Balkans, Forced population transfers, Ottoman colonization (different approach to POPs&paramilitary)

[withche.07]

Let's start this thread mentioning Halil İnalcık:

"In order to make their new conquest secure the Ottomans used an elaborate system of colonization and mass deportation (sürgün). The turbulent nomads or the rebellious population of a village and even of a town which had caused or might cause trouble were shifted to a distant part of the Empire. The Ottoman state was also greatly concerned with the settlement of Turkish people in conquered lands."

What were overall objectives Ottomans followed?

A. Manpower
Construction of a new order through displacement:
a. "The documents of later periods confirm this old tradition of mass deportation and give interesting details. According to an imperial decree of deportation dated 24 September 1572 one family out of every ten in the provinces of Anatolia, Rum (Sivas), Karaman and Zulkadriye were to be sent to newly conquered Cyprus. The expressed motives for this particular deportation were the rehabilitation and security of the island. The settlers were to be chosen from every level of the society, peasantry, craftsmen, etc. However, the first people to be sent to the island were peasants with insufficient or unfertile lands, the poor, the idlers and the nomads." (decreasing unrest in different cultured lands in game)

Profiting from disposable populations:
b. "Conquered populations present another example of such a ”disposable‘ group. We have seen, for example, that huge numbers of captives from Mehmet II‘s conquests in Greece were transported to Istanbul in the course of the city‘s repopulation. Some were settled outside the walls as agricultural laborers and some, particularly artisans and craftsmen, were selected to settle inside the city.
The mass deportations by Mehmed II (1451-1481) from Serbia, Albania, Morea and Kaffa to Istanbul are well known. Their chief object was to secure the prosperity of the new capital."
(dev increase in specific trade centers or capitals in game)

Loyalty through displacement
c. "Key examples of this in the Ottoman case include of the movement of Turkish and Tatar tribes from Anatolia into the Balkans, the reassignment of native aristocracies to positions elsewhere within the empire, and the transport of conquered peoples out of their native lands to be settled in the towns and countryside of Anatolia. As Colin Imber expresses concerning the deportation of Turkish knights to Albania in the early 15th century: —What Mehmet clearly did was to remove the fief holders from Saruhan, where they had local connections, and transferred them to Albania, where they had none. Their only source of patronage and protection was the Ottoman Sultan, whose interests they would therefore defend from local challenges.“ The disorienting/reorienting effects of such relocations, however, were not necessarily enduring; the strangeness leveraged here no doubt diminished as the foreigners and their new environment became accustomed to one another." (decreasing influence of estates/increasing their loyalty)

Other options I don't need to quote:
B. Security Objectives
PUSHES: political and military reasons to move people out control of new territories,
part 1: conquered populations control of new territories,
part 2: conquered elites
the issue of internal elites
the issue of the tribes and their elites
PULLS: political and military reasons to move people in
holding new territories placement for internal security

C. Economic Objectives
PUSHES: economic reasons for moving people out
alleviation of population pressure
economic deprivation
PULLS: economic reasons for moving people in
revival of conquered lands
reconstruction and rural economic development
reconstruction and urban economic development
looting labor

As Paramilitary forces
d. "Ottomans seemed to be interested rather in using deportation for military purposes. During this period a number of nomadic people in Anatolia who had proved troublesome were transferred to the Balkans, and having been settled in the border zones were given a special military status. According to the map drawn up by Barkan, who obtained his information from the early 16th century defters, these Turkish nomads, militarily organized under the name yörük, were found primarily in Thrace, in the Rhodopes and on the Southern slopes of the Balkan mountains, in Macedonia and in Dobrudga, all of which were conquered in the second half of the 14th century. Meanwhile, according to the defter of Albania, many deportees from several parts of Asia Minor such as Saruhan, Djanik, Paphlagonia, Tarakliborlu (Bolu) and from Vize (in Thrace) were given timars in Albania between 1415 and 1430. " (instead of assimilation, suppress of local communities by yörük/nomad usage under tımar system)

Here are list of historical population transfers in Balkans and Anatolia and the results
Why and how:

Furthermore:

Labor exploits: (Sephardic Jew detail)

Full list:

Other examples for various reasons such as security, economy, internal autonomy:

Byzantium:

Russian:

Ming:

Inca and Ming:

Paramilitary usage similarities:
Mongols of Ming
Cossacks of Muscovy
Tatars and Türkmens (called Yörük) of Ottomans:

I have used these documents for this thread:

-Ottoman Methods of Conquest by Halil İnalcık
http://media.library.ku.edu.tr/reserve/resfall17_18/Hist 203_KeremTinaz/week3.pdf
-Forced population transfers in early Ottoman Imperial Strategy: a Comparative Approach by Paul Lovell Hooper
http://www.unm.edu/~phooper/thesis_condensed.pdf
-Forced Population Movements in the Ottoman Empire and the Early Turkish Republic: An Attempt at Reassessment through Demographic Engineering by Nesim Şeker
https://journals.openedition.org/ejts/4396
-The Ottoman Auxiliary Units in the Balkans; A Study of the Yörüks in Rumeli and the Descendants of the Conquerors in the 17th and 18th Centuries by Keiko Iwamoto
https://www.academia.edu/19074222/T...the_Conquerors_in_the_17th_and_18th_Centuries

I have couple of different suggestions for Tımar system here and possibility of advisor drafting school called Enderun for Ottomans:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-state-sipahi-sultanate-of-women-era.1068546/

 

[withche.07]

So I gave context what is possible around with this whole new Expulsion of Minorities feature:
1. I think new mechanic should also be used to 'decreasing autonomy of minor culture of an empire', 'decreasing estate influence', 'increasing development in specific centers', 'decreasing minority unrest' and 'increasing security in border regions by populating there with minorities like yörüks etc'
Instead of fully assimilating everyone, we may still have some sort of pop mechanics under estates, we can interact with doing couple of different population management issues.
2. According to documents I used these methods were used by not only Ottomans, also Russians, Mings, Incas (mitimae system), and Byzantium. There are examples in documents and quoted them in images. I just reimagined these mechanics should be applied to nations only that reach status of being 'Empire'. Instead of nonhistorically fully assimilating and converting areas, we can still use population mechanics to control and exploit our regions in Empire! This could be good enough to at least represent minority issues that empires face.
This was explained well in document:

3. Introducing paramilitary forces. We have civilians, soldiers of regular armies, mercenaries. Also paramilitary forces should be introduced to empires. As history shows they were favored by capital, they were allowed to operate freely in minority regions. This would increase depth of game. And these forces may be even new way of crushing rebels. Let us mobilize civilians!

So, let us transfer populations to diffent regions in Empires without majority culture changes.

 

[FantasticFwoosh]

To try and consolidate the points, you're suggesting that we have a more natural system of cultures in EU4 that can be moved around rather than culturally converted?

Wherein Byzantine Influx & Granadan Dispora event might actually directly shift and import the cultural groups onto your own land if you choose to accept to make it more of a tough decision on whether this is viable for you? Random groups of Jewish communities from collapsed ethiopian states like semien / events in the middle east, random gothic/byzantine groups & granadan's to elaborate come offering short term bonuses in exchange for a instant overtake of a site's culture.

Id go a step further to say that instead of just exporting, we can use this internal emigration mechanic to spread a culture into culturally empty lands which have been cleared by use of the convert/remove culture or colonisation, by a system in which cultures have a 'population' density to them that determines how quickly they 'reproduce' depending on how much development they have, single city cultures would need to be high development to branch out (Basque), but it initially doesn't cost anything besides diplo to spread from there outwards in transfers (swap with originating province) or assimilation/expansion which is more like conventional culture conversions.

• New bonus to finishing the Humanitarian group, culture transfers rather than expansion do not invoke unrest from the site being displaced, allowing you to move all of your accepted same-culture provinces further within your states, expelling the existing cultures there in exchange for some diplomatic point cost & time of swapping with emigration + -15% to cost of this.

The gameplay of tolerance regarding the humanitarian group if picked as the sole thing within its field usually restricts the options you have regarding properly assigning your higher productive state provinces if overrun by heretic religions/ or you can't expand into more lucrative land in favour of working over a large easy to handle area, elsewise you can have both religious & humanitarian to fully micro-manage and optimise your populations layout.

Never-ending humanitarian expansionism only works if you play a country with religious tolerance, like America rather than 'religious tolerance' as a mechanic that nearly always justfiies just taking religious ideas and NI countries instead and doing a mass purge to make your provinces fully optimised and habitable. Spain is a perfect example, think of how much heretic land surrounds it in Africa, East Asia and the New World in which toleration wouldn't fly and super orthodox conversion practices make it playable and even profitable to convert (religiously + culturally) as many provinces as possible.

 

[Mingmung]

Cultural majorities weren't replaced, though. In EU4 provinces, that is.

 

[withche.07]

Id go a step further to say that instead of just exporting, we can use this internal emigration mechanic to spread a culture into culturally empty lands which have been cleared by use of the convert/remove culture or colonisation, by a system in which cultures have a 'population' density to them that determines how quickly they 'reproduce' depending on how much development they have, single city cultures would need to be high development to branch out (Basque), but it initially doesn't cost anything besides diplo to spread from there outwards in transfers (swap with originating province) or assimilation/expansion which is more like conventional culture conversions.

• New bonus to finishing the Humanitarian group, culture transfers rather than expansion do not invoke unrest from the site being displaced, allowing you to move all of your accepted same-culture provinces further within your states, expelling the existing cultures there in exchange for some diplomatic point cost & time of swapping with emigration + -15% to cost of this.

Hmm this is different than my original point, but I think I liked your idea.

The gameplay of tolerance regarding the humanitarian group if picked as the sole thing within its field usually restricts the options you have regarding properly assigning your higher productive state provinces if overrun by heretic religions/ or you can't expand into more lucrative land in favour of working over a large easy to handle area, elsewise you can have both religious & humanitarian to fully micro-manage and optimise your populations layout.
Never-ending humanitarian expansionism only works if you play a country with religious tolerance, like America rather than 'religious tolerance' as a mechanic that nearly always justfiies just taking religious ideas and NI countries instead and doing a mass purge to make your provinces fully optimised and habitable. Spain is a perfect example, think of how much heretic land surrounds it in Africa, East Asia and the New World in which toleration wouldn't fly and super orthodox conversion practices make it playable and even profitable to convert (religiously + culturally) as many provinces as possible.

That is problematic. Yeah there must be some new mechanics favoring religious tolerance gameplay to balance against complete conversions.

@Mingmung Yes that's why I imagined internal transfers to handling minority cultures. Currently we can only supress them with regular armies and somewhat non dynamic decrease or increase autonomy buttons.
This won't be as broken as expulsion of minorities or culture conversion. It will be weaker but cheaper way to handle these issues realistically. We need other ways to spend those diplo points

 

[chegitz guevara]

There are a couple in game mechanisms that could be harnessed for this: razing and colonialism.

 

[withche.07]

Exactly. Paramilitaries might be bit hard work to design, but first 3 minority issues (a b c) could be implemented in state window I guess.

for example, reconstruction by heathens in special heathen provinces might be similar to assigning colonist to your own state/province. But it will slowly decrease dev in heathen provinces and will increase dev in greater trading center like Ragusa.
This might be affected by distance.
It will slowly decrease autonomy on heathen provinces as well.

This is what I imagine so.

 

[FantasticFwoosh]

That is problematic. Yeah there must be some new mechanics favoring religious tolerance gameplay to balance against complete conversions.

After playing EU4 wide in a campaign, i can most certainly say that the confuscian religion's harmony assimilation is the only viable way in-game after trialling some Mandate of Heaven which ends tommorow after starting last week ( https://steamcommunity.com/games/236850/announcements/detail/1691566844143864182 ) in a Ming Campaign (humanism is encouraged with a +0.25 harmony gain bonus), heretics above 3.0 toleration (or a fixed amount) due to multiple factors should be accepted but not state religions. This is a comparable alternative at the end of the Humanitarian tree to enable this vs regular play, therefore freeing up a large portion of your land but still being succeptible to having events and ideas damage the balance.

Particularly hitting decisions that hurt your religious tolerance in exchange for buffs.

 

[withche.07]

Let's explain purpose of this mechanic in most basic way.

Let's say you are Russian empire (Muscovite) who has Kazakh minority you don't want to accept, but you just don't want to assimilate them as its too expensive to change culture.
You transfer Kazakh province developments to your other provinces to make their rebellions easy to deal with.
And you transfer other accepted Slavic populations like Novgorodian to your primary trade centers to buff your economy.

So its mimicing pop mechanics without pop percentages or culture transfers.
(All this can be used to kill unrest of other unaccepted religions as well, let's say you are Muslim empire and you can move christian development to other estates, so you won't need to convert every other thing on map)

For paramilitaries, let's say you bring Cossacks to your German provinces as Russian empire. This will totally suppress those provinces, and those estates might be made fightable against inner rebellions. Similar thing was done by Ottomans using Yörüks and Tatars in Balkans.

Think like this: you have different kind of army that can fight only with your rebels/or your own unrest, but not fight against outsiders. Maybe this. IDK. Paramilitaries are definitely hard to design.

 

[otaats]

I feel your posts are underappreciated, as they are always very insightful and thorough. I'd like to ask you a specific thing, about Mehmed's deportations from Serbia. Do you have the information what are the regions in question? The few known cases that i know of are Novo Brdo and Kruševac/Niš. Did the Ottoman Empire deport Slavs from Northern Macedonia? Skopje was quite a large city under Ottoman administration, and later Albanian dominance kinda leads me in believing most of those regions in Serbia and Macedonia were depopulated beforehand.

 

[withche.07]

I mentioned my thread on Johan's remake of Minority Expulsion mechanics. Wanna up my thread for further suggestions from members.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/expel-minorities-changes.1356236/