Caesar Australis
Banned
Probable it's Turkishness would decline over the 20th century, but their will be a few factors working against that trend. For one a lot of the immigration will be from rural Anatolia as well. For another the Christian and Jewish populations of the city were wealthier on average(and probably would retain such a position through inertia, unless an aggressive redistribution effort was made by the government), and so would have a lower birthrate.If Istanbul was only 50% Turkish in OTL, than in this timeline it will be only 30% Turkish or 20% Turkish, or even less...
Perhaps the most cosmopolitan city of it's age (in this timeline) ?
Ottomans never much cared about that. Observe that they never made much of a bid to subdue the Moroccans even in the Ottoman golden era, despite the fact the Moroccans refused to acknowledge the status of the Ottomans as caliph. If golden era Ottomans weren't bothered by the only Sunni realm that refused to acknowledge the Ottoman claim to the caliphate, I can't see 19th/20th century Ottomans interested in capturing genuine control of some random Indonesian island or Sahelian sultanate.What about the goal to unify all Muslims under one State?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Islamism
Actually the middle of the peninsula used to be the only territory the Saudis held, whilst the Ottomans held the coastal parts until WW1. The "worth" of the interior was that it was a good hiding place for the Saudis due it being too difficult for the Ottomans to crush them there. Then they seized the coastal areas once the Ottomans fell apart.Interesting. I did not know that (on Saudi Arabia's oil).
Makes one really wonder why even the Saudis wanted to cover the whole of that area. What is worth holding in the middle of the peninsula besides a claim to being a space filling kingdom?
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