alternatehistory.com

I refer people to this Quora thread: https://www.quora.com/What-would-have-happened-if-the-Ottomans-won-the-Battle-of-Vienna-in-1683

Also the comment by Kutluk Özgüven, which I will report below:

"Siege of Vienna was one hurdle within a much ambitious larger project jointly planned by Turkey and France. The following 16 years so-called Great Turkish War, the all out European WW0, involving almost every European nation from England to Russia, gives and idea.

"The solid FrancoTurkish alliance went back 160 years. The two wanted complete ending of the Hapsburgs and their allies, Spain, the Low Lands and the disunited but growing Germany.

"France wanted domination of Spain and its colonies as well as the rich Low Lands ports and some German buffer principalities. Turkey wanted Central Europe and a passage to the Atlantic Germany to start its own colonies.

"It was doable. France and Turkey were the most powerful states in Europe. Besides England was an ally and Poland, who also hated the Hapsburgs, would not intervene. Nobody took Russia seriously at the time. Sweden was also friendly. Venice was declining. Europe needed a new order headed by France and with the help of Turkey.

"The main hurdle was taking the German highlands, Austria and Bavaria, and its centre, Vienna. Because it was a fellow Catholic Christian country always the favourite of the Popes, France left this job completely to Turkey. Turkey had its finances fixed in the last 30 years and had been preparing for this for decades. Having the largest and undefeated army it looked inevitable.

"However it was tricky. Save the dervishes Turkey's expansion was entrepreneurial. People fought either got war bounty or new lands to settle. That was an orderly process with strict laws with shares to Christian warriors too and church treasuries. This was how people prepared for war and why borrowed money.

"Yet if Vienna were to be pillaged, and the lands of the German landowners were given to the Sipahi cavalry, and the young women of Vienna were taken concubines, and the able men as slaves, there would be heavy resistance in other cities like Munich, Prague and the several less armed but populous German cities up to Hamburg.

"So the scope of the larger project made otherwise a standard Ottoman operation harder. No pillage and war bounty were to be allowed this time. Not a single golden chandelier was to be taken from any church. That meant the entrepreneurial mounted soldiers and even the regular army was to go back home empty handed. That announcement just before the main attacks created a turmoil in the military camps. People had already enough with the pompous intellectual Karamustafa Pasha of Merzifon and his antics but that was over the top.

"Put together his treatment of the Crimean Tatar Khan, grandson of Genghis and ruler of most of Ukraine, as a medium ranking officer, his complete misunderstanding of real-time war, and underestimating the speed of Polish-Lithuanian Hussars, the siege was the greatest catastrophy in Turkish history and the first ever open battlefield defeat since the Battle of Ankara three centuries earlier.

"So the Turks messed it up and there wasn't to be a drive to the Atlantic all over the Germanic weaklings of principalities. That did not mean for France the end. When the enemy was fully engaged with the Turks, and they did for 16 years with the not so impossible ambition of conquering Istanbul, France could take the buffer zones between itself and the Germanic world. Hence the war in the western front started.

"What made things harder was as a result of the defeat in Vienna and obvious change of the tide England switched alliences and joined the anti-FrancoTurkish axis. Stables of Turkish thoroughbred, origin of the English one, sent from Vienna with love may have helped. As a result Portugal also drew back.

"The Great Turkish War eventually ended in 1699 with the Treaty of Karlowitz stripping Turkish rulers from the title Roman Emperor and reducing it to an equal European power. Istanbul handed over Hungary.

"France couldn't wrestle what we call Benelux today. But Spain wasn't over and the War of Spanish Succession started just after the Great Turkish War.

"So what would have happened if Turks had captured Vienna and all had gone according to the plan for Turkey and France? They would jointly rule Europe and its colonies. Western Europe would be France dominated and Central and Eastern Europe would be Turkish dominated.

"North America and some of South America would be Francophone as well as Holland and south western Germany. There would be German and Hungarian speaking American nations but with Muslim religion."
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