Lupin
08-16-2011, 01:31 PM
http://www.alternatehistory.com/disc...ultiply+Greeks
Kind of inspired from this thread
Although they are numerous today, the Turkish people while numerous indeed are not as spread out as compared to other ethnic groups. To my knowledge, many Slavs, Greeks and Albanians converted to Islam and we see evidence of this in areas like Kosovo, Bosnia and Albania but they didn't necessarily see themselves as Turks though I'm sure their Christian counterparts certainly did.
The Turkish immigrants to Anatolia settled down and kept their own language and culture, displacing and/or assimilating the largely Greek and Armenian-speaking population of Anatolia. The Ottoman Empire didn't bring multiple successor states speaking local variations of Turkish the way that the old Roman Empire did in Spain, France, Italy, etc. They certainly had the capability to do so, I think.
Turk was considered an insult to refer to the Anatolian peoples and the nobility considered themselves distinct from such. Modern Turkish nationalism is a far recent thing that came with the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. There wasn't much of an attempt to Turkify the populations in the Balkans or in the Middle East for that matter. It didn't really matter. Being Muslim was enough.
How do we increase the numbers of Turks? I can accept PODs going back to the Seljuk Sultanate but I want to have this done with PODs after the establishment of the Ottomans. How do we get a larger amount of self-identified Turks spread over a much wider area in OTL?
Kind of inspired from this thread
Although they are numerous today, the Turkish people while numerous indeed are not as spread out as compared to other ethnic groups. To my knowledge, many Slavs, Greeks and Albanians converted to Islam and we see evidence of this in areas like Kosovo, Bosnia and Albania but they didn't necessarily see themselves as Turks though I'm sure their Christian counterparts certainly did.
The Turkish immigrants to Anatolia settled down and kept their own language and culture, displacing and/or assimilating the largely Greek and Armenian-speaking population of Anatolia. The Ottoman Empire didn't bring multiple successor states speaking local variations of Turkish the way that the old Roman Empire did in Spain, France, Italy, etc. They certainly had the capability to do so, I think.
Turk was considered an insult to refer to the Anatolian peoples and the nobility considered themselves distinct from such. Modern Turkish nationalism is a far recent thing that came with the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. There wasn't much of an attempt to Turkify the populations in the Balkans or in the Middle East for that matter. It didn't really matter. Being Muslim was enough.
How do we increase the numbers of Turks? I can accept PODs going back to the Seljuk Sultanate but I want to have this done with PODs after the establishment of the Ottomans. How do we get a larger amount of self-identified Turks spread over a much wider area in OTL?