DBWI: Turkic Anatolia

With a POD after 1000 AD, find a way for Anatolia to become ethno-linguistically and culturally Turkic. Bonus points if you could get said Turkic Anatolia to control an empire which controls the Balkans, Anatolia, the Middle East, and North Africa after destroy the Rhomanian Empire as well.
 
With a POD after 1000 AD, find a way for Anatolia to become ethno-linguistically and culturally Turkic. Bonus points if you could get said Turkic Anatolia to control an empire which controls the Balkans, Anatolia, the Middle East, and North Africa after destroy the Rhomanian Empire as well.
ASB as this requires turks to move from eastern steppes all the way to anatolia. They were nomads, but still..
 
I doubt that being possible. Roman Empire wouldn't allow that. And there was several different Turkic tribes who fought against each others. It helped Romans supress and integrate them.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
Well, if they control the former regions of Rhomania, they would end up being partitioned under Sykes-Picot instead of Rhomania. The global powers are not going to let them get away with their huge oil reserves and their strategic position. Britain would grab Arabia, Egypt and Iraq like OTL, while Italy and France would probably still get Libya, Algeria and Syria.
 
Well, if they control the former regions of Rhomania, they would end up being partitioned under Sykes-Picot instead of Rhomania. The global powers are not going to let them get away with their huge oil reserves and their strategic position. Britain would grab Arabia, Egypt and Iraq like OTL, while Italy and France would probably still get Libya, Algeria and Syria.
OOC: Centuries of butterflies, you know. And I was thinking Rhomania's just Greece+most of Turkey+Albania+Macedonia+parts of Bulgaria.
 
I doubt that being possible. Roman Empire wouldn't allow that. And there was several different Turkic tribes who fought against each others. It helped Romans supress and integrate them.
not just Rome, other turkic tribes conquered china.. but ended up being assemilated by china.
 
Well, if they control the former regions of Rhomania, they would end up being partitioned under Sykes-Picot instead of Rhomania. The global powers are not going to let them get away with their huge oil reserves and their strategic position. Britain would grab Arabia, Egypt and Iraq like OTL, while Italy and France would probably still get Libya, Algeria and Syria.
OOC: Rhomania would be a Christian power and was largely based upon manufacturing in it's economy. It would be both respected as a civilized European polity and most likely be an industrialized great power. This is highly unrealistic. Plus they don't even own most of that and this late would likely never conquer those regions.

IC: What are you talking about with Rhomania being divided by the powers of Western Europe? The realms in those regions were colonized, but they hadn't been part of Rhomania since the Arab conquests. Outside of north-west Syria around Antioch I guess but that's still part of Rhomania.

Also I would think that a polity based upon Rhomania would likely adapt it's manufacturing culture, which would make it far less likely for them to fall behind Western Europe. Though they likely wouldn't have the respect of being a fellow Christian power that Western Europe gave Rhomania.

OOC: Centuries of butterflies, you know. And I was thinking Rhomania's just Greece+most of Turkey+Albania+Macedonia+parts of Bulgaria.
OOC: By this point of the POD (1000 AD), Bulgaria was essentially conquered by Basil the Bulgar slayer and I don't see them going independent when the Roman Empire still has all of Anatolia, so I'd expect that Bulgaria would be Hellenized/Romanized and be considered part of Rhomania. So I'd think they'd control all of Bulgaria personally.
 
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It was far from unheard of for Turkic groups to come galloping in off the Steppes and overrun large swathes of a region, for a time.

ASB as this requires turks to move from eastern steppes all the way to anatolia. They were nomads, but still..
Happened more than a few times. In fact, they wouldn't have to go far: The Oghuz Turks of Transoxiana and the Aral steppe would be a good bet to pull this off. Quite a few of them operated as mercenaries already and returned home with new religions and connections. OTL, the Oghuz ended up splitting off due to a tax revolt, with the Bayat, Kinik and Kayi clans migrating north of the Caspian and preying on the weak principalities left over from the fragmentation of Rus. Between them and the Pechenegs, the Rus remnants were so battered that they just rolled over by the time the Cumans arrived and settled down, even taking Taurica off the hands of the Greeks.

The Oghuz were apparently quite powerful, especially the Kinik, and even today the Uzes - the descendants of the Oghuz - form a distinct ethnic minority within the Qirim Republic; while most of the cities along the northern Black Sea (the Karadeniz Rim) and on up to Qiyib[1] are ethnically Cuman or Cumanized Slavs, the Uzes tend to live up in the Havasoq Mountains[2] near the border with Hungary, and they tend to be the only Catholics in a mostly Orthodox country, save for the Muslims who mostly came from the Kinik group.[3] That's mainly because the Cumans pushed them there when they arrived, just like the Cumans got compressed into the Black Sea Steppe when the Khitans arrived. They might've been pushed further had the Khitans not swung south around the Caspian to attack Georgia and Persia.

Maybe if some group of Uzes went south after the tax revolt, they could have achieved success against the Persians. At the time, the Persian Resurgence was just on the upswing, with the Buyids controlling the Abbasid Caliph. An arriving Oghuz horde might have been able to stop the Persian Resurgence in its tracks and continue on to attack Anatolia. The region's interior was always sparsely populated, and the arriving Oghuz could win a few lucky victories and settle in.

That timeline would be interesting. I wonder how Islam would look without its co-option and reform by the Persians and the reduction of ethnic Arabs to tributary status. I bet Shiism would be a lot less prevalent.


[1] Kyiv.
[2] The Carpathians.
[3] The Seljuks.
 
Not sure why they go all the way to Anatolia when India is closer. Are we assuming that they not migrate to the subcontinent ITTL?
 

Deleted member 97083

Well, if they control the former regions of Rhomania, they would end up being partitioned under Sykes-Picot instead of Rhomania. The global powers are not going to let them get away with their huge oil reserves and their strategic position. Britain would grab Arabia, Egypt and Iraq like OTL, while Italy and France would probably still get Libya, Algeria and Syria.
That's ASB. There's no way the Sykes-Picot partition would happen if the Byzantine Empire didn't exist.

The oil reserves of the former Byzantine Empire actually weren't widely known until the 1930s, some oil wells not even discovered until the 1950s. The motivations for the Sykes-Picot partition were mostly the age of "New Imperium" and the great powers wanting to extend their sphere of influence, as well as a sense that the "Holy Places" of Catholicism should be under the control of the West instead of the "heretic Greek East".

The native Arabs of Syria were Marionite Catholics, with some of the Catholic clergy in Lebanon being aligned with French interests against the Eastern Orthodox Roman Empire. This gave the French the opportunity to send Laurence d'Arabie to open a second front against the Byzantines. But none of this would ever happen if the Byzantine Empire was Turkic. The Central Powers, the Catholic Entente, and Laurence d'Arabie would all be butterflied away.
 
With a POD after 1000 AD, find a way for Anatolia to become ethno-linguistically and culturally Turkic. Bonus points if you could get said Turkic Anatolia to control an empire which controls the Balkans, Anatolia, the Middle East, and North Africa after destroy the Rhomanian Empire as well.
So a weird way of making a Rhomistan wank? I mean the Cumans who settled near Hungary became Catholic and the more southern Turkic tribes became both Sunni and Persianate. So I think it's safe to say that Turks settling in Anatollia will quickly adopt Greek practices and essentially just be an injection of a new warrior society into Rhomistan, something it badly needed at that time IMO.
 
So a weird way of making a Rhomistan wank? I mean the Cumans who settled near Hungary became Catholic and the more southern Turkic tribes became both Sunni and Persianate. So I think it's safe to say that Turks settling in Anatollia will quickly adopt Greek practices and essentially just be an injection of a new warrior society into Rhomistan, something it badly needed at that time IMO.
Technically the Uzes became Catholic. The Cumans became Orthodox, being squashed between Rhomaion and what would eventually become Novgorod-Rostov-Suzdal and later the Ladogan League.
 

Deleted member 97083

Technically the Uzes became Catholic. The Cumans became Orthodox, being squashed between Rhomaion and what would eventually become Novgorod-Rostov-Suzdal and later the Ladogan League.
There were also the Khazars earlier on who converted to Judaism, although it seems that either the conversion wasn't complete and a lot remained shamanists, or most converted to Orthodoxy under the Cumans.
 
OOC: If you read my post earlier in the thread, the Oghuz Turks turned north and attacked the Rus', until both parties suffered a major defeat at the hands of the Cumans, resulting in the Cumans gaining control of Kyiv, Crimea and the Pontic Steppe and the Oghuz being pushed into the Carpathians, closer to the border with Hungary. With the ERE still the major power in the area, the Cumans eventually settled along the Black Sea and converted to Orthodoxy for a) trade reasons and b) to secure an ally against the later arrival of the Khitans. They converted to Catholicism due to proximity and kinship to Hungary.

The Oghuz ITTL are sort of like the Balkars and Karachay in OTL Russia: Turks who got shoved into the mountains by a million other migrations and persist as an ethno-religious minority.
 
OOC: If you read my post earlier in the thread, the Oghuz Turks turned north and attacked the Rus', until both parties suffered a major defeat at the hands of the Cumans, resulting in the Cumans gaining control of Kyiv, Crimea and the Pontic Steppe and the Oghuz being pushed into the Carpathians, closer to the border with Hungary. With the ERE still the major power in the area, the Cumans eventually settled along the Black Sea and converted to Orthodoxy for a) trade reasons and b) to secure an ally against the later arrival of the Khitans. They converted to Catholicism due to proximity and kinship to Hungary.

The Oghuz ITTL are sort of like the Balkars and Karachay in OTL Russia: Turks who got shoved into the mountains by a million other migrations and persist as an ethno-religious minority.
ooc: Oh that's what you were trying to say in that earlier post.
 

Gian

Banned
What about Egypt? After all, without the Turkic tribes, the Mongols would have had an easier time conquering it and establishing the current Coptic Christian-dominated order that still persists to this day (Hell, even Rhomania couldn't squeeze it out and enforce the Orthodox faith when they reconquered it in the 15-16th century)
 
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