AHC: Ottoman Colonization of America

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to create an Ottoman Colony in the New World that lasts long enough for the colony to be Turkey-like (speaks Turkish, Islam is the religion, uses Arabic script etc.). Bonus points if its larger than an island in the Caribbean. The pod can be any time after 1492.
 
If Australia counts as part of the New World, that could be an Ottoman colony. Have an Ottoman trading ship to India/China get blown off course and land near Perth; Islamization of the natives follows, along with sending some Ottoman colnists.
*Australia can be a good source of farmland, kangaroo meat, etc.

Actually, the Ottomans might decide to bring some kangaroos back, to farm them back in Anatolia. If domesticated, they would be a useful source of milk and meat.
 
If Australia counts as part of the New World, that could be an Ottoman colony. Have an Ottoman trading ship to India/China get blown off course and land near Perth; Islamization of the natives follows, along with sending some Ottoman colnists.
*Australia can be a good source of farmland, kangaroo meat, etc.

Actually, the Ottomans might decide to bring some kangaroos back, to farm them back in Anatolia. If domesticated, they would be a useful source of milk and meat.

Not really new world, but I didn't think of that, its smart.
 
I doubt this is impossible, it just takes a long strench of the imagionation.

Bayezid II, that instead of resettling Jew into his empire after evacuating them from Spain after the proclamation of the Alhambra Decree, he dictates that a large fleet should take them and a had full of ottoman settlers to this mysterious new world spoke about by Portugese, Pedro Álvares Cabral.

This is where the Ottoman Empire, sets up a large settlemen in Yeni Türkiye (OTL Argintina) over the years more settlers start to travel to this land.
 
The Ottomans annex Morocco and Berber piracy streches into the Atlantic - in OTL "Algerians" went as far as Iceland - and with some extra support from the Porte the pirates start a base in a random Caribbean Island which eventually becomes full-fledged colony with a minority of Turkish-speaking nobles controlling a mass of African slaves.

Well, the most plausible path followed by the other Western powers. A colony in the Spanish mainland is borderline ASB. They could try to settle North America but it would be diplomatically stupid to confront their natural allies (i.e. England, France and the Netherlands).
 
Copying something I posted on another board:

One problem with actual Turks doing that is that to the Ottomans, the Balkans were colonies for their Turkish subjects to settle in with the hopes of stabilizing the region and cementing their control. If the Ottomans were feeling dastardly, they could in theory start exporting their Balkan minorities to the Americas, in a theoretical world where the Ottomans establish colonies in say, the Caribbean, and use these pseudo-slaves/serfs as the labor to grow cash crops. These theoretical colonies would be as ethnically Turkish as Haiti was ethnically French, but it'd be a colony.

The biggest problem with the Ottomans doing any sort of colonization is that they don't have access to the Atlantic Ocean, because that passage was controlled by Spain/the Hapsburgs, hated enemy numero uno. It'd require the Ottomans to take Morocco, which is certainly a plausible scenario, but even then the will to colonize would be dubious at best because of the long distances involved to even govern Morocco; the Ottomans had a nominal hold over the Bey of Algiers at the best of times.

I've often wondered about the best way to see Ottoman colonies, and IMO that'd be to have a Francis Drake analogue arising in the Barbary Corsairs with Ottoman backing and wrecking havoc in the Caribbean. Say, a few years before or after Lepanto, or even a successful Lepanto, the Ottomans take a very skilled pirate from North Africa, give him several ships as well as a substantial backing of funds, and send him on a mission to loot the treasure fleets of the Spanish. This man, much like Drake, has a great success looting the Spanish treasure fleets and the relatively easy wealth has the Ottomans throwing more funds and more ships at this man, who sets up shop in the Caribbean and coups the piracy movement in the Caribbean through conversions and sheer power/wealth to establish several colonies/outposts in the Caribbean.

The massive wealth flowing into the Sultan's coffers at the direct expense of the Spanish then results in far more interest in the Atlantic by the Sultan which sees tentative feelers being sent towards the English in an alliance against the Spanish, with the traditional Ottoman ally in France planning an end to the Hapsburg, both Spanish and Austrian.

Another option or supplementary event could be that if the Ottomans manage to reach Morocco and start looting the Spanish Caribbean before the Morisco Revolt of 1568-1571(meaning before Lepanto), then a window opens for the Ottomans to use this as a causus belli to invade the Spanish while having a (theoretically) welcoming and loyal populace to set up shop in Granada if they can successfully land in Spain and crush Phillip II; any later and the expulsion of the Moriscos gives the Ottomans little chance of crippling Spanish colonization efforts while at the same time giving them a very good port in Cadiz from which to colonize the New World from.

If the Spanish can be sent reeling, then theoretically many of their colonies become fair game if the Ottomans can muster the political will and army to do so without overextending themselves in Spain and any lands conquered from the Austrian Hapsburgs.

The problems with this scenario is that it'd either require for Suleiman the Magnificent to have more successes against Spain in the Mediterranean earlier on his reign, or to have a far more competent successor than his son Selim II.

So assuming all of the above could happen in a theoretical timeline, primarily because if #2 happens then #1 is plausible through causation, you've got the Ottomans in a position that could potentially eat chunks off of the Spanish's New World empire by draining their coffers dry and destroying the ability of the Spanish to successfully reinforce their colonies.

If an Ottoman sultan gets the itch from the money being raked in through piracy, they could plausibly throw a lot more political backing into wresting away Spanish colonies. Part 1 would be building up the Ottoman state apparatus in either Morocco or Granada due to the gold flowing in, while Part 2 would be the deployment/direct political effort to send pirates nominally in service to the Sultan into the Caribbean so as to increase the amount of gold flowing in, setting up profitable bases for the Ottomans that directly weaken the Spanish. Considering this would be circa ~1580 or so, most of the Spanish colonies in South America are relatively small and those that were bigger IOTL would be much smaller due to the rampant piracy and most importantly for the establishment of proper Ottoman colonies, slaving of Spanish colonials.

A very ambitious Sultan, if done early enough, could send out a small army with the goal of conquering Spanish colonies, and would probably meet with success if they enslave the colonists that resist and use them to grow the cash crops they themselves used their slaves for. I could see the Ottomans setting up a plantation economy using both African and Spanish slaves, which results in more interest and by extension more colonists primarily from North Africa, albeit far more commercial and decentralized manner than what the Spanish had organized. Or alternatively inciting slave revolts which sees a combined African and Arab-Turk mercenary class slaving away the Spanish populace in the Americas.

Combining a much stronger Ottoman position with a Spanish inability to reinforce their Andean strongholds due to deeper and deeper raids by both Ottoman militias and corsairs could lead to a native revolt in the Andes that the Spanish would be very very hardpressed to put down.

If the Spanish are kept down through a combination of Ottoman, French, and English ambitions and most notably, the Dutch Revolt which would be far more important ITTL to the Spanish due to being proportionally far more revenue than OTL, could see the Ottomans supplanting South America and the Caribbean within several decades(at the cost of many Spanish lives) while continuing to use the more populated Mexico and Central America as slaving zones for the corsairs while still having the potential to eat more chunks off the Spanish in the future.
 
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