If the Ottomans actually built a Suez Canal, would the Portuguese empire in Asia have collapsed?

Just a showerthought (really, just took a shower).

Say the Ottomans really do build an early Suez Canal in the mid-sixteenth century, during Suleiman's reign, as the Venetians suggested and as some Grand Viziers wanted to. The Ottomans let all Muslim traders and some Christian allies of the empire (the French, maybe even Venetians) use the Canal in return for a reasonable toll. The Ottomans also use it to transport wood to the Red Sea to build a proper fleet suited to Indian Ocean conditions.

With this Suez Canal in place:
  • Does the Portuguese spice trade around Africa sustainable? Or is the Canal route so much shorter that the Portuguese trade in Europe collapses entirely?
  • If Portuguese commerce in Europe does collapse, can the Portuguese sustain themselves on inter-Asia trade alone?
  • The Portuguese in the Indian Ocean never numbered more than eight or nine thousand. If the Ottomans send maybe 20,000 janissaries straight from Constantinople to India through their fancy new canal, can the Portuguese survive?
 

TruthfulPanda

Gone Fishin'
The Portuguese in the Indian Ocean never numbered more than eight or nine thousand. If the Ottomans send maybe 20,000 janissaries straight from Constantinople to India through their fancy new canal, can the Portuguese survive?
The Ottomans did not need a canal for that. They had their ass kicked in the Indian Ocean by the Frota Real (Royal Navy in Portuguese) - the Turks and Italians were Mediterranean coast huggers while the Portuguese were a blue ocean navy.
 
They had their ass kicked in the Indian Ocean by the Frota Real (Royal Navy in Portuguese)
The Ottomans never sent tens of thousands of troops to the Indian Ocean. They were also moderately successful (especially in keeping the Red Sea a Muslim lake and warding off the Portuguese from Yemen), especially given Istanbul's limited commitment.
 
Perhaps the ottomans can prop Aceh or Demak due to them having a foothold in the east in the same time to empower them to make something against the Bruneians in Luzon butterflying the Spanish conquest or limiting spanish conquests due to Luzon being partition between an Aceh or Demak puppet and Bruneians and also have Aceh conquer Malacca which would be cool..
 
Just a showerthought (really, just took a shower).

Say the Ottomans really do build an early Suez Canal in the mid-sixteenth century, during Suleiman's reign, as the Venetians suggested and as some Grand Viziers wanted to. The Ottomans let all Muslim traders and some Christian allies of the empire (the French, maybe even Venetians) use the Canal in return for a reasonable toll. The Ottomans also use it to transport wood to the Red Sea to build a proper fleet suited to Indian Ocean conditions.

With this Suez Canal in place:
  • Does the Portuguese spice trade around Africa sustainable? Or is the Canal route so much shorter that the Portuguese trade in Europe collapses entirely?
  • If Portuguese commerce in Europe does collapse, can the Portuguese sustain themselves on inter-Asia trade alone?
  • The Portuguese in the Indian Ocean never numbered more than eight or nine thousand. If the Ottomans send maybe 20,000 janissaries straight from Constantinople to India through their fancy new canal, can the Portuguese survive?
On land the Ottomans would have no problem considering the strenght of the Ottoman Army, especially with Indian allies in the inlands. The problem starts with the Navy. The Portuguese have up to that time an already experienced Navy. That is what you have to deal with it...

The best era to succesfully fight the Portuguese is when the Portuguese King dies in Morocco. When Philips II is also the Portuguese ruler he used most of Portugals resources as well for his war against the Dutch, French and English. The less attention of Madrid for the Portuguese interest made sure the Dutch did not have a hard time beating Portuguese in the East Indies.

Coming to the Canal to connect the Red Sea with the Medditeranean is what makes me question. As far as I know and read other topics about this, the Red Sea up the Sinai peninsula did not had ideal wind for Sailing ships. This wouldn't be too much of a problem for Galleys but they are up to the point to be obsolete in Naval Warfare.

I can see Venice and later the Dutch to invest in the Canal to undermine the Portuguese. It is faster to india, more friendly ports nearby and it can be open for only certain countries which makes Portugals situation harder in the East. Especially with Dutch having a strong Naval tradition and experience. The only obstacle I see is the Gibraltar and Ceuta/Tanger being in Hostile hands.
 
The Ottomans never sent tens of thousands of troops to the Indian Ocean. They were also moderately successful (especially in keeping the Red Sea a Muslim lake and warding off the Portuguese from Yemen), especially given Istanbul's limited commitment.

The problem for the Turks wasn't really numbers. Virtually all of Portugal's military expenses went to the construction and maintenance of heavy, state-of-the-art warships that had an outsized complement of ordnance, which meant that whenever the Portuguese encountered the much lighter dhows and such amassed against them in the Indian Ocean, they could essentially hunker down and blow their opponents to smithereens without a serious concern of the same thing happening to them.

Now, heavy ships like the galleon and nau were probably the most expensive pieces of military hardware for the 16th and 17th centuries, so the real issue the Turks would have in dislodging the Portuguese is being able to find the funds for both its massive, well-equipped field army (an absolute necessity in Europe and on the Persian border) and for a new fleet comparable to Portugal's (arguably the most powerful in the world in the 15th and 16th centuries). The latter will not only require the raw material and labor costs for building and manning ships, it will also require (more importantly) the training of Ottomam seamen by foreign advisors (Portuguese defectors would be your best best) to bring their technical naval expertise (another thing the Portuguese have a monopoly on in the 16th century) up to speed.

Overall, not impossible but certainly requiring a large and reliable source of money that wasn't found in OTL and a lot of foreign intervention.
 
Last edited:
The problem for the Turks wasn't really numbers. Virtually all of Portugal's military expenses went to the construction and maintenance of heavy, state-of-the-art warships that had an outsized complement of ordnance, which meant that whenever the Portuguese encountered the much lighter dhows and such amassed against them in the Indian Ocean, they could essentially hunker down and blow their opponents to smithereens without a serious concern of the same thing happening to them.

Now, heavy ships like the galleon and nau were probably the most expensive pieces of military hardware for the 16th and 17th centuries, so the real issue the Turks would have in dislodging the Portuguese is being able to find the funds for both its massive, well-equipped field army (an absolute necessity in Europe and on the Persian border) and for a new fleet comparable to Portugal's (arguably the most powerful in the world in the 15th and 16th centuries). The latter will not only require the raw material and labor costs for building and manning ships, it will also require (more importantly) the training of Ottomam seamen by foreign advisors (Portuguese defectors would be your best best) to bring their technical naval expertise (another thing the Portuguese have a monopoly on in the 16th century) up to speed.

Overall, not impossible but certainly requiring a large and reliable source of money that wasn't found in OTL and a lot of foreign intervention.

Funds would not be the biggest problem for the Ottoman Empire as they had the money for wasteful campaigns in Hungary AND Persia in the late 16th and early 17th century.

If you even invest the funds in an Indian Ocean Navy instead of meaningless war in Persia that would be just enough.
 
A canal connecting the Red and the Mediterranean seas never got built until ships could run on steampower for a reason. These projects were considered as far back as the days of the Pharaohs but either never built or built or abandoned. And the reason is the winds at the northern end of the Red Sea, making it hard going for sailing ships.

It was just easier to use ports in Africa in the middle of the Red Sea, after which cargo could be portaged a fairly short distance to the Nile, and put on barges. And given the limited amount of cargo that could fit in old time sailing ships, which were quite small, this was fine. And if you needed a fleet on the Red Sea, you could build one there, the Ottoman Turks were not exactly deploying dreadnoughts in their navy.
 
The Suez canal which was built in the 1860s was not feasible (nor required really) in the 16th century.
It can be replaced by a "canal" patterned on the schemes which worked in ancient times: Necho's canal, for example, which used a branch of the Nile delta and an artificial canal to link it to the Bitter Lakes; Darius the Great also worked on this canal, and later on Ptolemy (his engineers developed a water lock to keep the salty water outside of the Nile). Plinius mention a "river of Trajan" which most likely followed the same route. Later on the canal was silted (and the branches of the Nile delta moved): this required constant maintenance work, which was pretty expensive. By the time of the Arab invasion, the artificial canal was completely silted, but was restored and was in use until it was closed in 767: the official reason was that the canal was used to send supplies to Mecca and Medina, which were in rebellion, but probably the maintenance costs were too high.

Something similar could certainly be reopened in the 16th century, but the question is why the Ottomans should go to such expense. The trade routes with India, either through the Persian gulf or through the Red Sea worked well enough, and the Portuguese expansion in India was not at the top of the worry list for Suleiman, of for any Ottoman sultan (although at the beginning of the 16th century there was a joint effort between Ottomans and Mamelukes to expel the Portuguese from Diu. It ended up badly, with a defeat at the battle of Diu in 1507, which was quite surprising because the Portuguese were badly outnumbered. The most reasonable explanation is that both Ottomans and Mamelukes were at the very edge of their power projection capability, there was no coordination in the attack with the local allies, and the worth of the caravels as gunnery platforms came as a surprise to them.)
Anyway, Balkans, Persia and Mediterranean were the main concerns of the Ottoman sultans. Portuguese penetration in India was not.

Last but not least: the wind in the Red sea is constantly blowing from north to south, but this does not mean that sail ships cannot sail northward. Arab feluccas did that since the antiquity, it is just a matter of tackling and the closer one can sail against the wind the better.
 
Top