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Historically Europeans have tended to view the Ottoman Empire as a threatening "Other" for a variety of reasons. Firstly because it was a very strong military power, the heir to Rome and possessor of what many considered to be the central city and 'capital of the world', potentially putting former Byzantine and Roman lands under threat of reconquest. Secondly because it was derived from Turkish conquerors, and Turks were originally nomads and therefore uncultured barbarians in European eyes. And thirdly because it was Muslim.

Let us create a thought experiment and eliminate the third factor. But let's not make it Orthodox or Catholic either, let's make it still different from the states of Europe proper, but let's make it heterodox Christian. Nestorian seems your best bet, given how there were a fair number of Nestorians among the Turkic peoples. What if our Turkic conquerors of the Byzantines (not the Ottomans specifically, of course, because of butterflies) followed this faith and believed it strongly enough not to go Orthodox for the sake of political convenience?

I'm proposing here a scenario where history runs roughly analogous to OTL, where these Nestorian Turks turn Byzantium into a new empire and reinvigorate it with new blood, but rather than an Islamic empire with all the following connotations, it's a Nestorian one. Of course there were plenty of Nestorians inside the Byzantine Empire and it's very likely they would cooperate with the Turks, perhaps forming the core of the new ruling class. I mean Monophysites and Nestorians infamously cooperated with the Islamic conquerors of North Africa centuries before, and that was only on the promise that they would be treated equally with the Orthodox, not favoured over them.

On the other hand, they will have more problems ruling over originally Muslim-majority regions that became Ottoman in OTL, such as the Levant and Mesopotamia.

Anyway, the question I ask is: what would Western Europe, Russia etc see in this hypothetical state? Would we get the same kind of dark and alien portrayal the Turks got in OTL, a similar one but to a lesser extent, or something else entirely?
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