No Ottomans

Replicator

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What if the Ottoman empire would have been crushed by Tamerlans invasion of 1402?? Could Constantinopel have risen again?? Who would have been the dominant power on the Balkans?

Would that have been a competition between a newly risen Byzantine empire and Bulgaria?
 

Sang

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The dominant power would have been either Bulgaria or Serbia.
This would have ended up in some messy wars between Bulgaria, Serbia, Constantinople and the crusader states.
Ultimate, the winner would have been Hungary, who would have simply used that conflict and extended it's sphere of influence.

And no, Constantinople wouldn't have risen again.
With or without Turks, the fall of Byzantium was inevitable.
 
Croatia and Bosnia would have more population than today, because of 500 years of bloody wars.

There would be no Serbs or people of Orthodox faith in Croatia or most of Bosnia.

Serbia would not been dominant, because Bizant would rise again without Turks.
 
I disagree.
Byzantium wouldn't have risen again.
Bulgaria could have risen instead.
Or some of those Crusader-states in Greece.
I think what he means is Bulgaria or Serbia conquering the byzantines and declaring their own dynasty as Byzantine emperors.
 
If it´s christians that conquer Byzantium, would we be more prone to see them as continuation of Byzantium than OTL. I.e. Bulgarian dynasty followed later by a Greek dynasty etc.

Edit: I´m inclined to think anyone conquering Byzantium would move the capitol over there.
 

Replicator

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Also without any threat from the Ottomans wouldnt the Hapsburg dynasty have expanded into the Balkans much earlier??

Because when Bulgaria is competing with Constantinopel and Serbia I cant see anyone of them marching on Vienna.

Russia would have been probably in posession of the Caucasus and the Crimea much earlier - perhaps a Russian expansion into Bulgaria in the 18th cenutury??
 
Also without any threat from the Ottomans wouldnt the Hapsburg dynasty have expanded into the Balkans much earlier??

Because when Bulgaria is competing with Constantinopel and Serbia I cant see anyone of them marching on Vienna.

Russia would have been probably in posession of the Caucasus and the Crimea much earlier - perhaps a Russian expansion into Bulgaria in the 18th cenutury??

I don't know - the Habsburg interest in the Balkans only really began when Ladislaus Posthumus became King of Hungary.
 
Croatia and Bosnia would have more population than today, because of 500 years of bloody wars.

There would be no Serbs or people of Orthodox faith in Croatia or most of Bosnia.

Serbia would not been dominant, because Bizant would rise again without Turks.
500 years of bloody wars? Thats a bit of an exaggeration, as the majority of Ottoman rule in the Balkans was actually quite peaceable. The major blots on this of course are the initial conquests, the wars with the Habsburgs, the crisis of the early 19th century and the final loss of those territories. The Crisis of the 19th century was probably the most devastating one of these, as many Christians in the Balkans fled to the uplands in order to escape the depredations of semi-independent beys, that either the Sultan couldn't stop or wouldn't stop. Interestingly enough, this is how the Serbian rebellion started, as a rebellion against one of these beys, and after they recieved no help from the Sultan, Independence became their aim.

In addition, I think that any date past 1204 is too late for the resurgence of a Byzantine empire, or at least one ruled by Greeks. As others have said on the thread, it is not too hard to imagine a Serb or Bulgarian ruled Byzatine empire coming into existance.

As for an earlier Hapsburg or Russian presence in the Balkans, I'm not so sure. As SavoyTruffle points out, the Austrians weren't interested at all in the Balkans until the mid 15th century. In Russian history, it is still too early to tell if the Russian state will turn out as it did OTL. Its priorities could be in completely different places then OTLs Russia. If it comes to the realization that there are easier and greater prizes then the Balkans at an earlier time for example, they could show even less interest in the Balkans then they did OTL.
 
Not to mention that the Russian quest for a warm-water port was directed towards Sweden until after the Great Northern War, after which it was St Petersburg vs the Porte.
 
500 years of bloody wars? Thats a bit of an exaggeration, as the majority of Ottoman rule in the Balkans was actually quite peaceable. L.

Skirmishes were always there.

Croatian and Serbian pirates and raiders (Uskoks) attack Bosnia and parts of connquered Croatia,and Turkish and their Serb allies (Akindzije) attack free Croatia.

Slovenia was also constantly threatened, the town of Metlika(near Croatian BORDER) was destroyed 18 TIMES IN 300 YEARS.

And THAT IS THE "PEACE TIMES",every 10-20 years there was a real war.
 
What if the Ottoman empire would have been crushed by Tamerlans invasion of 1402?? Could Constantinopel have risen again?? Who would have been the dominant power on the Balkans?

Would that have been a competition between a newly risen Byzantine empire and Bulgaria?

I do not think so.

Europe thought Timur was the Devil, and so the Genoese and Venetians were helping the Ottomans.

And the Ottomans were almost completely destroyed then, and still rose to power.
 
I think a friend of mine said it best when it came to Byzantium.

Yes, I would agree that the way circumstances panned out in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the Byzantine state theoretically had a shot at survival and maybe even reconquest. (The extent of that reconquest was of course not likely to be very great. The real world isn't a game of Europa Universalis.) The fragility of the early Ottoman state, for instance, has been vastly understated. It suffered severe shocks over the succession on multiple occasions and of course had perpetual issues with religious fractures (witness the Kizilbaşi revolt from the end of the fifteenth century - although that's slightly out of the scope of the Byzantine state's OTL survival, it does indicate that pressure along those lines was something to which the Ottoman state was susceptible...and Bedreddinite heterodoxy, which was around earlier on and which did cause problems during the OTL Interregnum, offers a similar point of departure).

The fundamental problem with arguments claiming that the Ottoman state was unstoppable after the mid-fourteenth century (if not earlier) that also claim that the Byzantine state was in terminal "decline" after [insert date e.g. 1071, 1204, 1348] is that those states were drawing on the exact same resource aggregation. Manpower available to the Ottomans had also been and was later available to the Byzantines, and the productivity of the territory under control did not really change, either. Arguments that the Ottomans Would Definitely Win and the Byzantines Would Definitely Lose therefore hinge on theoretical problems with the structure of their states (which were effectively based off of one another anyway) or on the old trite standby of "it happened that way ergo it could not have happened any other way". The possibility theoretically existed for Byzantine military revival into the fifteenth century - it may have been so unlikely as to hardly merit mention, but then again, the Ottoman state had a similar starting point and, from what I remember, did reasonably well.
 
This is an interesting idea. One wonders if the Pontiff would call anotther Crusade initially meant to secure the European part of the Ottoman Empire and the straits. Europe has one thing going for it as far as stoping Timur is concerned; Naval superiority.
 
What if the Ottoman empire would have been crushed by Tamerlans invasion of 1402?? Could Constantinopel have risen again?? Who would have been the dominant power on the Balkans?

Would that have been a competition between a newly risen Byzantine empire and Bulgaria?

Thing is, the Ottomans got beaten around pretty badly by Timur IOTL-their main army was utterly smashed on the battlefield, their sultan died in captivity, and his sons spent the next two decades battling it out in a five-sided succession war. And yet, the empire survived. Honestly...I guess you could have the Genoese refuse to ferry the remnants of the Ottoman army back across the straits, leaving them to be wiped out by Timur, but that's really the only way I can think of to make the situation somehow worse for them than OTL.
 
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