How many people here have expressed that Constantinople "belongs to the greeks" or that "the turks stole the eastern half of greece" (in reference to western anatolian coast) or that the actual borders of Greece are "unfair", that they "deserved" more territory? It appears a lot in threads discussing the otoman collapse.
"We don't gloss over them", right, they are almost never mention. I must assume that the ottomans controlled the balkans for centuries but
Not too many, in my experience. Substantially less than those who claim the opposite. And atrocities committed against Muslims are far from overlooked, they're nearly always mentioned when the Ottoman Empire discussed, probably nearly as often as the Armenian genocide. Other atrocities against Christians are in fact more likely to be overlooked.
In fact, it's rare at all that something good is said about the post-Ottoman Christian states at all (though in the interest of fairness I should point out it's Greece and Serbia that are particularly negatively perceived), especially when compared with the Ottoman Empire There is rarely attempt to claim that they're not as bad as commonly thought or that it would be better if they had been more successful. See this very thread, for example.
I recognize that I may have came on a little too strong, but it annoys me when in this kind of complex cases people come up with this narratives trying to simplify them into one dimensional victim and villian stories where the ottoman empire is some barbaric butcher that opresses the poor christian nations of the balkans but ignores completly the reality of the big ottoman muslim minorities that used to live in the balkans or glosses over those killings committed by the newly liberated balkan nations.
It shure would do a lot of difference if the Shoa had killed 3 million jews instead of 6. Clearly anybody who talks about the the death and persecution of ottoman muslims must be a shill. Even people who openly dislike Justin McCarthy agreed that the number of casualties is in the millions between the killings and ethnic cleansing. Read the cusualties section
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims_during_Ottoman_contraction , it mentions other historians.[/QUOTE]
It would of course not change the character of the Shoah if 3 million were murdered instead of 6. But that doesn't mean that false claims of 12 million Jews being murdered should be accepted, especially when done for political reasons.
As for your article, it's a good example of the danger of relying on Wikipedia (if the neutrality dispute was not already a good indication). Just having sources doesn't mean that they're reliable ones. To give just one example of a claim that I'm quite familiar with, the claim about there being 1.5 million Muslims in Bulgaria before the 1877-78 war is not supported by any source, contradicts the total population estimates of the country and is higher than even what the Ottoman government claimed at the time. Based on figures basically pulled out of thin air, the author then (again without any source to support them) claims a number of Muslims killed and expelled that can't be reconciled with the post-war population of both Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire. Incidentally, a better supported estimate (
Bulgaria by R.J. Crampton) of the number of Muslims which left Bulgaria is about 130 thousand, with some returning after the war.
Can we just agree that all nations involved sucked, everyone made mistakes (Deliberate or not) and you can't dwell on them. Why not come up with alternate history where all of that doesn't happen.
I don't see why we should accept such a encompassing claim such as a whole nation "sucking". As for everyone making mistakes, this fact doesn't mean that history should be simplified to the extent of both sides being equally bad as each other. As bad as the Balkan Christian countries were often against their Muslims, nothing they did comes even close to the Armenian genocide. And there is the fact that the Christian population of Turkey has basically vanished while there are large Muslim minorities in all of the Christian countries (the major exception was Greece and that because a population exchange demanded by Turkey).
But if you mean in the narrower sense of formal autonomy... Before the Crimean War, the Ottomans had some success in reducing Serbian and Romanian autonomy, but all that came undone when the Russians started to really get successful in the Balkans.
Before the Crimean war the Romanian principalities had become de-facto Russian satellites, so I don't understand how exactly it can be claimed that the Ottomans reduced their autonomy. In any case comparing them with Serbia is dubious, since they had never been an integral part of the Ottoman Empire.
And what exact success did they have in Serbia? During this period Serbia increasingly acted more independent of the Ottomans.
That the empire steadily lost areas that first became autonomous and then independent or conquered by external powers is not evidence of some natural gradient, it is evidence that the Ottoman empire was too weak to roll back the autonomy outside powers were forcing them to accept in their regions for the last 60-70 years of its existence. Had the empire grown stronger relative to its Christian neighbours, this may have changed.
It's a natural gradient, since as you yourself admit only force (when the granting of autonomy was supposed to prevent violence) could halt the process of increasing independence.
Which is funny, since at the height of the empire, 50% (possibly even more) of the population was Christian and the core territories of the empire (the Balkans) were majority Christian.
And this became an increasingly serious obstacle for the continued existence of the Ottoman Empire once it began declining, which would have to be solved if the Ottoman Empire was to survive. And I'm not sure that your solution of the problem simply going away is much of an improvement.
Not to mention, the breakup of the empire did significant damage by disrupting trade links and causing violent ethnic strife. Empires collapsing are always bad in the short to medium economic terms (and sometimes in the long term).
The collapse of Empire was caused by ethnic strife, so this seems a somewhat circular argument. As for the trade links, they were arguably outweighed by the inefficient, corrupt and hidebound Ottoman administration, worsened by the size of the Empire. It's not surprising that the three main Christian states in the Balkans were better developed by the Balkan wars than the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Empire was more Greek than it was Turkish, heck, before 1922 "Turkish identity" was Anatolian peasant culture. And (modern) Greek itself was a pretty new identity - most all Greek speakers in 1800 most likely called themselves "Romans" and while their empire was ruled by a Muslim emperor, it was still the Roman empire, being run in the Roman way.
The Ottoman Empire was more Muslim than anything else. As for the Greek identity, the assertion that they were just Romans seems to me to be just as much an irrelevant distraction from the real issue as the Israeli claims that the Palestinians are not a real nation. The Greeks were a separate nation from the Muslim nation who ruled the Empire, regardless of how they named themselves
Of course, post-1900 the new identities had won and the Ottomans couldn't simply get along on "Roman-ness", "Ottoman-ness" or "Muslim-ness" alone. The bigger identities needed to make room for the new Ethno-Nationalist identities within them. But without the Balkan wars and the Young Turks being taken over by the military wing, I think that "Ottoman-ness" could still fit Christian ethnic identities inside it, if the conditions are right.
At this point it's far too late to build an Ottoman identity. The other national identities are already built and an attempt to impose an Ottoman identity would always be seen as just another form of Turkish national supremacy.
What counts as a minority? The Ottoman Empire wasn't built on nations, it was built on a religious identity (a religious identity that had only lately become the majority rather than a plurality due to the loss of the empire's heartlands). So pretty much every national group was a minority.
This is bordering on sophistry. Even if Muslims were a minority (probably not the case after the 17th century at the latest), they controlled the government and the military, so them being a minority in the modern sense is irrelevant.
And considering that the collapse of the empire has been a major element contributing to the miseries of the Ottoman minority groups during and after the Ottoman collapse, I'd say it was pretty easy to imagine better alternatives for both the empire and its minority groups.
Blaming the atrocities against the minorities of the Ottoman Empire on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire when those atrocities were carried out in an attempt to prevent the collapse of the Empire is to put it mildly disingenuous. So one can easily imagine better alternatives for both the Muslims and Christians in the Ottoman Empire, but a plausible scenario where oppression is avoided and the Ottoman Empire survives intact is far more difficult to imagine. Well, unless we imagine that nationalism will simply vanish, but this is not what I would call plausible.
And why exactly is ethnic nationalism such an unstoppable force?
Have you considered where and when ethnic nationalism has succeeded? The Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century (but only when Russia was willing and able to use it as a wedge to break off parts of the empire), virtually everywhere in Europe after the great powers have beat each-other to smears on the pavement during WW1 and in in much of Asia and North Africa after the great powers of Europe plus Japan had beaten each-other to smears on the pavement for the second time, and the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia after 40-70 years of economic and political trouble being stored up, on top of the pasted-over wounds in both countries after WW1.
In every case, the Ethno-Nationalists only gain power when the empire they break away from is already broken - and usually the breaking is being done by another empire. Before WW1 changed the rules, the Balkans were seen as a strange anomaly that should not be replicated.
In all of these cases ethno-nationalism was such a major force that it required substantial security investment to keep it down. And the trends were not promising at all: all the modern developments of this period such as improving education, cultural developmemt and better communications favored development of distinct nations who strove for independence. The experience over the last century shows that eventually suppressing those demands involved either giving some autonomy to the ethno-nationalist groups, violently suppressing or swamping them with more loyal settlers. The first solution works to an extent, though often it increases even more the demand for independence. The second solution may work for a time, but it's rarely permanent, except if the suppression is very brutal or the minorities are simply expelled or exterminated. Those who could not go so far this, either because they were not willing or because it was not practical, faced a protracted struggle, which in the case of democratic countries eventually led to war weariness and they gave up. The third solution has been of course implicitly suggested here.
So in conclusion the Ottoman Empire could certainly suppress nationalism, but without giving minorities at least some autonomy - a solution which you don't seem to support - it's difficult to see how except through a combination of the two solutions nationalism could be permanently ended a force. And it's therefore not at all clear that this would be any better for those minorities than OTL.
On another point, Russia was more an opportunist than an inciter of independence movements in the Balkans. For an obvious example, the Russian government advised against the April uprising, which eventually led to the war of 1877-78. And even after crushing of the rebellion alienated Britain, it took the foolish intransigence of the Ottomans and the prodding of their own public opinion for the Russian Tsar to decide on starting the war. And in Serbia their role was even more indirect.
Even today, most of the surface of planet Earth are controlled by states that are not Ethno-Nationalist states (even though we view pretty much everywhere through an Ethno-Nationalist lens).
This might be technically true because of Africa, but this is hardly a ringing endorsement of non-Ethno-Nationalist states...
If the Ottomans have the power to stop the Christian powers meddling in its affairs, Ethno-Nationalism will wither and fade. If the Ottomans do not have the power to keep its Christian neighbours from intervening inside it, then nationalism will continue to be a problem.
If the Ottoman Empire is some unique exception from general worldwide trends, this might be possible.
All that said, here's my proposal for how the Ottomans could have done better after 1900:
Annnnnd. Yeah. That's a very broad-strokes alternate history of 80 years. The Ottomans have some luck to be sure, especially with Russia having a similarly bad 20th Century even though the PoD is in 1911, but I don't think any of this is implausible.
fasquardon
Mostly not. All or even most of them happening is pushing it far beyond the believable.
Have you even read any in depth histories of the Ottoman Empire?
Have
you? Some of your claims, like Christians being appointed to governors of provinces or Muslims peasant paying the Jizya, fly in the face of a nearly unversal historical consensus of the Ottoman period.
More importantly, your claims fail to address the main point of the poster you were replying to. The Christians atrocities against their Muslims minorities can't be excused, but distorting the context in which they happened is not at all helpful. There were successful Christians in the Ottoman Empire, but the great majority had to endure an existence of being second hand people, subject to legal restrictions and extra-legal restriction by the capricious and arbitrary rule of the Muslim dominated government; with little personal security (which was a concern even for the most well off and well connected Christians and greatly contributed to them taking leadership in the anti-Ottoman struggle) due to the laws - written and unwritten - favoring Muslims over Christians. And if the Ottoman Empire did not treat most Muslims well, it treated most Christians even worse.
The civil servants and provincial governors in the Balkans were usually Christians (overwhelmingly Greek Christians), the merchant class were largely Christian (again, mostly Greek) and paid less tax (sometimes no tax) than the Muslim merchant class.
Very unlikely. Even if one paper taxes were equal, this was often changed by arbitrary imposed additional taxes.
Tax farming and money lending was generally engaged in by people of all faiths (I don't know if one had an advantage here, but it was always a diverse range of people and families engaged in this sector).
This seems to contradict your assertion above. Land ownership was dominated by absentee Muslim land-lords.
The Greek Orthodox clergy wielded enormous power, and, as in Western Europe, the Church was basically an entire parallel state, under the Patriarch in Constantinople, Bishops often had palaces, engaged in money lending, tax farming and other abuses of clerical power.
Only in regard to Orthodox Christians and only as long as the Ottomans tolerated them. I can't imagine the head of the Church being hanged in the front of his own sear in any Western European country on a whim by the ruler.
If anyone turned to banditry or rebelled, they were equally likely to end up impaled and the Ottoman army wasn't exactly going to strain to differentiate between Muslims or Christians (or Jews) when committing atrocities (of course, a really successful bandit could end up being bought out, rather than impaled).
I'm not aware of any atrocity against Muslims that comes even close to the many committed against Christians. The Ottomans did not seem to consider it necessary to impose collective punishment on rebellious Muslims, as they did on rebellious Christians.
So we see that actual advantage was spread quite evenly, at least across religious lines. Christians had the advantage in some areas, Muslims in others, it sucked to be a peasant regardless of religion and by far the most powerful ethnic group were the Greeks, or as they'd call themselves at the time, Romans.
Christians' advantage was in economic strength. Which due to Muslim military strength and the laws favoring them (and even after) meant that this could be negated at any time. It's not a coincidence that so many of the Ottoman Christian merchants who were rich due to their trade in the Ottoman Empire preferred to live outside the Ottoman Empire.
Of course these weren't the Greeks of Morea where peasants in the mountains would mount a successful nationalist rebellion. No, we're talking about the Greeks of the cities, especially Constantinople, who despised the grubby peasants of Morea just as much as any other elite group.
The peasant of Morea would get nowhere if they weren't supported by the resources of the Greek merchants and shipowners. Chios was one of the richest Greek populated islands in the Ottoman empire. It was the same with the April uprising of 1876: the richest settlements, those with the most to lose, were the one who lead the rebellion.
Uh huh. Right. People may have said that at the time, and may have believed it. But it's hogwash. Muslims and Christians were as equal as things got in pre-modern states.
In other words, they were not, but the Muslim superiority was relatively less severe by 16th century standards. It's hardly an explanation for why the minorities should have been satisfied with such treatment.
But what does that matter when you are a Romanian peasant being abused by a Greek tax farmer and your local priest is saying that your Muslim neighbour is the one oppressing you? Going and burning your neighbour's farm is alot easier than finding and hurting the Christian Greek who's actually impoverishing you with illegal taxes. And hey, you can trust your priest right? Why would a man of God lie? (Besides his own self interest, genuinely held nationalist sentiments or any of a host of other motivations.)
This is a poor example since Romania was never populated by Muslims. As for the priest, he would be more likely to preach acceptance of Ottoman rule (and certainly not incite violence against Muslims), especially if his worshipers were not Greek.
But I can't see Ireland becoming independent without WW1 or something that inflicted similar trauma.
Without WWI, Ireland would have been granted Home rule. Which (based on the experience of devolved government in the UK) would eventually increase the desire for independence. And Ireland has a much worse historical memory with the rest of the UK than Scotland did.
Modern genetic studies show us that Balkan people are mostly Balkan, and new additions to the gene pool from say invading Slavs or invading Turks was pretty small.
These studies are still rather ambigious, but there are substantial genetic differences between the Slavic speaking peoples and the pre-Slavic Greeks and Albanians. Obviously the Balkan genetic component is significant, but then so is the Slavic one.
As for the Balkan Muslims, most of them are converts, so obviously they weren't settlers. But the Turks living in the Balkans are likely predominantly descended of settlers from Anatolia. Not that this excuses expelling them of course.
It's not like the Holocaust in that this wasn't state-sponsored violence, and it certainly wasn't one-sided violence, but it's definitely not the expulsion of an alien oppressor that some would like to paint it as.
More liking taking revenge on the former oppressor on the nearest convenient target.
Rather what was happening was a civil war, with corrupt Janissaries, corrupt local power brokers, bandits, warlords, nationalists, corrupt Christian clergy, well-meaning Christian clergy, different linguistic groups, different religious groups, cynical external powers, romantic adventurers and a heavy handed central state all bouncing off each-other during a period of enormous change in a region that for most of the previous 2,000 years had either been part of the Roman Empire or the Ottoman Empire (meaning national groups and religious groups were extremely mixed, like the way they are in a modern empire like the USA - I mean, in the US I doubt people even really keep track of what their ethnic group is, that's something that isn't important to most people when they live in a stable empire - though I am sure like Ottoman subjects people in modern America know what religion they are).
Treating complex issues as simple is rarely a good idea, but going too far in the opposite direction has its own dangers. The factors you describe were important, but they don't change the main point that the Ottoman Christians had good reasons to resent Ottoman rule and this was ultimately the root cause of both their independence and the atrocities against the Muslims population of the Balkans. And again, nothing excuses the later, but pretending that Christian-Muslim relations only started with Christian attacks on Muslims is simply not useful and not helpful for understanding the history of the Ottoman Empire.