Largest Ottoman Empire possible?

What's the largest the Ottomans could have expanded? They were quite big OTL but could they have taken Austria or Persia? Maybe even Spain or India?

Could they have maintained their dominion over the Indian Ocean, maybe becoming a naval superpower?
 
I don't think that Ottoman Empire can expand much more than OTL. It had already difficulties controllarge empire. Perhaps parts of Persia and Southern Italy could be possible but the empire can't keep these long.
 
All of Persia and Spain and most of India were ruled by moslems for a while, why could they not be part of the Ottoman Empire?
 

Deleted member 67076

Have the Ottomans start their rise faster. Have the Ottomans take Constantinople in 1403 by avoiding Timur's invasion and you give the Ottomans a 50 year headstart. No one in Europe will be able to stop their expansion then. Therefore the Ottomans have opportunities to take Italy and prevent the rise of the Safavids, opening up opportunities in Persia and the Caucus. Additionally, the earlier Ottoman rise to power would mean that the state can interphere in Morocco at the time the Wattasids attempt their rise to power, therefore giving them an opportunity to complete the conquest of the Maghreb.

Really, the earlier the Ottomans rise to power, the larger they can get during the initial phase of expansion. There'll be less capable states to put up resistance.
 
All of Persia and Spain and most of India were ruled by moslems for a while, why could they not be part of the Ottoman Empire?

By the time the Ottomans had conquered Constantinople/Istanbul there was only one Muslim state in the Iberian Peninsula. That state fell only about 40 years later. IIRC Persia and India were controlled by powerful empires.
 
Well if they can keep up with Europe better maybe they can grab some more land. I think they had some activity in Indonesia for a while.
 
If they don't lose Egypt in the 19th century they certainly could expand into such places as OTL Sudan, Chad, etc. If the Safavids are butterflied they might take over a fragmented and still majority-Sunni Iran, and vassalize the Turkish states of Central Asia, but holding the eastern bits from Constantinople is going to be hard: the only empire I can think of that ruled both western Anatolia and eastern Iran for any length of time was the Achaemenids, and the old Persian Empire was a fairly decentralized sort of thing. Pushing on into India, even if the butterflies flap their little wings off and take out the Mughals too, is probably going to be logistically impossible, or at best lead to the eastern bits breaking off as a separate empire.
 
I've always thought that the Ottomans were the perfect candidate to steal Spain's colonial empire from out under them very early on. Quoting myself from something I posted a while back:

One problem with actual Turks doing that is that to the Ottomans, the Balkans were colonies for their Turkish subjects to settle in with the hopes of stabilizing the region and cementing their control. If the Ottomans were feeling dastardly, they could in theory start exporting their Balkan minorities to the Americas, in a theoretical world where the Ottomans establish colonies in say, the Caribbean, and use these pseudo-slaves/serfs as the labor to grow cash crops. These theoretical colonies would be as ethnically Turkish as Haiti was ethnically French, but it'd be a colony.

The biggest problem with the Ottomans doing any sort of colonization is that they don't have access to the Atlantic Ocean, because that passage was controlled by Spain/the Hapsburgs, hated enemy numero uno. It'd require the Ottomans to take Morocco, which is certainly a plausible scenario, but even then the will to colonize would be dubious at best because of the long distances involved to even govern Morocco; the Ottomans had a nominal hold over the Bey of Algiers at the best of times.

I've often wondered about the best way to see Ottoman colonies, and IMO that'd be to have a Francis Drake analogue arising in the Barbary Corsairs with Ottoman backing and wrecking havoc in the Caribbean. Say, a few years before or after Lepanto, or even a successful Lepanto, the Ottomans take a very skilled pirate from North Africa, give him several ships as well as a substantial backing of funds, and send him on a mission to loot the treasure fleets of the Spanish. This man, much like Drake, has a great success looting the Spanish treasure fleets and the relatively easy wealth has the Ottomans throwing more funds and more ships at this man, who sets up shop in the Caribbean and coups the piracy movement in the Caribbean through conversions and sheer power/wealth to establish several colonies/outposts in the Caribbean.

The massive wealth flowing into the Sultan's coffers at the direct expense of the Spanish then results in far more interest in the Atlantic by the Sultan which sees tentative feelers being sent towards the English in an alliance against the Spanish, with the traditional Ottoman ally in France planning an end to the Hapsburg, both Spanish and Austrian.

Another option or supplementary event could be that if the Ottomans manage to reach Morocco and start looting the Spanish Caribbean before the Morisco Revolt of 1568-1571(meaning before Lepanto), then a window opens for the Ottomans to use this as a causus belli to invade the Spanish while having a (theoretically) welcoming and loyal populace to set up shop in Granada if they can successfully land in Spain and crush Phillip II; any later and the expulsion of the Moriscos gives the Ottomans little chance of crippling Spanish colonization efforts while at the same time giving them a very good port in Cadiz from which to colonize the New World from.

If the Spanish can be sent reeling, then theoretically many of their colonies become fair game if the Ottomans can muster the political will and army to do so without overextending themselves in Spain and any lands conquered from the Austrian Hapsburgs.

The problems with this scenario is that it'd either require for Suleiman the Magnificent to have more successes against Spain in the Mediterranean earlier on his reign, or to have a far more competent successor than his son Selim II.

So assuming all of the above could happen in a theoretical timeline, primarily because if #2 happens then #1 is plausible through causation, you've got the Ottomans in a position that could potentially eat chunks off of the Spanish's New World empire by draining their coffers dry and destroying the ability of the Spanish to successfully reinforce their colonies.

If an Ottoman sultan gets the itch from the money being raked in through piracy, they could plausibly throw a lot more political backing into wresting away Spanish colonies. Part 1 would be building up the Ottoman state apparatus in either Morocco or Granada due to the gold flowing in, while Part 2 would be the deployment/direct political effort to send pirates nominally in service to the Sultan into the Caribbean so as to increase the amount of gold flowing in, setting up profitable bases for the Ottomans that directly weaken the Spanish. Considering this would be circa ~1580 or so, most of the Spanish colonies in South America are relatively small and those that were bigger IOTL would be much smaller due to the rampant piracy and most importantly for the establishment of proper Ottoman colonies, slaving of Spanish colonials.

A very ambitious Sultan, if done early enough, could send out a small army with the goal of conquering Spanish colonies, and would probably meet with success if they enslave the colonists that resist and use them to grow the cash crops they themselves used their slaves for. I could see the Ottomans setting up a plantation economy using both African and Spanish slaves, which results in more interest and by extension more colonists primarily from North Africa, albeit far more commercial and decentralized manner than what the Spanish had organized. Or alternatively inciting slave revolts which sees a combined African and Arab-Turk mercenary class slaving away the Spanish populace in the Americas. It's worth noting that there's probably a fair number of Muslims among the slaves, so it's not as though the Ottomans are going in with no potential support base. Not to mention a fair number of converts by virtue of being their liberators. I'd say hijacking the slaves into their piracy/slaving empire is the more probable course of action due to it being the path of least resistance for a strong Ottoman Empire in the New World.

Combining a much stronger Ottoman position with a Spanish inability to reinforce their Andean strongholds due to deeper and deeper raids by both Ottoman militias and corsairs could lead to a native revolt in the Andes that the Spanish would be very very hardpressed to put down.

If the Spanish are kept down through a combination of Ottoman, French, and English ambitions and most notably, the Dutch Revolt which would be far more important ITTL to the Spanish due to being proportionally far more revenue than OTL, could see the Ottomans supplanting South America and the Caribbean within several decades(at the cost of many Spanish lives) while continuing to use the more populated Mexico and Central America as slaving zones for the corsairs while still having the potential to eat more chunks off the Spanish in the future.

Of course, combining several of the ideas posted by others will give you better results; the earlier the Ottoman gravy train gets rolling the sooner they smash everything in their way. If you can butterfly Tamerlane, the Ottomans are in Constantinople a good half century earlier. Which frees up their resources to go into North Africa even earlier. Which in turn makes an intervention in Southern Spain and a stronger tradition of piracy as an arm of Ottoman warfare more likely.
 
Persia would be doable had they pre-empted the rise of Safavids. But it'll be hard to control and vulnerable from Central Asia.

Hungary was possible had they crushed Vienna, but it'd still be of better use as a vassal anyway.

And as Soverihn said, the earlier their rise came, the wider their window to Italy will be.

But I still don't think they can save Granada.
 
Top