Colonial Expansion, 1715-28
Sorry it's been so long since I updated, been out of town all week.
Storey: The Austrians really seem to like fighting me. It seems the more land I take from them the more they feel like attacking me and giving me more. Oh well...
jwolf: Coud be the BB. I'm surprised as well, generally once I get as big and as rich as I am now, other countires generally leave me alone.
Recent colonial wars with the English had lead many in Istanbul to investiagte the colonial situation more carefully than they had been in the last several years. For as long as anyone could remember these days, the colonies had been a wonderful place to send people the state considered "undesirables", criminals, the permanently unemployed, and perhaps most importantly, the troublesome nomadic tribes who could make life difficult for the settled people when their numbers weren't kept in check. However, these halcyon days were rapidly coming to an end. There was no longer virgin territory for the Ottoman government to claim, all neighboring provinces in the American and African colonies were in hostile English, French, or Omani hands.
The one exception to this rule was the tribal nation of the Iroquois, a native people of the Americans who managed to get their tribal confederacy recognized by the colonial powers as a state. By no means did the primitive Iroquois have the necessary military or economic strength to back their claim to statehood, but the Ottomans, English, and French each recognized the Iroquois when they felt it likely one of their more advanced neighbors would infringe upon Iroquois sovreignity and thereby gain additional lands and resources. So the Iroquois confederacy lived on in difficult circumstances, its existence depending above all else on its ability to play the neighboring states off against one another, all with the sobering realization that a determined invasion by any of the colonial powers could easily destroy their state. The English indeed had already mounted two armed invasion of Iroquois territory, which were only defeated thanks to inadequate planning on the English side. They had received covert assistance from both the French and Ottoman governments on each occasion, but neither side was willing to loan guns or artillery to the Iroquois, as a strong confederacy neighboring the sparsely populated colonies was definitely something all powers could agree was undesirable in the extreme.
Yet the Ottoman government, facing a renewed call for colonial missions from the people of Syria after a nomadic tribe had raided as far as the suburbs of Damascus. The Ottoman government decided after the Damascus incident that new lands would have to be opened in the New World, which would involve the destruction of the Iroquois confederacy. The Ottomans carefully assembled a fully equipped army, 22,000 men strong, to do the job that English colonial levies had failed to do. This force was to ensure that Iroquois lands could be effectively occupied and to ensure that neither the English nor the French would choose to intervene on the Iroquois side. The war itself was the easiest part, the well-armed and disciplined Ottoman troops requiring only 7 months in 1136-37/1724 to overrun and annex the Iroquois lands.
The Turkish government then resorted to scorched-earth tactics to drive the remaining Iroquois tribesmen to the virgin western territories, many of the Iroquois people took this route even as several Arab tribes were migrated in their entirity from Syria. Of the Iroquois who remained in their ancestral lands, most quickly assimilated into the new Arabic and Turkish speaking settlements, marrying with immigrant families and accepting Islam, nominally at first but becoming genuine converts as the years went by and the old traditions slowly forgotten (an event switches both Iroquois provinces to Turkish culture and Sunni religion). Other remnants fled southwards to English territory, where the English government gladly added the tribesmen to its local levies and found a new excuse to complain in internaional forums against the "brutish Turks" to which the Ottomans responded by trotting out the Cherokee remanants they settled in Roanoake colony, which the English attempted to argue was a "completely different" situation without much success. Ottoman colonial momentum set in once again and in addition to Turkifying the former lands of the Iroquois, the virgin territories of Irondekoit and Onodaga were settled by Turkish frontiersmen.
North America in 1726
Sorry it's been so long since I updated, been out of town all week.
Storey: The Austrians really seem to like fighting me. It seems the more land I take from them the more they feel like attacking me and giving me more. Oh well...
jwolf: Coud be the BB. I'm surprised as well, generally once I get as big and as rich as I am now, other countires generally leave me alone.
Recent colonial wars with the English had lead many in Istanbul to investiagte the colonial situation more carefully than they had been in the last several years. For as long as anyone could remember these days, the colonies had been a wonderful place to send people the state considered "undesirables", criminals, the permanently unemployed, and perhaps most importantly, the troublesome nomadic tribes who could make life difficult for the settled people when their numbers weren't kept in check. However, these halcyon days were rapidly coming to an end. There was no longer virgin territory for the Ottoman government to claim, all neighboring provinces in the American and African colonies were in hostile English, French, or Omani hands.
The one exception to this rule was the tribal nation of the Iroquois, a native people of the Americans who managed to get their tribal confederacy recognized by the colonial powers as a state. By no means did the primitive Iroquois have the necessary military or economic strength to back their claim to statehood, but the Ottomans, English, and French each recognized the Iroquois when they felt it likely one of their more advanced neighbors would infringe upon Iroquois sovreignity and thereby gain additional lands and resources. So the Iroquois confederacy lived on in difficult circumstances, its existence depending above all else on its ability to play the neighboring states off against one another, all with the sobering realization that a determined invasion by any of the colonial powers could easily destroy their state. The English indeed had already mounted two armed invasion of Iroquois territory, which were only defeated thanks to inadequate planning on the English side. They had received covert assistance from both the French and Ottoman governments on each occasion, but neither side was willing to loan guns or artillery to the Iroquois, as a strong confederacy neighboring the sparsely populated colonies was definitely something all powers could agree was undesirable in the extreme.
Yet the Ottoman government, facing a renewed call for colonial missions from the people of Syria after a nomadic tribe had raided as far as the suburbs of Damascus. The Ottoman government decided after the Damascus incident that new lands would have to be opened in the New World, which would involve the destruction of the Iroquois confederacy. The Ottomans carefully assembled a fully equipped army, 22,000 men strong, to do the job that English colonial levies had failed to do. This force was to ensure that Iroquois lands could be effectively occupied and to ensure that neither the English nor the French would choose to intervene on the Iroquois side. The war itself was the easiest part, the well-armed and disciplined Ottoman troops requiring only 7 months in 1136-37/1724 to overrun and annex the Iroquois lands.
The Turkish government then resorted to scorched-earth tactics to drive the remaining Iroquois tribesmen to the virgin western territories, many of the Iroquois people took this route even as several Arab tribes were migrated in their entirity from Syria. Of the Iroquois who remained in their ancestral lands, most quickly assimilated into the new Arabic and Turkish speaking settlements, marrying with immigrant families and accepting Islam, nominally at first but becoming genuine converts as the years went by and the old traditions slowly forgotten (an event switches both Iroquois provinces to Turkish culture and Sunni religion). Other remnants fled southwards to English territory, where the English government gladly added the tribesmen to its local levies and found a new excuse to complain in internaional forums against the "brutish Turks" to which the Ottomans responded by trotting out the Cherokee remanants they settled in Roanoake colony, which the English attempted to argue was a "completely different" situation without much success. Ottoman colonial momentum set in once again and in addition to Turkifying the former lands of the Iroquois, the virgin territories of Irondekoit and Onodaga were settled by Turkish frontiersmen.
North America in 1726
