The Ionian State builds Modern Greece

Somebody has to say this !

I thing that Abdul Hadi Pasha is aware of the following:
1. Great Powers, like the Ottoman Empire (or Byzantium before it) tend to dissintegrate when they stop evolving.
2.The Greeks couldn'd be halted in their way to independence. Their national concience was too firm. In addition, the Greeks, as all the Christians in the empire were seen as "third-class" subjects of the state.
3. The exodus of the Muslims from mainland Greece, especially the military feudarchs couldn't be prevented, since they were seen as conquerors, tyrants and foreigners.

I'm not sure if an understanding between Greeks and Turks was possible in this time, considering the ideologies of the two nations. It's nevertheless sad that an understanding wasn't reached in the years to come.


1) This is a good point.

2) Considering that they are stronger ITTL under a more competent leadership, and apparently Ottomans underestimated them quite much by didn't even apply the basic cautiousness, they deserve it. But that's the "destiny", that is the OPPORTUNITY, and national concience (if there was any valid one, though I guess there was kind of one, considering the existence of Phanariot caste) is nothing without it.

3) It's just fine and healthy to have sympathy towards a kind or another, but something doesn't perish just because one doesn't favor the said something because it conflicts with one that you sympathizes.

All in all, I strongly suggest you to withstand against even what you believe in if it's about to consume you from your ability to commence anything under a proper logic and to see history as it is. This TL has its beauty due to your ability to write it realistically, and this TL may has the potential to be an Ottoman-bashing TL which I will going to give a proud thumb up on. Keep it up, and don't let your allegiance into something else other than objective truth even bother standing 1 km from it. This is AH.com, and its existence is for but for giving ones the pleasure that can only be obtained from actually true, historical truths! There is no AH.com but AH.com, and Ian is her administrator. AH.COM AKBAR !!!
 
1) This is a good point.

2) Considering that they are stronger ITTL under a more competent leadership, and apparently Ottomans underestimated them quite much by didn't even apply the basic cautiousness, they deserve it. But that's the "destiny", that is the OPPORTUNITY, and national concience (if there was any valid one, though I guess there was kind of one, considering the existence of Phanariot caste) is nothing without it.

3) It's just fine and healthy to have sympathy towards a kind or another, but something doesn't perish just because one doesn't favor the said something because it conflicts with one that you sympathizes.

All in all, I strongly suggest you to withstand against even what you believe in if it's about to consume you from your ability to commence anything under a proper logic and to see history as it is. This TL has its beauty due to your ability to write it realistically, and this TL may has the potential to be an Ottoman-bashing TL which I will going to give a proud thumb up on. Keep it up, and don't let your allegiance into something else other than objective truth even bother standing 1 km from it. This is AH.com, and its existence is for but for giving ones the pleasure that can only be obtained from actually true, historical truths! There is no AH.com but AH.com, and Ian is her administrator. AH.COM AKBAR !!!

Pardon me but I guess my English is not good enough lately. Could you please explain what is your point at point 3, and your last clause ?
 
Pardon me but I guess my English is not good enough lately. Could you please explain what is your point at point 3, and your last clause ?

My point #3 is about exactly as it sounds. As the last clause, do you mean the very last 2 sentences of the last paragraph ? I can only say "Welcome to AH.com" about that ;)
 
Pardon me but I guess my English is not good enough lately. Could you please explain what is your point at point 3, and your last clause ?
Ridwan's first language isn't English, either IIRC (if I remember correctly).

3) It's just fine and healthy to have sympathy towards a kind or another, but something doesn't perish just because one doesn't favor the said something because it conflicts with one that you sympathizes.

I think he meant something like "It's fine and healthy to be sympathetic towards one idea/group or another. But it won't die out just because you don't like it."
 
Ridwan's first language isn't English, either IIRC (if I remember correctly).

3) It's just fine and healthy to have sympathy towards a kind or another, but something doesn't perish just because one doesn't favor the said something because it conflicts with one that you sympathizes.

I think he meant something like "It's fine and healthy to be sympathetic towards one idea/group or another. But it won't die out just because you don't like it."

What has irked me from his post back then is that he said that ottoman muslim rulers will inevitably get out of Greece in all conditions, merely because the Greeks don't like them. I wonder how many of those Tibetans and Uyghurs who like being ruled by Chinese. But will the Chinese get out from their respective homelands just only because of that ? Surely at the very least the Chinese would have to empty their garrisoning there as uncautiously first as Ottoman had done ITTL, not ?

So Andreas, how could have you said something like that, after you had just started this TL so splendidly logically and plausible and even getting a positive response from the board's most foremost Ottomano-phile due to that ?? Don't get me wrong, I'm not suing you for screwing the Ottomans here ;):D However, sprouting something so ideological and, frankly, baseless as that tends to be so silly at best, might be beyond offensive at worst, and such a good TL as this doesn't deserve to be stained by something like that.

Well, that's about all of my concerns in this matter though, I hope I didn't sound too cranky at it ;)



And concerning about my first language, it's Indonesian. I'm currently living in Bandung, West Java now.
 
I thing that Abdul Hadi Pasha is aware of the following:
1. Great Powers, like the Ottoman Empire (or Byzantium before it) tend to dissintegrate when they stop evolving.
2.The Greeks couldn'd be halted in their way to independence. Their national concience was too firm. In addition, the Greeks, as all the Christians in the empire were seen as "third-class" subjects of the state.
3. The exodus of the Muslims from mainland Greece, especially the military feudarchs couldn't be prevented, since they were seen as conquerors, tyrants and foreigners.

I'm not sure if an understanding between Greeks and Turks was possible in this time, considering the ideologies of the two nations. It's nevertheless sad that an understanding wasn't reached in the years to come.

1. That is a totally discredited idea. All states evolve, some just fail to keep up, usually because circumstances have changed in some unfavorable way - for instance, the Kanem Empire in the Chad basin declined because the Sahara advanced and their land dried up. The Ottomans were certainly evolving, but their population and resources were so small compared to the other powers that it was impossible to withstand their pressure. Being adjacent to Russia and the Hapsburg Empire didn't help.

2. The Greeks WERE halted on their way to independence, until all the Powers of Europe combined stepped in to force the issue. They had no national conscience at all until after Greece was created, and even then it was weak - the idea of being Hellenes took a long time to supercede the Christian Byzantine identity. That is the basis of the Megali Idea - restoration of the Christian Empire, not expansion of a national state. Greeks and Christians were not 3rd-class citizens, just second-class until the 1830s. By the later empire, Christians actually had substantial advantages over Muslims, because they could assume foreign citizenship and thus had to pay no taxes. They also didn't have to serve in the military, which was a huge economic burden (not to mention a source of high mortality) for Muslims.

3. This is nonsensical. The Muslims were massacred wholesale and forceably driven off. Since Greeks were a minority in everything north of Thessaly, this was probably an inevitable action, otherwise there was no hope of holding the new territory. In addition, Albanians and Macedonians were forceably Hellenized. There were no military feudarchs by the 19th c. You are thinking of an earlier era.
 
What has irked me from his post back then is that he said that ottoman muslim rulers will inevitably get out of Greece in all conditions, merely because the Greeks don't like them. I wonder how many of those Tibetans and Uyghurs who like being ruled by Chinese. But will the Chinese get out from their respective homelands just only because of that ? Surely at the very least the Chinese would have to empty their garrisoning there as uncautiously first as Ottoman had done ITTL, not ?

So Andreas, how could have you said something like that, after you had just started this TL so splendidly logically and plausible and even getting a positive response from the board's most foremost Ottomano-phile due to that ?? Don't get me wrong, I'm not suing you for screwing the Ottomans here ;):D However, sprouting something so ideological and, frankly, baseless as that tends to be so silly at best, might be beyond offensive at worst, and such a good TL as this doesn't deserve to be stained by something like that.

Well, that's about all of my concerns in this matter though, I hope I didn't sound too cranky at it ;)



And concerning about my first language, it's Indonesian. I'm currently living in Bandung, West Java now.

The reason why Abdul accdepted this part is that it actually happened in OTL. It is not part of my script. So I guess it is not silly nor baseless at all.
 
1. That is a totally discredited idea. All states evolve, some just fail to keep up, usually because circumstances have changed in some unfavorable way - for instance, the Kanem Empire in the Chad basin declined because the Sahara advanced and their land dried up. The Ottomans were certainly evolving, but their population and resources were so small compared to the other powers that it was impossible to withstand their pressure. Being adjacent to Russia and the Hapsburg Empire didn't help.

2. The Greeks WERE halted on their way to independence, until all the Powers of Europe combined stepped in to force the issue. They had no national conscience at all until after Greece was created, and even then it was weak - the idea of being Hellenes took a long time to supercede the Christian Byzantine identity. That is the basis of the Megali Idea - restoration of the Christian Empire, not expansion of a national state. Greeks and Christians were not 3rd-class citizens, just second-class until the 1830s. By the later empire, Christians actually had substantial advantages over Muslims, because they could assume foreign citizenship and thus had to pay no taxes. They also didn't have to serve in the military, which was a huge economic burden (not to mention a source of high mortality) for Muslims.

3. This is nonsensical. The Muslims were massacred wholesale and forceably driven off. Since Greeks were a minority in everything north of Thessaly, this was probably an inevitable action, otherwise there was no hope of holding the new territory. In addition, Albanians and Macedonians were forceably Hellenized. There were no military feudarchs by the 19th c. You are thinking of an earlier era.

First of all, I'm happy we're having this conversation Abdul. Just note it is AH, so it is a kind of history, and history doesn't describe the best or the fair, but what happened and why. Although I don't like getting involved in discussions including arguments based on propaganda (Greek, Turkish, Albanian, Skopjan, Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, etc), I think I have to answer, as I have to defend my ATL:

1. The Greeks were indeed halted by the combined strikes of Ibrahim and Kioutache (I'm not sure I pronunce it correctly in English), but it's due to their diplomatic activity that the powers acted. See the Philhellenes movement, the Act of Subordination, the loans from Britain, etc. So in the end it appears they couldn't be really halted: they would give everything they had in order to avoid Ottoman rule. Unfortunatelly...
The Greeks had a high level of national concience, although not in they way we perceive it nowadays. Anyway, which nation had a national concience in the way we perceive now, apart from the French and probably the Spanish and English at the time?

2. What's nonsense? That the Ottomans were SEEN as conquerors and tyrants? That Greeks as the rest of the Christians were third-class? Let me remind you the structure of the Ottoman society in the beggining of the 19th c.: 1. The military feudarchs (ok, they weren't so military at the time, but they were feudarchs for sure, including the owners of the tsiflikia) and the administrative elit, 2. The main body of the Muslim population which had less privileges, but they were proper subjects of Sultan, 3. The "infidels" who were paying additional taxes as a return to the reverence of their lives and possesions in the House of Islam, and who had to be tried in courts consisted by mulahs, the "infidels" who hadn't the right to ring the bells of their churches, the "infidels" that hadn't the right to ride a horse if a Turk was present etc.
This is the reason of the outbreak of the Greek Revolution and the behaviour of the Greeks towards the Muslims of Greece, in addition, of course, with the behaviour of the Ottoman Porte during the Revolution: the excecution of the Patriarch, the pogroms in Constantinople, Smyrna, Thessaloniki and other cities, the massacres in Chios, Kassos, Psara and Messolonghi etc. In contradiction to the policy of Muhamad the Conqueror and his successors, Machmud, as his predessestors, was unwilling to preserve the well-being of his Christian subjects, causing their revolt in which he reacted with massacres and denial to discuss the matter.

As far as it concerns the composition of the populatin in the Balkans, I won't discuss it now, since you're reffering in the end of the 19th c. We'll come to this when the time comes in my ATL...
 
The reason why Abdul accdepted this part is that it actually happened in OTL. It is not part of my script. So I guess it is not silly nor baseless at all.

Yes, the Greeks didn't like their Muslim overlords; everybody knows that ! But if some rulers will be driven out just merely because the ruled ones don't like them, than by that logic Tibet and Xinjiang normally can and should be able to gain their independence. But no, because we know how strong their strengths compared to the PLA, and PLA doesn't seem to be emptying their garrisoning in both lands in any moment from now just like the OE had done in the OP of TTL.
 
The reason why Abdul accdepted this part is that it actually happened in OTL. It is not part of my script. So I guess it is not silly nor baseless at all.

It's not "getting out" is the problem, it's genocide and ethnic cleansing. The reason isn't because people don't like each other. On the local level, Greeks and Turks (more properly Christians and Muslims) got along fine throughout the course of the empire. It was always revolutionaries and nationalists who exploited the idea of "other" to rile up their prospective "nation" and directed them towards violence. I was in a village in Cappadocia, and people there said they'd be happy to have the Greeks (they used the term "Rum" - which means "Roman") back. You would never hear such a thing in Greece, because the manufactured Greek nationality has anti-Turkishness as a core-building block. Likewise, Turkish nationalism has developed an anti-Greek slant, for obvious reasons, but just in case it's not, it was the brutal invasion after WWI. But that's why urban secular elites are more likely to be anti-Greek - the mass of the population doesn't really buy into the nationalist program to the same extent and rely on older identities (Muslim) that are more compatible with other ethnicities.

Returning to the idea that the oppressed Greek soul was struggling to be free, you'll note that the 19th c was notable for a total lack of Greek revolutionary or secessionist activity. The initial Revolt was about taxes, not nationalism (as I'm sure you know, nationalist calls for recruits got about zero response), and the Greek state was created by the Powers. But after that, there was absolutely nothing whatsoever until the Balkan Wars. The only exception was the war in 1897, which teh Greek government was dragged into unwillingly, and only because they mistakenly thought the Powers were about to dismember the empire.
 
The Treaty of Paris and the end of the War of Independence

In late July the Conference parties arrived in Paris. The Sultan, of course, didn’t send a representative. In the aisles and the lounges of the palace of the Versailles, Capodistrias managed to delay the talks, having individual bargains with the powers. Except from the Austrian representatives, the rest seemed to be quite understanding of the points he made. The Corfiot politician stated to all the powers the following:

  • The Ionian State will be united with Greece.
  • The new state could stay under Ottoman high sovereign, although it should maintain its armed forces and fleet, while it will have full control of its internal affairs. International treaties should be approved by the Porte, but Greece should be free to conduct commercial and economic treaties and agreements.
  • Ottoman feudal seigneurs should evacuate their possessions with no compensation. Other Muslim individuals that wish to leave Greece should do so, with their land property been compensated.
  • The Greek inhabitants of the islands Chios, Psara and Kasos should be allowed to return to their homes, including those who were sold as slaves.
  • Greece is promising it will maintain peace and stability and assist the powers in extinguishing piracy from the Eastern Mediterranean.
  • The borders of the new state should be firm and capable to ensure its security, while fulfilling the expectations of the Greeks after their sacrifices. This meant that in the minimum the Platamon – Heptachori line should be recognized

By recognising the high sovereignty of the Empire, Capodistrias managed to overcome the demand of the powers that Greece should become a kingdom and accept a king from a European royal family. In his private talks with the powers, he promised Britain a status of a commercial partnership and a favorable trade agreement, France commercial rights in Greece and assistance in matters of Roman Catholics in the East, and Russia cooperation in the Balkans and trade agreements concerning routes from and to the Black Sea.

In late September 1824, the Treaty of Paris was signed, by which:

  • Greece was proclaimed a single and independent State, under the High Sovereignty of His Majesty the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
  • Greece should maintain its armed forces and fleet, while it will have full control of its internal affairs. International treaties should be approved by the Porte, but Greece should be free to conduct commercial and economic treaties and agreements.
  • The Greek State will have a federal form, with the consisting parts be decided by the Greeks. The Head of the State will be a Governor, but the consisting parts should have administrational bodies for their internal matters.
  • No Power should have military bases in Greece, apart from the British who already have, but the British military bases should be reduced to one, with the location and duration of use decided by a joint Greek and British Committee. All Powers should have the right to station navy units in Greek ports for a limited period and only after notice to both Greek and Ottoman governments.
  • Ottoman feudal seigneurs should evacuate their possessions with no compensation. Other Muslim individuals that wish to leave Greece should do so, with their land property been compensated. The amount of the compensation in every case should be determined by a jurisdictional body consisted by judicial officers of the Powers and a Greek and an Ottoman representative.
  • The Greek inhabitants of the islands Chios, Psara and Kasos should be allowed to return to their homes, including those who were sold as slaves.
  • Greece is promising it will maintain peace and stability and assist the powers in extinguishing piracy from the Eastern Mediterranean.
  • The borders of the new Greek State shall be drawn by a committee consisted by representatives of the Powers. A Greek and an Ottoman representatives will participate without voting rights, but as consulting members of the Committee.

It took several months to persuade the Ottoman Porte to accept the Treaty of Paris. In February 1825, the Russians, still in Adrianople, mobilized their forces, while a joint Fleet of British, French and Russian warships appeared in the Aegean in order to put some pressure on the Ottomans to let the inhabitants of Chios, Kassos and Psara return to their homes. Taking advantage of the situation of the rebellion of the Janissaries in Constantinople, the Heptanesian Army marched into Macedonia (without any significant opposition) and settled on the south bank of river Aliakmon.

In 14th March 1825, Sultan Machmud, in desperate need to close the Greek Question in order to focus on the Janissaries revolt, signed the Act of Constantinople, by which he accepted the Treaty of Paris.
 
The Greek State

the borders and the internal organization

Greek Revolution (after].GIF
 
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This was one of the first timelines that I read. There are some criticisms that are worth to look at if you consider on continuing this or doing a redux in the future. The premise is interesting.
 
Did you just not only wank the heptanese but somehow make it defeat the ottoman empire in a ridiculous piece of nationalism?

3. The "infidels" who were paying additional taxes as a return to the reverence of their lives and possesions in the House of Islam, and who had to be tried in courts consisted by mulahs, the "infidels" who hadn't the right to ring the bells of their churches, the "infidels" that hadn't the right to ride a horse if a Turk was present etc.
These had already been abolished for a long while. Additionally I'm not sure how your country teaches thing, but that's not how the Millet system worked, so strike one for balkans nationalist history classes.

Also the Venetians had no love for the heretic orthodox greeks of Candia and the islands.
 
Did you just not only wank the heptanese but somehow make it defeat the ottoman empire in a ridiculous piece of nationalism?


These had already been abolished for a long while. Additionally I'm not sure how your country teaches thing, but that's not how the Millet system worked, so strike one for balkans nationalist history classes.

Also the Venetians had no love for the heretic orthodox greeks of Candia and the islands.

Is there a reason to be a dick about a timeline that hasn't been updated since 2009?

Of course not.
 
Hm, even if you make the Austrians use schooners, I still don't think they have enough ships to actually conduct any kind of naval battle in the 1820s.

The Austro-Hungarian navy of 1821 consisted of ;

One unfinished 74 gun ship of the line (to be razeed to the 56-gun frigate Bellona and taken into service 1823).

Three frigates (Österreich, Augusta, Lipsia, all 44 guns)

Four small gunboats (coastal vessels)

There was another frigate finished late 1821.
 
I know very little about Greek history, but you've already got me interested. I'll be eagerly watching this thread.

EDIT: I did not notice the dates of the posts until just now. Whoops.
 
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