Redpill me on the Ottomans Veeky Forums

Redpill me on the Ottomans Veeky Forums
Were they bad compared to other empires in their age, is the balkan rage boner on them justified?

Balkan nations were partially to blame for Ottomans setting foot into Europe in the first place. When you read about initial Ottoman contacts with Balkan kingdoms and principalities it's always them employing Ottomans as mercenaries or just outright calling them to intervene in one of their endless petty feudal conflicts. The reason why Ottomans ever appeared in Balkans in the first place is because a Byzantine throne pretendent brought them there to help him win a civil war.

That said, Ottoman conquest of Balkans was kinda natural. The Balkans were heavily feudalized and divided and Ottomans knew how to exploit it. It's divide et impera 101

But were they as bad as the remove kebab memes lead me to believe? aside from imposing Islam the balkan countries did get to preserve their cultures, what other aspects of Ottoman rule were disliked by Balkan

Outside urban areas islamization wasn't that big. Islam in the Balkans brought by Turks was mainly urban religion. Rural areas remained Christian and didn't mingle much with Turks except when they had to pay their "leave me alone" tax and devshirme There weren't many ethnic Turks in the Balkans anyway, most of the "Turks" in Balkans from 16th century onward were just islamized Slavs, Greeks and Albanians.

If you wanted to progress any further in society, basic prerequisite was to convert to Islam. Naturally this attracted many opportunists, also in some cases former Christian nobility converted to preserve their lands and privileges. Such is the example of Bosnia where many old medieval noble families converted to Islam and became Ottoman beys and pashas. If you wanted to stay Christian your best bet would be to try your luck as a merchant or join the Church. Christian Greek and Armenian merchants were notorious in Ottoman Empire for their shrewdness and wealth. Also Orthodox churches were usually semi-protected by the Sultan. They obviously didn't have many rights compared to Muslims but could still hold authority over Christian subjects and preserve their estates and holdings.

Ottoman rule was actually relatively mild in the first few centuries, due to the general prosperity of the empire and the tight control the Sultan had over the provinces. As the rot started setting in though, Constantinople gradually lost the power to effectively curb the power and excesses of regional governors, leading to a ton of corruption and tyranny on their part.

Bad, as in?
Cruel? No, they were quite tolerant of their Christian subjects; however, they had special taxes for them.
Militarily? They were a threat early on, and were really strong for some time, but slowly after the empire started weakening

>be Ottomans
>say you won`t kill anyone if they surrender now
>still kill everyone
Thank god the austrian army wich manages to fight itself by accident held them off Europe

They were pretty fucking bad. I mean Europeans get demonised constantly for far less egregious acts of cruelty and treachery in the new world than what the ottomans did to the venetian garrison and population of famagusta, let alone the Bulgarian horrors or the periodic massacres of Greek and Armenian speaking Christians.

That said some early sultans weren't that bad. A couple even patronised mount athos.

>they had special taxes for them

'cause they didn't have to fight in the army. Europe let people pay not to be drafted too.

There's no because. It's a non sequitur. The jizya was enforced on non Muslims to coerce them to convert, just like the laws against repairing churches etc.

> they were quite tolerant of their Christian subjects

>laws against repairing churches
IIRC Christians could repair and rebuild churches if they found a Turkish/Muslim person who could vouch in front of authorities that there was once a church standing there and then. Or something like that, could be wrong, it's been a long time since i've read Inalcik.

>Young turks
>Ottomans

Yes.

No

Well that's bullshit but okay.

RIP THEIR FLESH
BURN THEIR HEARTS
STAB THEM IN THE EYES
RAPE THEIR WOMEN AS THEY CRY
HAIL AND KILL

Non troll question: Was it really a genocide?
I'm not saying that a lot of people didn't die, that's obviously the case, but I'm wondering if it was intentional. From what I remember, the Ottomans tried to deport the armenians somewhere else but the deportation conditions were so horrible that many armenians died during their deportation.
So were their deaths intentionnal or not?

t*rks are cockroaches

>'cause they didn't have to fight in the army.
No, only their children which the Ottomans took from them as slaves did, much more humane.

>Non-troll question
>Immediately asks a troll question

>Immediately asks a troll question
Where? I was just asking if the deaths were something that was planned by the ottomans that's it. A genocide is the intentionnal extermination of a people. I wanted to know if the armenian genocide was an actual genocide or a massive deportation that went wrong.

They deported women and children. They killed adult men outright. It was a genocide by any means.

Lives of civilians and garrisons in sieges were always forfeit. Slaughter and rape is common place in sieges all the way into Napoleonic wars.

they specifically tried to avoid conversion because of the amount of revenue they would lose. That's the reason why most of the balkans are still christian today

Because of the media with their word "genocide" and over-simplifying history, many ignore that the WWI violence against Christians in Asia was not a sudden event but was the high point of a series of incidents from the first Greek War of Independence until arguably now with ISIS.

The equality of non-Muslims was a major political topic in the Ottoman Empire for decades prior to WWI, so it is quite likely that by the start of WWI at least some intolerant leaders were eager to take lands from the Christians in Asia and replace the peoples present with Kurds, Turks and Arabs. That alone counts as a genocide, then there's the cultural destruction.

The word genocide was named after, as far as I know, the massacre of Assyrians in 1933, and like I said that's part of a series of massacres over perhaps a century by then.

>The word genocide was named after, as far as I know, the massacre of Assyrians in 1933, and like I said that's part of a series of massacres over perhaps a century by then.
Nah, it was explicitly the Armenian genocide that the term was coined for.

>death march
>deportation