I’ll take things in the following order: Church matters, then the Ottoman Empire, then Salonika.
So where is the new Pope going to live? It seems clear he can't go back to Rome, is the Curia going to be setting up shop more or less permanently in Rio after the Conclave?
As Jord839 said, it will be Rio for the time being, not out of any commitment to the New World but because (a) that’s where the successful Conclave happened; and (b) Rio is one place where the Curia can be fairly sure it won’t be forced to leave. The long-term goal is a return to Rome, but that will have to await political developments in the twentieth century.
That's certainly surprising, and he'll definitely fit the mold for a pastoral Pope that will nonetheless rock the boat. I like this direction. I'm assuming his conservative dogma makes him unsympathetic to Muslims in the colonies though?
He won’t be very sympathetic to them, but as we’ve seen, they’re quite capable of speaking for themselves.
Between him, typical colonial interests, native unrest, and a larger Portuguese migration to those areas, things will be rife for conflict in Portuguese Africa. Whether it'll be sad and horrible or a great step towards a equal society still remains to be seen.
It could, of course, be both.
And now we have an Ottoman Revolution led by Trotsky. Didn't see that coming.
It won’t be all Trotsky’s show by any means. You may have heard the saying about a revolution being what happens when the army switches sides – in this case, the army will do what it feels it has to do to prevent the country from breaking up.
Damn I hope the empire doesn't balkanize...
Hmm… the fact that it's referred to as an Ottoman revolution suggests some sort of continuity with the old state
The term "Ottoman Revolution" implies that Anatolia and Arabia will still be ruled by a Sultan after the civil war, but in order to maintain his power, the Sultan will have to bend to the will of the rebels: real democracy, and a dual Arab-Turkish monarchy. I'm not sure if the Balkans will remain Ottoman after the Revolution, though
The state that exists after the revolution will still be the Ottoman Empire – it may have to shed a few loosely-held territories and give the frontier provinces more autonomy, but it isn’t going to break apart like Austria-Hungary did. The Balkans and especially Bulgaria will be tricky, because they have a strong desire to leave while the Ottomans can’t afford to let them go, but since they’ve lost the last two wars and have no effective outside patron, they’ll probably settle for some kind of enhanced autonomy. We’ll see how things develop in the 1910s, though.
I really do wonder what the Ottoman revolution is actually going to change in the Empire. Indeed, I wonder how much of the Ottoman army has actually stayed loyal to the Sultan as well. Still, it sounds as if he'll eventually be overthrown by those once loyal to him, so maybe the numbers don't matter.
Most of the opposition remains loyal to the idea of
a Sultan – the empire would have no raison d’etre without the Sultan as religious overlord – but not necessarily to
this Sultan. And while there’s still some residual loyalty for Abdul Hamid among the Anatolian peasantry, the bad economy and political dysfunction means that most of them won’t shed many tears to see him go. Abdul Hamid was deposed by a revolution in OTL, and the same thing will happen in TTL – as Senator Chickpea says, there will be a more pliable Sultan installed in his place, while the actual government (for the time being) will be a coalition of the army, the opposition parties and provincial notables.
I assume the Ottoman Empire is going to end up as another post-Westphalian conglomeration after this revolution.
Hmm... United Sultanate of Sanjak-Republics?
I know you said that in jest, but it’s actually not a bad description of how
some of the empire will work after the revolution (the administrative subdivisions will have several different forms of government). Parts of the empire will be post-Westphalian eventually, but not all of it and not immediately.
Now an Ottoman revolution… could really go both ways : a relatively quick and clean coup or a much messier civil war with ethnic tensions in the Balkans, socialist workers trying to instore a revolutionary regime and maybe the odd Arabic prince (Rachidi, Saudi, ect) establishing an independent Arabia and Hejaz.
It will be somewhere in between. On the one hand, the revolutionaries aren’t just a random group of people taking over – they actually held an election, which counts for something in terms of legitimacy. They’ll be accepted as the legal government by most of the population very quickly, and people will be willing to give their reforms a chance to work. On the other hand, there will be centrifugal pressures on the fringes of the state, especially in Arabia and Yemen, and with so many diverse factions making up the new government, there might be trouble from the dissenters. The shakeout will take a while and will have complications.
On another note, when will the Ottoman cinema start making big budget historical dramas? I could see a lot of people clamoring for top-Lira tickets for 'Sultan Suleiman's conquest of Europe', as well as a lot of controversy for it.
Ooh! Actually, yeah! Is the 'great Ottoman epic' a real thing? I feel as if Ottoman cinema might just get under the idea of a real epic on screen.
They’ll probably reach the point of big-budget feature films in the late 1910s or early 20s, and that kind of epic would definitely be up their alley. Someone’s bound to do a Suleiman movie sooner or later.
OTL, the two world wars were devastating to the film industries of Europe and east Asia, and a hell of a lot of talent fled to the USA, cementing Hollywood's global dominance. One wonders, since cinema is largely a post-war thing and we will avoid any new major wars for quite some time, whether this world's cinema industry will remain more multipolar.
The list of cities in the footnote might answer that question. TTL's film industry won't be nearly as American-dominated; instead, there will be a variety of regional hubs.
Also, how much of the surrounding hinterland of Salonika is Jewish? Is it still mostly Greek/Turkish or have Jews moved into rural areas too?
The city itself has been built outward somewhat to house the new arrivals. Some Jews also live in the countryside, but non-Jews are still the majority outside the city. They have their own village and district councils, so they don’t have to get involved in the Jews’ squabbles unless they want to (which they sometimes do, for political or commercial advantage).
Salonika itself... it seems like a really interesting (if probably a bit overcrowded) city. The cultural, Bahà'ì-influenced Jewish nationalism of this timeline will surely help solve some of the ethnic and religious conflicts that are plaguing the city.
If you don’t mind apartment living, it can be an exciting place – it’s a cosmopolitan city, a center of business and the scene of a good deal of intrigue, in addition to being a cultural blender. The Baha’i/Reconstructionist-influenced nationalism will help to solve some conflicts, but it might also create others, given that much of the religious establishment considers the Reconstructionists heretical.
About Salonika, I would think it's far from being the only center of Judaism, as there were already quite a few Jews in Palestine : those ones would like to reclaim the holy land, wouldn't they? Is there any movement to make an Israel in an other place (EDT fight and be right had it in Kimberley, that was fun).
Yes, there’s a quasi-Zionist movement – Herzl’s ATL-brother is now living on the north side of Lake Victoria, but proto-Zionists like Hess did exist and have influenced the Jews in Palestine. Right now, the *Zionists are hoping to piggyback on the Arab autonomist movement and get some kind of communal self-rule. Only a few radicals are demanding independence, and they won’t get it, but *Zionism will continue as a rival to the cultural nationalism of Salonika.
There will be a few schemes to set up Jewish states elsewhere, but most of that energy will be sucked up by Salonika, which has the benefit of actually existing. Why go to the trouble of setting up a Jewish state in Africa or the Pacific when there’s already one in a historically Jewish city? There will be scattered groups of settlers like the Hungarian Jews in Buganda, but they’ll be citizens of that kingdom rather than having their own state.
Hmm - Salonika as an independent or semi-independent city-state? A post-Westphalian world needs more city states...
The Free City of Salonika was part of the aftermath of TTL's Russo-Turkish war - it's technically under international administration, but
de facto self-governing. Nobody was sure if it would last, but it did.
A random thought : is there a canal across central America and have Americans done anything in the region?
A canal is currently being built across Nicaragua (the political conditions weren’t right for Panama in TTL) and is scheduled for completion in 1915. It’s owned by an international consortium that includes the United States, Brazil, Japan and several European powers.
BTW, I was planning to include Russia in this update, but it didn’t really fit with the rest of the subject matter. So there will be a (relatively) short Russian update soon, possibly tomorrow; then a last narrative to close out the 1900s; then on to the Decade of Revolutions.
