How much of the Balkans did the Ottomans actually conquer?

Orry

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(read a timeline about the Sweden joins the crimean war for some reason the ottomans get partitioned by austria, Bulgaria and Greece for reasons)

I seem to remember a thread like that....

Having an extra Enemy was the best thing that could happen to Russia it seemed leading to then conquring Sweden, Driving the British and French Armies out of Crimea and their navies out of the Black Sea before their irristable march to Constantinople.......

:)
 
Well I think 500 years under the Ottomans was enough of a time frame for them to forget, but they didn't. Obviously the Ottoman rule wasn't that cushy.



Ok all that is bad, there is no doubt about it. But just because someone else did terrible things it didn't make it alright for the Ottomans to do it. The British Empire doesn't have a spit perfect reputation in the world, it is actually despised by many believe it or not. Same for the Ottoman Empire. In the Balkans they are on the same level as the Borgs in Star Trek, because they felt a lot of their crap on their skin. What is so difficult to understand?



I can agree with you on this, but lets not kid ourselves. The then contemporary view of the early Ottoman rule wasn't rosy either. The then contemporary view of 19th century Ottoman empire was also bad. If any empire needed to hire a PR agency it was the Ottomans.

Now I feel like I derided this thread into ''how bad were the Ottomans compared to the other Empires'' and that was not my intention. I apologies for that.

I trust that it isn't your intention. Not going to lie I might be biased as a Turk about the Ottomans. It was not all rosy with the dynasty alone considering the execution of the younger brothers or sons of the Sultan as an example. With regards to that I'd be happy to live in Modern Era.

But if I were a Jew in Russia, Catholic in Sweden, Orthodox in Venetian Greece, Sunni in Persia or Protestant in Austria I'd be happy there is a chance to move to Ottoman domains. The additional tax is I would be willing to pay rather than taking the risk of being caught by the Inquisition.
 
I trust that it isn't your intention. Not going to lie I might be biased as a Turk about the Ottomans. It was not all rosy with the dynasty alone considering the execution of the younger brothers or sons of the Sultan as an example. With regards to that I'd be happy to live in Modern Era.

But if I were a Jew in Russia, Catholic in Sweden, Orthodox in Venetian Greece, Sunni in Persia or Protestant in Austria I'd be happy there is a chance to move to Ottoman domains. The additional tax is I would be willing to pay rather than taking the risk of being caught by the Inquisition.
The inquisition did not target non-Christians, the expulsions of minorities was not part of the inquisition proper. The inquisition was more about stamping out heresies and underground religious groups that formally converted to Christianity, so in theory they did target Jews but only those that converted(even by coercion) but still practiced their original religion.

There weren't many deaths compared to the scale of the of the populations involved.
 

Maoistic

Banned
The inquisition was one of the mildest thing the Spanish Empire has ever done, at least compared to the encomienda, transatlantic slavery, expulsions etc.
Agreed. The Spanish Inquisition is extremely mild compared to so many other atrocities in history and it's one of the most overrated atrocities. It was your standard repression of the time. Hadrian's persecution of Jews far surpasses the Spanish Inquisition's killing and torture of Jews and Muslims. There are peasant revolts in the Middle Ages that were suppressed far more bloodily than the Jews and Muslims were under Isabel and Fernando. Heck, I don't get why the Spanish Inquisition became the most emphasised atrocity of Spain when even in the 16th century, it was the genocide of Native Americans that was the most emphasised Spanish atrocity by Spain's rivals. Bartolomé de las Casas's works became one of the most printed works of the 16th century and served as among the most spread anti-Spanish propaganda tools.
 
Considering those 'kidnapped' children in the Corps had a chance to become the second man in the empire aka Grand Vizier they were to say better off in the Empire. For its time of course.

There were attempts of converting the Tatars of Kazan by abducting the Tatar Children and baptize them.

And there are abduction of people by British as well namely the Slave trade. There are more slaves taken to America by the British than the Ottomans ever taking kids in the Janissary Corps.

I honestly am surprised that people view the Ottomans as absolute evil considering that some states did more horrible things. And I am not even talking about the Inquisition...
Was Sipahi-cavalry recruited in a similiar way Like the Janissary ?
 
Latin Americans know nothing of Monty Python.

I mean... we can know about Monty Python? It's not like Monty Python magically stops existing when you cross the Atlantic.

I'd wager the reason the Inquisition is so popular is that 1) it had some really creepy works of torture (go to any torture museum in Spain, those things are far creepier than 'working people to death in a silver mine'), 2) it affected white people too (when the Counterreform came around the Inquisition of the Netherlands and Mary I's persecution of Protestants was far more concerning to English people than what Spain did to natives) and 3) Europeans could complain about it without being huge hypocrites (going with the demographic presence argument, the fact that there are far fewer Natives as soon as you leave Mexico going north is a bit telling).
 
I was taking a jab at his assertion that conquests only count when there's cultural influences visible in present day demographics.

It usually helps if you put some indicator: sarcasm is not easily recognized in the text (honestly, I was surprised that You wrote something of the kind but...) . :teary:

As for the point to which you were answering, defining scope of the cultural influences which should qualify as a conquest is a mammoth task: following criteria you described probably the Mongols did not make any conquests at all (I'm not sure if the obscenities in Russian language are really Mongolian)
 
They conquered most of it.

The fact that the conversion rate on the Balkans during the Ottoman period remained pretty low has several explanations, but chiefly it was an economic issue. Christian subjects paid higher taxes than Muslims, plus they supplied conscripts for the empire’s elite janissary corps. If all the Balkan Christians has converted to Islam it would have created a huge deficit in the Ottoman state finances.

However, several Christian prominent families joined the Ottomans during their conquest and some subsequently converted to Islam as a way to maintain their rights and privileges. Furthermore, as the Ottomans secured their control over the peninsular, conversions were largelyade in order to access jobs in the state apparatus and civil service, positions which were exclusively reserved for Muslims. Those who converted though, largely retained their native tongue - Turkish being seen as a primarily administrative language.

Generally speaking, the Christian (and Jewish) minorities weren’t treated too badly during this period; there are even examples of Christians attempting to have their cases heard at sharia courts!

It was only with the onset of nationalism and the independence movements of the 19th century that an outright hostile dichotomy between the two faiths arose in the region. Islam was identified with Turkish suzerainty, which is why so many Muslims were forcibly expelled from Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia in the wake of their eventual independence. In Bulgaria for example, this persecution continued all the way to WW2 where the government attempted a violent forced conversion of the Pomak minority.
 
Probably barking up the wrong tree here, but are we open to at least considering that part of the negative folk memories held regarding the Ottomans in the Balkans may be influenced by the later emergence of nationalist ideologies? Narratives of the Devshirme dominate despite the practice being abolished in the early 18th century (and largely discontinued by the mid 17th), whereas the growing misrule that characterised the Ottoman Empire from the mid 18th to mid 19th centuries remain relatively unexplored, despite its crucial role in the formation of independent Balkan States. It isn't that Ottoman Rule was beneficial for Balkan Christians (while not being as horrible as some contemporaries, the Ottoman State still represented a negative force for most, as is the case with almost all pre-modern states), but that the role of the Ottomans as a unique horror is the result in part of selective memory. Of course, it goes without saying that the foundation of Christian National States in the Balkan as Ottoman rule was beaten back often resulted in catastrophe for the Muslim populations of the area.

I do find the premise of OP somewhat confusing however. While the Ottoman State had more or less devolved into a loose commonwealth by the 18th century, the notion that the Balkans weren't conquered in any meaningful sense is unique at the very least.
 

Maoistic

Banned
I mean... we can know about Monty Python? It's not like Monty Python magically stops existing when you cross the Atlantic.

I'd wager the reason the Inquisition is so popular is that 1) it had some really creepy works of torture (go to any torture museum in Spain, those things are far creepier than 'working people to death in a silver mine'), 2) it affected white people too (when the Counterreform came around the Inquisition of the Netherlands and Mary I's persecution of Protestants was far more concerning to English people than what Spain did to natives) and 3) Europeans could complain about it without being huge hypocrites (going with the demographic presence argument, the fact that there are far fewer Natives as soon as you leave Mexico going north is a bit telling).
Monty Python is not popular at all in Latin America, yet the Spanish Inquisition is far more known than even the Native American genocide, which when brought up, your average middle and upper class Latin American mestizo and criollo will get all defensive about. And actually, in the 16th century Protestants emphasised Las Casas's history of Spanish atrocities far more than any other Spanish atrocity or at least just as much.

And the torture of the Inquisition was hardly worse than any torture method used before, during or after. You find the same torture devices anywhere else in Europe, including in Protestant countries like England and Holland.
 
Monty Python is not popular at all in Latin America, yet the Spanish Inquisition is far more known than even the Native American genocide, which when brought up, your average middle and upper class Latin American mestizo and criollo will get all defensive about. And actually, in the 16th century Protestants emphasised Las Casas's history of Spanish atrocities far more than any other Spanish atrocity or at least just as much.

And the torture of the Inquisition was hardly worse than any torture method used before, during or after. You find the same torture devices anywhere else in Europe, including in Protestant countries like England and Holland.

You're stereotyping way too much.

The 'average middle and upper class Latin American mestizo and criollo' (criollo hasn't been an actual ethnic term in a hundred years because criollo literally means Spaniard born in the colonies) gets defensive about that if they are conservative since, just like in the rest of the world, education until very recently talked about the greatness of the local Empires. Education standards have more or less changed and everyone here is told of how conquistadores destroyed rich native civilisations now.

The narrative of the Black Legend is far more pervasive in Europe and North America than in Latin America, and if you ask a Latin American about the Spanish Inquisition, they'll probably know about it but pay less attention to that than to what happened to local cultures.

At no point did I say that torture methods were particularly horrible, but they are more grisly than the encomienda system in narrative if not in numbers.
 
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