AHC- Arab conquest of Anatolia-

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
OK, so there's a strong (but not universally held) view on the board that Constantinople/Byzantium was just one high-walled capital city too far for the Arabs to seize in the pre-Ummayad, Ummayad or Abbasid era.

I'll just accept that as a given for now.

But what what about the Arabs succeeding at conquering and holding the Anatolian peninsula. Maximally, have the Arabs conquer and hold the entire peninsula, or minimally, they hold at least all the interior that OTL's Seljuk Sultanate of Rum consistently held.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Rum

Over the long run, would the peninsula have likely become ethnolinguistically Arab? Ethnolinguistically Persian? Could a Graeco-Arabic fusion have developed? Or would the area have still been likely to become ethnically and linguistically Turkic anyway, as slave soldiers are imported and used to beef up frontier defenses in Anatolia. Yet another prospect might be an Anatolia is ethnically more Turkic, Persian and Greek than Arabic, but the dominant language is still Arabic because it becomes locally dominant early on?
 

Zlorfik

Banned
It would follow a course quite similar to that of Al-Andalus, especially if the titanic Arab army from the Second Siege of Constantinople chose to settle in, say, the Marmara region.

The rest of Byzantine Greece is in easy reach of Constantinople (Konstantinniye?) and falls soon after, although rebels and mountain bandits will probably plague the Arab occupiers for a very long time.

Western Europe was certainly too feeble at this point to even think about liberating Greece/Anatolia... they couldn't even liberate nearby Spain, for comparison.

A remnant "Byzantine" state (really, just a loose assortment of duchies) clings on to the Imperial title in Italy, and perhaps the Exarch succeeds in centralizing "his" territories, or more likely falls to the Lombards as in OTL. Venice will break off as usual.

However, Sicily and Calabria likely survive for the time being as a Greek-speaking Byzantine remnant. Perhaps if they can establish a strong naval presence and control over Corsica & Sardinia, they can survive the Arabs in Tunis...
 
It would likely remain predominately Greek-speaking as Iran remained Persian-speaking but with some Arab-speaking enclaves where there is enough concentrated Arab settlement, like Khuzestan.
 

Zlorfik

Banned
I wouldn't be too sure about that. The Arabs managed to obliterate the native languages of many places, even as far off as Andalusia.

IIRC the reason why the Persian language survived, was that Iran broke away early on (early 9th century) under solidly muslim native dynasties, who decided to preserve the language of their heritage.

I'm having a hard time imagining a Muslim Greek dynasty breaking away with Greece and Anatolia, though. The population would probably still have been majority Christian (like in Egypt) by the time the Abbassids weakened, and a Christian Basileus would've found a lot more popular acceptance than an Islamic one.

Of course, I suppose a similar argument could be made for Persia...
 
Top