A Hellenised Ottoman Empire

In their beginning, the Ottomans had quite close, though not always peaceful, relations with Byzantium. Many fortified localities and their rulers simply switched sides from when Byzantine power waned, and Orhan I was actually the son-in-law of the Byzantine emperor. As the Ottomans were essentially a militant ghazi state, Christianization is out of the question. However until Selim I's conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate, the (slim) majority of the Ottomans' subjects was probably Christian. Until some time after 1453, their center of power was even in the Balkans, rather than Anatolia, and Mehmed II looked more to the west than the east. If other Turkic states like the Karamanids or the Safavids further east are more successful in challenging Ottoman domination of eastern Anatolia, a Balkan-centered Ottoman state will be very different from the Arab- and Pesian-influenced empire of the 16th century and on. However, in this timeframe it is actually more likely that it will become Slavicized rather than Hellenized: IIRC, the predominant language in the palace was Serbo-Croatian...
 

Skokie

Banned
Um. You might want to get around to keeping Rome/Byzantium hellenized first.

Otherwise, you might consider changing this thread to A Dominantly Greek-Speaking Ottoman Empire.
 
Different tack.

If it became Ottoman habit (tradition might be a little strong) early on to marry only or mostly Greek women, you could get there fairly easily.

One Sultan (thinking pre-Caliphate Ottomans) has an all-Greek harem[1]. Of course, his definition includes some Muslim Hellenophones, and some Orthodox Slavs. Nonetheless, his eventual heir is brought up surrounded by the Greek language, and to a small extent culture. He finds the unfamiliar distasteful, and largely repeats his father's tastes in company[3]. One of his sons rules, and though he's indifferent on the subject, the harem includes a number of Greek women, not least because peninsular Greek cooking is by now a staple at court.

By the fourth emperor in the sequence it is customary for at least part of the harem to be populated by Hellenophones from the Aegean, Crete, Cyprus, or Greece proper. All emperors are fluent in Greek by late childhood, and those with Greek mothers from birth. Greek is alternately the first or second tongue at court for non-religious purposes, and bits flood into all the languages spoken by the governing elites. The well-to-do in Istanbul try to ensure that their children are taught Greek, and a large minority marry Greek women to make certain of the matter.

Fast-forward a century and a half and Greece is substantially more Muslim than OTL, the cumulative result of generations of families converting to make their daughters more eligible. With Greek a prestige and sometimes-governmental language, it remains in places where it slowly faded in OTL. A shift is starting to take place wherein the Greeks view the Ottoman Empire as theirs, and where this school of thought spreads, so to do conversions to Islam.

Of course by this point you've utterly subverted the entirety of Ottoman history, and the polity could be running Italy, or Persia, or have largely collapsed militarily. But I think it could work.

And I'm willing to be crucified by the experts, naturally :rolleyes:.

[1] Big assumption number one. But, hey, [2].

[2] Much weirder personal habits abound in the historical record - why not?

[3] Big assumption number two. But, hey, [2].
 
What about the Turks migrating into Anatolia early, the Byzantines accept them, Eastern Rome begins to crumble, the Turkish states in Anatolia are free having developed a Greco-Turk pseudo language, and take over ala Ottomans, resulting in a Greco-Turk offspring language that assimilates Turkish and Greek? Oh, and the religion can go either way.
 
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