caused Russia's wrath against them so impossible either...
 
You could get the Ottomans to be more like Spain when the Granada fall. Have them send ultimatum to the greeks, convert, flee or die. Also if you start killing orthodox clergy, then you have to kill them all, apsolutely all, from the patriarch to the lowliest village priest. Also burn down churches, and burn bibles as well. The priests would be dead, and everyone would be too scared to even think about becoming one. Then start killing the remaining christians and voila, you get muslim greeks with lot of resentment thus giving them a reason to fight for independence. Of course if you want to keep them muslim the strugle for independence would have to come at least 200-300 years after this

That wouldn't work. You need the elites to convert to continue the culture. If you just have a bunch of illiterate Greek peasants ruled over by an Arab overclass, then Arabic would quickly be viewed the prestige language and become the medium of mass communication.
 
Same thing happened in 1500s 1600s etc. 11 Patriarchs and numerous senior Bishops were executed between 1453 and 1821 and all these massacres lead to rebellions and retaliations... So executing high ranking clergy isnt quite a good plan as Church's continuity wont be disrupted.. The way i see it there is only one way for this plan to succeed... If Ottomans managed to kill every single Bishop where there are orthodoxs before they can consecrate a successor... But that has 0 chances of success too since Ottoman Empire cannot touch Russian Bishops who can consecrate new Bishops and send them over... Plus a wide Church persecution would have caused Russia's wrath against them so impossible either...


Seing Ottomans impale every bishop who tries to enter on a stake, well if you were a bishop would you sign up to go to greece, if you knew what awaits you?
 
That wouldn't work. You need the elites to convert to continue the culture. If you just have a bunch of illiterate Greek peasants ruled over by an Arab overclass, then Arabic would quickly be viewed the prestige language and become the medium of mass communication.


Yeah but I am going to go from a certain standpoint that at least a few greek nobles will convert.... I dont quite expect that everyone would chose death over conversion, there are diferent kinds of people everywhere, some would rather die than change religion, others dont believe at all so nominaly changing it isnt that much of a deal
 
Seing Ottomans impale every bishop who tries to enter on a stake, well if you were a bishop would you sign up to go to greece, if you knew what awaits you?

Τhere were several people who wanted to become martyrs... As traditionally martyrdom is the ultimate sacrifice for God... I know several cases (especially monks from Mt. Athos) who deliberately provoked Ottomans in order to achieve martyrdom...

Plus i dont think that Ottomans would want to provoke Russia to attack them if they impale every Bishop in Greece...
 
Τhere were several people who wanted to become martyrs... As traditionally martyrdom is the ultimate sacrifice for God... I know several cases (especially monks from Mt. Athos) who deliberately provoked Ottomans in order to achieve martyrdom...

Plus i dont think that Ottomans would want to provoke Russia to attack them if they impale every Bishop in Greece...

Depends on when this is. The first half of the Ottoman Empire's history, Russia is irrelevant.
 
Depends on when this is. The first half of the Ottoman Empire's history, Russia is irrelevant.

Perhaps... But still Russian Bishops would concecrate new Bishops and Church continuity wouldnt be disrupted... This didnt worked even in Decius's and Diocletian's persecutions why work now? Especially when christianity has even more deeper roots than Diocletian's times...
 
Perhaps... But still Russian Bishops would concecrate new Bishops and Church continuity wouldnt be disrupted...

Actually...good point. As long as the Turks cannot get at Russia the Greeks will never run out of priests. Which they cannot. And martyrdom-skeeing bishops isn't going to be that uncommon. Did not think of that.

Mind, Russia itself is a precarious kind of place in the 14th/15th c. so you need some crazy Perfect Muslim Storm to happen and it might still be doable to reduce both to irrelevance. Maybe something to do with Tamerlane.

Alright, Don, let's step back and brainstorm why there WERE mass conversions to Islam from Christianity/Judaism/Zoroastrianism in the early middle ages (Syrians/Syrian Arabs, Persians, ?Egyptians, Caucasian Albania/Daghestan, Andalus/Spain, Berbers, Oghuz Turks), and why it became as hard as you say it did ca. 1500.

Maybe that's where the answer is.

Examples of late conversions: Bosnia, Albania, Uighurs, parts of Africa, South East Asia. Why did those happen but Greece remained as it was?
 
What about a Siege of Constantinople that succeeds in 717? Let's say that Leo the Isaurian dies in a mishap or accident, and a disorganized Constantinople in a state of chaos falls to the Arabs.

Or even earlier, in 674. Let's butterfly away Greek Fire, and with the right PoDs, Constantinople might fall, ending the ERE right there and then.

And once the Caliphate disintegrates, a successor Greek Sultanate, perhaps ruled by Islamized Bulgars/Slavic Soldier-slaves (in a situation analogous to the Turks in Persia) gradually form out of that, sometime in the 10th or 11th century.

An equivalent to the Seljuks in Persia and Mesopotamia, a Berber Sultanate in Iberia and North Africa, while Egypt and the Levant being ruled by an equivalent to the Fatimids. While Anatolia and the Balkans is ruled by Islamized Slavs and Bulgars. And after a few centuries, a native Greek Dynasty sets up a new Sultanate in that region, in a situation analogous to the Safavids in Persia.
 
Constantinople had HUGE Walls by 717 and Arabs lacked proper sieging equipment so it would take a miracle that City would fall then...
 
May I contribute to the conversation with a couple of parameters:

1. Decapitating the Patriarchate (or don't re-establishing it in 1453) and the high-rank orthodox clergy, would contribute eventually to more coversion of Greeks into Islam, but in the same time, it would push the rest of the Greeks to the arms of Catholic Church (probably in the form of Hunite Church) and eventually turn them into a fifth column of a Pope and Castillian crusade. The problem is that this is a situation we cannot say how it would develop.

2. There's trully a very large number of muslim Turks with Greek origins (can't be described as "ethnic Greeks", though), summing up to 20 million or 20% of Turkey's population today (can't remember which, but it's the outcome of a German research in mid' 1990's -IMHO exagerating).
It is thus possible the bulk of them to form a separate state, which is islamic and have some greek elements in order to call it "Greek". IMHO, one good point to create this is the 19th c., by having a different development of Greek nationalism, as follows:

Even thoug the first ideas of the Greek nationalism were absolutely influenced by the western models of nation-building as it was formed during the Enlightenment Era, and all included the creation of a separate Greek state, there were some scholars in the environment of Fanari (the district of the Patriarchate of Constantinople) who claimed that the Greeks, along with the rest of the Christians, could improve their status within the Empire more than by breaking from it. They carried on with this policy until 1923!
After the emerge of the Greek Kingdom, the distance between those two ideologies deepened, even more during the Tanzimat. Their possition, though was worsened because of the schism of the Greek Church, which lessened the power of the Patriarchate, and led to the emerge of the Bulgarian Exarchate, and thus to the "Balkanization" of the Balkans.

If the infiltration of the Greek-state based scholars into the Empire during the Tanzimat period could be limited, I could see a lot of the Greek-origin and speaking muslims of the Empire to gain some concience of differentiation from the muslim Turks of far Anatolia, building up a quite different education system (this was easy until 1923). Again, it is not easy to forthsee the developments, but the possiblility of a Western Turkish state (containing Eastern Macedonia, Thrace, Propontis, Bithynia and Ionia at least) with elements of Greek, or rather more "european" culture is apparent, starting from something equivalent to the New Turks revolution and completed after the inevitable WW I, regardless of the Ottoman stance during it.
 
If Mehmed II didnt reestablish the Patriarchate in 1453 he would be unable to control the Greek Orthodox population of his realm so his empire would be very unstable... I dont think that he would want to risk that...
 
If Mehmed II didnt reestablish the Patriarchate in 1453 he would be unable to control the Greek Orthodox population of his realm so his empire would be very unstable... I dont think that he would want to risk that...

He didnt have anything to risk, if they dont like that they would die cause they cannot resist. Seems kinda odd that cruelty actualy works, I dont recall a rebelion against medieval mongol invasions, FEAR IS A MAGICAL WEAPON
 
He didnt have anything to risk, if they dont like that they would die cause they cannot resist. Seems kinda odd that cruelty actualy works, I dont recall a rebelion against medieval mongol invasions, FEAR IS A MAGICAL WEAPON

As Andreas said above besides rebellion there was the chance that Greek Orthodoxs migh slip into Catholic Church's lap (doubt it but its a possibility) and that would be a big problem for the Sultans since they would have to constantly repel attacks from various Catholic princes... With a Catholic Greece even a Crusade is possible at some point...
 
As Andreas said above besides rebellion there was the chance that Greek Orthodoxs migh slip into Catholic Church's lap (doubt it but its a possibility) and that would be a big problem for the Sultans since they would have to constantly repel attacks from various Catholic princes... With a Catholic Greece even a Crusade is possible at some point...


That might be true, but I am actually reading a book from 1700s, about ottoman empire, even during the siege of constantinople, greeks used to say that they would rather be at the feet of sultan than under the bishops hat (catholic)
 
He didnt have anything to risk, if they dont like that they would die cause they cannot resist. Seems kinda odd that cruelty actualy works, I dont recall a rebelion against medieval mongol invasions, FEAR IS A MAGICAL WEAPON

Then you need to read more, because they did happen.

They may have been put down brutally, but they did happen.
 
Why not just give Greek language and culture an even higher standing within the post 1453 Ottoman empire? Hell half the Ottoman Sultans had Greek or Slavic mothers anyways, and they were pretty Byzantophillic early on.
 
Then you need to read more, because they did happen.

They may have been put down brutally, but they did happen.

I guess there was a large ethnic Greek Muslim population IOTL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Muslims). It seems they are now pretty much assimilated as Turks aftere the population exchanges in WWI. However, i do recall an NPR bit about ethnic Greek Muslims in thr Pontus who are fighting for separate status in Turkey and were being met with a lot of resistance.
 
I guess there was a large ethnic Greek Muslim population IOTL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Muslims). It seems they are now pretty much assimilated as Turks aftere the population exchanges in WWI. However, i do recall an NPR bit about ethnic Greek Muslims in thr Pontus who are fighting for separate status in Turkey and were being met with a lot of resistance.

Would be interesting to see how they would develop in a different situation than OTL.
 
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