Some change to Anatolia

[Grand Historian]

I agree completely with this tread, the anatolian peninsula must be revised, also because I love to play here and i'm a fan of the ottoman and the byzantine history.
I think that now, with the new development system for the provinces is not so difficult to add regions of other cultures in anatolia. Just increase development of the Ottoman provinces and so the Ottomans will not be nerfed. Also because actually I think they must be enhanced to become more powerful as they are now.

About cultures, I think that at least Smyrna must be greek, (in this cultural map, in 1916 It is marked as a completely Greek city, like Adalia, just imagine five hundred years before...) If we wan to be realistic, Smyrna, Biga and Bolu should be of greek culture at this time. But...
Canik and Sinop should be Pontic.
Then should add the Cappadocian greek culture, now the cappadocian greeks are almost extinct, but in 1916 they occupied the entire area of Kayseri, an so I would like to have them in the game, in the province of Kayseri, or Kaiseri and Bozok. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cappadocian_Greeks with a culture tag called "Cappadocia"
Then Adana and Erzurum should be of Armenian culture, and Erzincan and Malatya of kurdish culture.

Last thing, Ottoman empire was NOT Turkey, the Ottoman Empire was a dynastic state in which the Byzantine and the Eastern tradition were merged in a single state united under the islamic religion and ruled by a turkish dinasty who claimed to descent from the Komnenos of Byzantium. But they did not have the "nation-state" consciousness, they did not consider the Ottoman Empire the empire of all Turks like France is the nation of the French ad Germany of the Germans, for example they call the less civilized turks of eastern Anatolia "Savages" or "Barbarian" with the same words used by the byzantines. National consciousness in their land awoke in the early modern era, and it would cause the fragmentation of their empire.
About Turkey, I think that must be added as a decision like forming Egypt, if a Turkish nation controls all anatolia and is actually westernized, it can become Turkey.

I can agree with most of that, except the Turkey part. Rather, because if Karaman/Candar replaced the Ottomans as the primary Turkish state, it's highly unlikely they would have been different from the Dynastic/State perspective that they were, why not add in a decision like the 'Kingdom of God' that lets one of the Beyliks become the primary culture of Turkish instead of the Ottomans? This would let them keep their unique flag and resolve the issue of having Ottoman separatists when, for all intents and purposes, you're the only Turkish state left and would be viewed by them as being legitimate.

 

[Straigthtsilver]

I can agree with most of that, except the Turkey part. Rather, because if Karaman/Candar replaced the Ottomans as the primary Turkish state, it's highly unlikely they would have been different from the Dynastic/State perspective that they were, why not add in a decision like the 'Kingdom of God' that lets one of the Beyliks become the primary culture of Turkish instead of the Ottomans? This would let them keep their unique flag and resolve the issue of having Ottoman separatists when, for all intents and purposes, you're the only Turkish state left and would be viewed by them as being legitimate.

Seeing as I've been gearing up for a game as the White Hand of Saruhan, I really like this idea. Heck, Karaman even has a national idea which references them becoming the 'True Heirs of the Seljuk Dynasty'!

While it may be true that the Ottomans once held most of Anatolia prior to the start date, what's logically stopping another Beylik from conquering the others and essentially becoming the same thing? Nothing about the Ottomans circa 1444 marks them out as the exclusive torchbearers of Turkish culture.

Having it be dynamic would not only add an interesting element in the region, but it might even compel the somewhat lackadaisical Ottoman AI to unite Anatolia faster.

 

[.Me]

Oh not this again.

I'll just copy my post from the thread we had less than two weeks ago.
___

The Turkification of Anatolia was not a continual process from 1071 until 1924. it was largely over by the end of the 14th Century, and Turks (i.e. Muslims, since ethnicity was not considered important and thus not recorded by contemporaries) were a majority in every province in Western Anatolia in 1444 according to the best estimates of modern historians. The last major population shakeup to hit the region was Timur's invasion, which was one of the catalysts that turned Smyrna Turkish as many of the remaining Greeks fled when he sacked the city. According to early 16th Century Ottoman censues, Smyrna (the whole district, not just the town) had 5900 Muslim households and 41 Christian. One modern estimate (Olnon) places the permanent Muslim percentage of the town in 1678 at 80%, and the largest minority were Jews at 15%. Censuses show Sinope province in the early 16th Century having 4,129 Muslim households and 552 Christian. However, the Pontic region was the section of the country where Greek Christian minorities remained the strongest, and many may have escaped the tax collectors due to the nature of the terrain. Nevertheless it seems to be the case that they were outnumbered even there by Muslims during this period.

Now, having Sinope as Pontic Greek culture would be a decent way to represent those minorities that existed throughout the region, but it's not technically accurate for any one province.

Indeed, trybald's right in that the crux of Vryonis' thesis is that the decline of the Byzantine Church and its social institutions in Anatolia, along with the trepidations of the Turkish nomads were the primary causes of the decline of Greek culture. The Ottomans reestablished order and after 1453 were united with the Orthodox Church rather than fighting against it, preserving what little had survived of the Greek Christian population. Nonetheless they were a minority everywhere, and only returned to Anatolia in significant numbers during the 19th Century.

___

tl;dr, projecting a twentieth century map backwards 500 years is silly, and most of the Greek population of the early twentieth century came to Anatolia as migrants from the Greek mainland during the nineteenth century, not remnants from Byzantine Anatolia.

From what i remember Smyrna during the ottoman period was called "Gavur Izmir" that mean "the infidel smyrna" due to the large presence of Greeks, jews and levantine christians, but yes, this do not mean that the non islamic population was the majority... But maybe you remeber badly about the census, because the first ottoman census based on ethnicity was made only in 1880, after the tanzimat... And the ottoman census shows that the Greeks were half of the population of Smyrne. Before, as you know, there was only the millet system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rum_Millet And based only on religion, and this makes all the thing very vague, because there are many muslim greeks, or turkish christian, like the Karamanlides. And the information on this place is generally very poor.
But i've read in many sources that until the 19° and 20° century in many places of the western anatolia and pontus the greek/pontic people was still very big, also the greek census of 1912 (and the american one) shows that the Greek population is much more compared to that of the ottoman census, someone can argue that It was for nationalistic reasons but I don't think so, and i'm not a crazy byzantinophile, and as far as I love the Greek culture i'm not even a greek, certainly not a greek nationalist XD. In fact the sources are conflicting, but calculating the number of the Greek population fled from Anatolia towards Greece, plus the number of the dead in the struggles that would lead to the genocide of the Greeks of Asia Minor and Pontus, and the fact that you can not deny that the Turkish presence in Anatolia was growing and not decreasing in the last centuries, I think that in the fourteenth century in all that regions the Greeks were the majority.
(I've read only now the edited part) About the fact that they are migrants of the 19th century, we can not say it, the big dialectal differences between the Greeks of anatolia, the particular cultural characteristics that vary from region to region (like differences in the traditional greek dance), or the differences in traditional clothing and musical instruments, however, shows continuity. But I can not say to have the certainty when the sources are scarce, maybe i'm wrong, I don't know.

https://books.google.it/books?id=EG6MnjtYKIoC&q=greek population majority anatolia smyrne XV century&dq=greek population majority anatolia smyrne XV century&hl=it&sa=X&ei=NGODVfXOM-LnygPYgZTQAg&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBA

 

[Chamboozer]

From what i remember Smyrna during the ottoman period was called "Gavur Izmir" that mean "the infidel smyrna" due to the large presence of Greeks, jews and levantine christians, but yes, this do not mean that the non islamic population was the majority... But maybe you remeber badly about the census, because the first ottoman census based on ethnicity was made only in 1880, after the tanzimat... And the ottoman census shows that the Greeks were half of the population of Smyrne. Before, as you know, there was only the millet system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rum_Millet And based only on religion, and this makes all the thing very vague, because there are many muslim greeks, or turkish christian, like the Karamanlides. And the information on this place is generally very poor.

It was called Gavur Izmir because of the large population of European merchants which came into existence over the course of the seventeenth century. Greek migration over the nineteenth century only added to this, and changed its character.

"Ottoman censuses only recorded religion and not ethnicity, so they could have been Greek Muslims" is the normal fallback argument for people who hold this position, but there are several problems with it.

1. It's entirely speculative. There's no evidence whatsoever which shows that any significant proportion of Muslims of Izmir spoke Greek.
2. It goes against modern day scholarship, which sees conversion to Islam and adoption of the Turkish language as two things which go hand-in-hand. Vryonis argued that the process of change took approximately three generations between conversion and linguistic assimilation.
3. Contemporaries didn't make this distinction at all. Both Ottomans and European observers imagined all Muslims and Orthodox Christians together as a single community with no deference whatsoever to ethnicity. A Muslim was a Turk. An Orthodox Christian was a Greek. No room for nuance here.

As an aside, the "Millet System" was a historiographical myth. It didn't exist as an organizational concept before the eighteenth century.

But i've read in many sources that until the 19° and 20° century in many places of the western anatolia and pontus the greek/pontic people was still very big, also the greek census of 1912 (and the american one) shows that the Greek population is much more compared to that of the ottoman census, someone can argue that It was for nationalistic reasons but I don't think so, and i'm not a crazy byzantinophile, and as far as I love the Greek culture i'm not even a greek, certainly not a greek nationalist XD. In fact the sources are conflicting, but calculating the number of the Greek population fled from Anatolia towards Greece, plus the number of the dead in the struggles that would lead to the genocide of the Greeks of Asia Minor and Pontus, and the fact that you can not deny that the Turkish presence in Anatolia was growing and not decreasing in the last centuries, I think that in the fourteenth century in all that regions the Greeks were the majority.

Again, you're looking only at demographic data from the twentieth century and pretending it's in any way applicable to the fifteenth. It's not. No one doubts that there were plenty of Greeks in Anatolia by the year 1900, but among historians it's agreed that there were proportionally less in 1500. You mustn't be fooled by a teleological view of history - just because Anatolia ultimately ended up Turkish doesn't mean that the process was as simple as a gradual decline of Greeks and gradual increase in Turks all throughout its history, as if each year the percentage of Turks was destined to tick upward by 0.1%. The reality of it was much more complex than that.

To quote Vyronis, whose work represents the most definitive study on this subject:

"The Ottoman sultans practiced the policy of transplanting populations, and Balkan Greeks and other Christians were on occasion settled in Asia Minor, but there was also an important migratory current of Greeks from the Aegean isles as well as from other regions. The lush riverine valleys of western Anatolia offered greater economic opportunities for the islanders, and as they were only a few miles away many Greeks emigrated to Asia Minor during the centuries of Ottoman rule. In this manner began a movement that reversed the exodus of Greeks from western Anatolia occasioned by the Turkish invasion of the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Many of these Christians gradually made their way inland as merchants, a movement that received considerable impetus with the building of the railroads in the latter half of the nineteenth century."

Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 448.

Also I see you improved your Turkish

Thanks, I've had quite a few opportunities to practice it.

 

[Demetrios]

1. Those cores are certainly not historical. The Brittanica clearly states (http://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Ankara) that those Beys became vassals of the Otto's, and still had their own armies. So that means no cores in EU4.
2. Well, I don't have any population numbers available, nor think the Ottomans had an administration that was detailed enough to include ethnicity, but I guess that only Trebizond to have a Pontic Greek majority is not historical.

Karaman was definitely fully conquered in 1399 and its Bey was held prisoner in Bursa from 1399 to 1402.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karamanids
(check the ruler list, the text of the article itself quietly skips over those years)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmet_II_of_Karaman

 

[Grand Historian]

Thanks, I've had quite a few opportunities to practice it.

So... You're not a Turk?

Anyways, I personally think that Anatolia is a case example of why there needs to be mechanics for having more than one religion/culture per province. I suggested that minorities be based off basetax, a la Civ 5, but really I would welcome any change that adds dynamics to it.

 

[KapiKolu]

Anyways, I personally think that Anatolia is a case example of why there needs to be mechanics for having more than one religion/culture per province. I suggested that minorities be based off basetax, a la Civ 5, but really I would welcome any change that adds dynamics to it.

Not just Greeks or Turks.

We have Lazlar , Zazalar.

And we have Aleviler.I dont know why paradox didnt put them.They are the second large sect(like Sunni , Shia) in Anatolia.
They are different from Shia , i know wiki will say they are Shia but no.
Their way of worshipping is very different from Shia
You want to know the biggest difference ? Our place of worship is mosque.Shia Islam's place of worship is mosque too , but Aleviler ? Their place of worship is Cemevi(s)
Cem means ''meeting'' in Arabic btw
Yavuz Sultan Selim did kill many of them you know.Qizilbash massacre.

@Chamboozer Bak arkadaşım böyle bir şey için hiçbir kanıt yoktur. Böyle konuşarak kimseyi ikna edemezsin aslında herkesin gözünde deli görüneceksin.

-Bak arkadaşım böyle bir şey için hiç bir kanıtın yok.Böyle konuşarak kimseyi ikna edemezsin aslında herkesin gözünde deli görüneceksin.

That would fit better (You dont have to use -tur , it sounds odd )

Edit : Just adding one more thing

 

[celethiel]

Karaman was definitely fully conquered in 1399 and its Bey was held prisoner in Bursa from 1399 to 1402.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karamanids
(check the ruler list, the text of the article itself quietly skips over those years)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmet_II_of_Karaman

My answer to this... yes however this either puts the Beys as Vassals to the Ottoman Empire, or the Karamanids having a treaty with the Ottomans that one would think would last a similar length of Time as the Polish/Hungarian Crusaders....or both..
It also states on many of these Beyliks that they were absorbed into the Realm which means they didn't have cores they were simply vassals, first of the Sultanate of Rum, then the Successor of the Ottomans

1. My position is either A. They should have the Beyliks that are Free as Vassals without Ottoman Cores. But they should be rebellious and be asking for the Malmuk intervention...most if not all of them... and Karaman should have a peace treaty with the Ottomans for the same amount of time as the Polish/Ottoman Crusaders.
Or B... Just remove the Cores from the Beyliks...
2. The Minors should form the Sultanate of Rum in my opinion, if they manage to take enough terrritory in the Turkish Lands... Turkey wasn't created as pointed out until the 1900's. And the Sultanate of Rum, existed at one point, it's something people especially rulers of the area knew about it.
And No Ottomans shouldn't be the primary Culture of Turkish... they were one Beylik that Grew far more powerful than the others. Indeed Turkish probably should have broken up... probably into Karamani Turkish, the area of Cilicia should be Armenian with a Cilician Core....there should be probably a little more Greek and Pontic Cores on the mutual Coasts... Or how about Hittite Turkish just for amusement sake. I think Ottoman Turk should only be a small part of the Beylik Lands... mostly his own subgroup.
3. I think if you form Turkey as any of those it should be forcing them like Burgundy to release all their none Culture Cores...i personally rather see the Sutlanate of Rum form though
3. I saw someone mention Well you know these populations weren't constant and were smaller in the 1400's (ie Game Start) than they were in the 1800s of the above Map... So... Massacres anyone...very BIG ones... How long ago before the Ottoman Beylik Came to power (not just existed) did the Byzantines comepletely leave Anatolia...? and even then there should have been a significant population in some more Greek/Pontic lands as well as other previous cultural States.
4. it wouldn't surprise me that they did...census muslims verses nonmuslims... special Religion tax anyone... if you're Muslim of our Brand your Exempt... if you're Othodox Christian or anything else pay more!. Young man who's obviously Greek Raises hand: I am Sunni! *Thinks: Yesterday i was Orthodox but I wasn't very devout...*

So... You're not a Turk?

Anyways, I personally think that Anatolia is a case example of why there needs to be mechanics for having more than one religion/culture per province. I suggested that minorities be based off basetax, a la Civ 5, but really I would welcome any change that adds dynamics to it.

Possibly in Event mechanics... for instance gradually replacing Hungarian Culture in Transylvania with Romanian over time.... perhaps something like decisions or Event based Relocations by the ottoman Empire in certain Provinces......

to this little controversy of Nationalism... verses Ottoman Haters...
I am an American...i have ancestors all over Europe... However my grandfather came from Galacia in the pre-ww1 Era... so i am either Polish or Austrian or something else in there... however I don't "love" Or "hate" on Austria.. Nor am i especially Nationalistic towards my own country that I now live in... Because I know my country's history and Modern times and Frankly it's embaressing... and so is most Countries really when you look at it, INCLUDING Turkey's You Punted out your own Ruler and exiled him and his Descendants, and still do, you massacred the Armenians in such a way that the Germans got the idea from you...gods knows what else you have done and do...and Guess what... almost every other power and country throughout history has done so at one time or another....the Balkans aren't any better or the Caucasians...or the English, French, Irish, Americans, the Byzantine/Greeks... or the Creme Puff Nationalists...

Don't get me wrong, there is a historical Romance in my mind for the Ottomans, the Prussian Germans, the Mughals, the Confederate States, Burgundy, Byzantium, Granada, and a dozen other places...it doesn't make me blind to them or Nationalist or otherwise argue for them... (unless i make a bad habit of playing them often and feel that another nation suddenly gets a advantage that they shouldn't have) I however haven't played Ottomans in game more than twice... for the same reason as not playing France, Castile, Portugal, Moskovy, England or Austria... Because they're a great power Blob...and for the Ottomans, I like Byzantium More than the Ottoman Empire... always have...just as i like Granada more than Castile... (actually I like Granada way more than Castile proportionately over the Byzantium/Ottoman thing...which is funny because i've played Granada WAAAY less)

 

[bizkit]

Why fix something that is not broken? Ottoman AI is in the best form so far since the beginning of EU4. Let's try not to re-balance things again.
They have precious time to spend, so let's give them more pressure to fix Naval and Espionage system.

 

[Chamboozer]

So... You're not a Turk?

Not yet.

 

[.Me]

It was called Gavur Izmir because of the large population of European merchants which came into existence over the course of the seventeenth century. Greek migration over the nineteenth century only added to this, and changed its character.

"Ottoman censuses only recorded religion and not ethnicity, so they could have been Greek Muslims" is the normal fallback argument for people who hold this position, but there are several problems with it.

1. It's entirely speculative. There's no evidence whatsoever which shows that any significant proportion of Muslims of Izmir spoke Greek.
2. It goes against modern day scholarship, which sees conversion to Islam and adoption of the Turkish language as two things which go hand-in-hand. Vryonis argued that the process of change took approximately three generations between conversion and linguistic assimilation.
3. Contemporaries didn't make this distinction at all. Both Ottomans and European observers imagined all Muslims and Orthodox Christians together as a single community with no deference whatsoever to ethnicity. A Muslim was a Turk. An Orthodox Christian was a Greek. No room for nuance here.

As an aside, the "Millet System" was a historiographical myth. It didn't exist as an organizational concept before the eighteenth century.



Again, you're looking only at demographic data from the twentieth century and pretending it's in any way applicable to the fifteenth. It's not. No one doubts that there were plenty of Greeks in Anatolia by the year 1900, but among historians it's agreed that there were proportionally less in 1500. You mustn't be fooled by a teleological view of history - just because Anatolia ultimately ended up Turkish doesn't mean that the process was as simple as a gradual decline of Greeks and gradual increase in Turks all throughout its history, as if each year the percentage of Turks was destined to tick upward by 0.1%. The reality of it was much more complex than that.

To quote Vyronis, whose work represents the most definitive study on this subject:

"The Ottoman sultans practiced the policy of transplanting populations, and Balkan Greeks and other Christians were on occasion settled in Asia Minor, but there was also an important migratory current of Greeks from the Aegean isles as well as from other regions. The lush riverine valleys of western Anatolia offered greater economic opportunities for the islanders, and as they were only a few miles away many Greeks emigrated to Asia Minor during the centuries of Ottoman rule. In this manner began a movement that reversed the exodus of Greeks from western Anatolia occasioned by the Turkish invasion of the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Many of these Christians gradually made their way inland as merchants, a movement that received considerable impetus with the building of the railroads in the latter half of the nineteenth century."

Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 448.



Thanks, I've had quite a few opportunities to practice it.

But Vryonis work was criticised on various occasions by claude cahen , was revisited by long time, because he makes the mistake of a romantic vision according to which the Turks invaders enslaved and exterminated Christians mercilessly, his work is based on the supposed absence of a local ecclesiastical hierarchy, and on many writings and letter from that period who followed the Byzantine rhetoric (example "The terrible arab wolves..." etc..), and that deliberately worsened the situation of the anatolian christian to push patriarchy to additional economic aid. Instead the two groups have lived side by side and the Christian would have integrated very slowly in the turkish state, the living examples of this are the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karamanlides .
http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.co...ljuk-mongol-ottoman.html#sthash.N1wYmelQ.dpuf
I also noticed this https://www.islam-anatolia.ac.uk/ very interesting source

I cited the chapter "The greek orthodox communities of Nicaea and Ephesus under turkish rule in the fourteen century" of book "Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia" of Bruno De Nicola, and Sara Nur Yıldız:
"The impression that the christian communities had established stable [hierarchical] structures by the middle of the fourteen century is confirmed by the metropolitan of Thessaloniki, Gregory Palmas. In his letter to his flock in Thessaloniki, he gives a detailer account of his ottoman captivity from march 1354 until spring 1355. Palamas stated that falling into captivity was due to god providence. His captivity was not only a punishment for his sins, [...] It seems that Palamas also interpreted the fact that the christians lived side by side with the turks in this way. While in captivity of the turks, before finally arriving at Nicea, Palamas came into contact with various christian communities as he passed through western Anatolia. Everyvere he went he found himself looked after by members of the christian communities who were eager to profit from the unexpected presence of one of the leading orthodox scholars of the time and who took care of him. The military superiority of the turks was the major concern of these christians. While in Pegai (Biga) were he resided among local christians, Palamas found himself under the cares of a certain Maurosoumes, the head of the christian community holding the title of Hetaireiarches. Palamas even preached in the local church. Etc... [...] In contrast of the accounts presented above, Palamas provides us with amples evidence of the presence of christians in these regions. Indeed in his account christians have to be found everywhere, in every city and even in the sultan's court. Palamas also provides detail of the internal structure of these communities: while in Pegai the local community was under the direction of a secular dignitary the hetaireiarches Maurosoumes, whereas in Nicaea the christian lived in their own quarter probably still under the direction of a krites.
Perhaps the Theophanes of Nicaea, the metropolitan of Nicaea from about the 1364 until 1380, accepted this modus vivendi and thus never attempted to take up his see in Nicaea."

Against the teory of the successive greek migration there is also the still living presence of greek communities in Caucasus, Syria, and the Christian communities of Egypt. And until the turn of the eighth century the coptic christians were still the majority in Egypt. Although I do not deny that this migration is occurred, but I think it went to strengthen the Greek communities in this regions.
(another thing to say is that the city of Halicarnassus remained independent until 1517, protected by the Knights of Rhodes, other proof of a city whose population remained Greek for long time.)

In short, certainly in many places there was a fast Turkification but overall in many areas the presence of the Greek, Armenian and Kurdish element is continuous and uninterrupted. Then again, in the presence of conflicting sources, everyone believes in the theory that seems the most logical. My intention is not to prove that I'm righ, but just to clarify why I believe in a particular version of events.
History, as usual, is very vague is open to interpretation XD

 

[seriousgigi]

you massacred the Armenians in such a way that the Germans got the idea from you...gods knows what else you have done and do

see full list:

list of all genocides committed by turkey
1913 - greek genocide
1915 - armenian genocide
1914 - assyrian genocide
1918 - pontus genocide
2005 - chicken and turkey genocide (30k turkeys and 1 million chickens cruelly massacred by turkey)