Very lucid and realistic approach. Fascinating.
Reading this, I made out a quick TL on the subjet:
The POD is on 1840's Oriental Crisis: the European powers didn't sabotage Muhammad Ali's rule over the Levant. Egypt grows crazy and manages to substitute the Ottoman Empire as the new Middle Eastern regional power even as a nominal part of the OE, restraining real Ottoman power to Anatolia and the Balkans.
As the instability in the OE grows a group of nationalists overthrow the Sultan establishing a westernizer Sultan. TTL's "Crimean War" develops like a mix of OTL's Crimean War and OTL's Turkish Independence War. Russia, Austria and Greece invade Turkey to support the old Sultan as Britain, France and Egypt go support the legality of the new one.
Russia is better in TTL's "Crimean War" (actually, Anatolian War) and the diplomatic agreement to end the war between Turkey, the Khedive, Britain, France and Russia will lead to an independent Armenia (Russian-occupied Anatolia), a buffer-state between the Khedivate (highly influenced by the British and the French), the Ottomans and Russia, a "Caucasian/Anatolian Switzerland" pending to the Russian side. Egypt will also agree to host Russian merchants in its Levantine ports.
In the Balkans, this smaller Ottoman Empire would call for an earlier and faster modernization and will develop an earlier sense of Young Turk's "Turkishness", instead of the 19th century Ottomanism. Bosnia and the Romanian Principalities will probably go free, but Muslim Albanians and Turkish Dobrudjans will limit the loss of the Turkish "Lebensraum", specially with the major influx of Anatolian Turks and Circassians to this new Ottoman Empire. Bulgarians and Greeks will eventually be loud minorities, but nothing more than that.
What do you guys think?
Reading this, I made out a quick TL on the subjet:
The POD is on 1840's Oriental Crisis: the European powers didn't sabotage Muhammad Ali's rule over the Levant. Egypt grows crazy and manages to substitute the Ottoman Empire as the new Middle Eastern regional power even as a nominal part of the OE, restraining real Ottoman power to Anatolia and the Balkans.
As the instability in the OE grows a group of nationalists overthrow the Sultan establishing a westernizer Sultan. TTL's "Crimean War" develops like a mix of OTL's Crimean War and OTL's Turkish Independence War. Russia, Austria and Greece invade Turkey to support the old Sultan as Britain, France and Egypt go support the legality of the new one.
Russia is better in TTL's "Crimean War" (actually, Anatolian War) and the diplomatic agreement to end the war between Turkey, the Khedive, Britain, France and Russia will lead to an independent Armenia (Russian-occupied Anatolia), a buffer-state between the Khedivate (highly influenced by the British and the French), the Ottomans and Russia, a "Caucasian/Anatolian Switzerland" pending to the Russian side. Egypt will also agree to host Russian merchants in its Levantine ports.
In the Balkans, this smaller Ottoman Empire would call for an earlier and faster modernization and will develop an earlier sense of Young Turk's "Turkishness", instead of the 19th century Ottomanism. Bosnia and the Romanian Principalities will probably go free, but Muslim Albanians and Turkish Dobrudjans will limit the loss of the Turkish "Lebensraum", specially with the major influx of Anatolian Turks and Circassians to this new Ottoman Empire. Bulgarians and Greeks will eventually be loud minorities, but nothing more than that.
What do you guys think?