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all 68 comments

[–]Emotional_Newt_2227 267 points268 points  (0 children)

Europe: 'We need a route to India.'
Ottomans: 'We found something funnier.'

[–]evilhomers 296 points297 points  (10 children)

Anti (western) imperialism activists on social media when a subjugating empire also hates the west: 😍

[–]irradihate 78 points79 points  (4 children)

Nah, all imperialists are bastards.

[–]mother_love- 19 points20 points  (3 children)

90% is a huge group. So we should say almost all imperialist are.....

[–]GAdvance 14 points15 points  (2 children)

Find me an imperialist and I'll find you a bastard.

It's a fundamentally bastardy ideology

[–]azriel_odin 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's the ideology of a cancer cell.

[–]mother_love- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I will get brand .But

Winston Churchil best example

[–]Iron166 11 points12 points  (3 children)

Idk, Ottomans were on good terms with France. Occasionally with British and Germans

[–]Yapludepatte 24 points25 points  (0 children)

The hate if the habsburg is an underrated unifiying factor

[–]Rawislon 8 points9 points  (0 children)

They also were just imperialists, only with different stomping grounds

[–]nuker0S 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah USA is too rn

[–]Charles12_13Kilroy was here 187 points188 points  (3 children)

That’s AI crap isn’t it?

[–]Miserable_Yellow_556[S] 137 points138 points  (1 child)

*slop

[–]Noriaki_Kakyoin_OwO 49 points50 points  (0 children)

He already said AI

[–]Moidada77 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Yep AI has this certain saturation or "stink" to it probably because it's been feeding on itself as much as it has been on people's art.

Hopefully it develops the digital equivalent to a prion

[–]Mg42gun 60 points61 points  (0 children)

It should be "Hide the boys"

[–]Cucumberneck 56 points57 points  (14 children)

Didn't the Ottomans take both, men and women? Or rather boys and girls and castrate the boys for military slavery?

[–]McGillis_is_a_Char 14 points15 points  (0 children)

They did not castrate boys recruited for military/government. Eunuchs were pretty much exclusively used for guarding harems and similar tasks where being 100% that any children were the children of the master of the house. While serving Janissaries were forbidden from marrying often senior devshirme officials would be married to female relatives of the Sultan to reinforce their closeness with the Ottoman dynasty.

I don't think that the devshirme included girls, but slave raiding looked for able bodied slaves of either sex with eye towards sexual slavery for young women. Theoretically raiding inside the Ottoman Empire for slaves was illegal and most white slaves were taken either by pirates or Tatar border raids. Black slaves were usually brought from Sudan.

[–]Lithurgia9999Decisive Tang Victory 29 points30 points  (0 children)

It's about the second, but for humours part it was shortened

[–]bochnik_cz 24 points25 points  (0 children)

They did. Men as workers, sometimes castrated. Some castrated slaves were sold to sultan to be working as guardians of harem. Women were taken to slavery, sold to highest bidder and often used as both workers and for sexual needs for the master because Islam clearly allows that.

The janissaries were not castrated though. They were forcibly converted to Islam, allowed to marry and have children.

[–]Tosimaru 27 points28 points  (8 children)

Military wasn't castrated, they were just forced to convert. While undoubtedly taken from their families without consent, janissaries could hold high ranks in the government and were allowed to have families in later years of the empire.

[–]Senior-Sale273 6 points7 points  (6 children)

> Undoubtedly taken from their families without consent

I love how this is always excused with

> hold high ranks in the government and were allowed to have families in later years of the empire

Oh so it wasn't child slavery then,... lol

[–]verraeteros_ 6 points7 points  (0 children)

"You will be a slave from childhood, own nothing, never start a family and basically live for war only"
-> :(

"But you will have a 0.1% chance of holding a high rank later on"
-> :)

[–]Razor_EDGTea-aboo -4 points-3 points  (4 children)

if you retire at 40 with land thats not really salvery now is it? do you get a land to farm when you retire?

[–]Senior-Sale273 12 points13 points  (2 children)

You wouldn't mind being taken from your family forcibly to slave as a soldier for the enemy. From your 15 to 40 to serve as a soldier. Modern russia has a great career option for you.

[–]Razor_EDGTea-aboo -1 points0 points  (0 children)

oh no i would be very sad

but it wouldnt be total slavery, just a partial one that could be dubbed, government appointed carreer path with good benefits.

[–]88elena -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Modern Ukraine *

[–]LethalOkra 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do I have a say in that? I'd pick my family over any piece of land, personally, sorry,

[–]thissexypoptart 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah it would be super stupid to castrate for the military. Especially before completing puberty, which is when devshirme captives were taken

It was done for harem guards, though, since the logic is you don’t want the male guards doing anything with the harem members.

[–]yourstruly912 20 points21 points  (0 children)

They also ensalved boys for... bathhouses

[–]gallade_samurai 66 points67 points  (14 children)

One this is for certain is that they probably would turn Aztec temples in mosques and build minarets around them, similar to what they did with christian churches.

[–]JRDZ1993 16 points17 points  (6 children)

Nah they'd get the full convert or die treatment as pagans

[–]Rome453 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Yes, but the architecture would be kept (assuming it survived the war).

[–]Leyderpeje 7 points8 points  (1 child)

So...the same thing?

[–]JRDZ1993 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not really, the Spanish in the Americas were a bit schizo about it, the nobles didn't want them to convert so they could keep exploiting them since they got church protection on converting and legally speaking were a standard Spanish subject (in practice racism was still a big thing), this led to quite for extreme the support for Catholicism is in LATAM because the church was often seen to be a legitimate protector against state abuses. There were even separate tax systems in place and pagans weren't subject to the inquisition on the basis that you can't be a heretic if you aren't a Christian.

[–]lordFlaming0 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Ottomans didn't kill non-muslims. They charged them high taxes, so many non-muslims ended up lying to the government saying "i swear i'm muslim, trust me bro"

[–]JRDZ1993 4 points5 points  (0 children)

That applied to Christians and Jews, non Abrahamics never got as good a shake except from in India due to the Mughals having to be pragmatic to stay in power

[–]Medical-Total6034 0 points1 point  (0 children)

afaik this only applied to "people of the book" i. e. Jews and Christians 

[–]TimeRisk2059 7 points8 points  (2 children)

The ottomans generally didn't tear down or convert churches though, christians were allowed to continue to live and practice their religion under ottoman rule.

The one big exception though is Hagia Sofia, but off the top of my head, that's the only example of ottoman conversion of a church into a mosque I can think of.

[–]Medeza123 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Nah they converted a bunch of churches into mosques.

They even converted the Parthenon in Athens into a mosque after it had been converted to a church by the Byzantines.

[–]Razor_EDGTea-aboo 3 points4 points  (3 children)

church not churches as when constantiniyye got conquered only hagia sophia were transitioned

[–]Medeza123 11 points12 points  (2 children)

Not true several major churches were transitioned to mosques.

Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora

Church of the Pammakaristos

Monastery of Christ Pantokrator

Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus

Monastery of Lips

Church of Saint Theodosia

Church of Saint Andrew in Krisei

All in Istanbul.

[–]Immediate_Engine3066 0 points1 point  (1 child)

not all of them, there is at least 100 church in Istanbul active now

[–]Medeza123 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Still these are some major churches. They are not all small parish churches.

One of them the Monastery of Christ Pantokrator was the second largest church complex after the Hagia Sophia.

[–]VegaJuniper 18 points19 points  (1 child)

They would still introduce the virulent Eurasian diseases to the native populations who had no biological immunity to them. One thing is for certain, the resulting death toll would be about the same.

Whether the Ottomans would have been better or worse colonial overlords hardly even matters: Disease killed far more people than any violence, and before the discovery of the germ theory in the 19th century, there was no real way of preventing those deaths as people had no real understanding of how disease spread.

[–]Hackeringerinho 4 points5 points  (0 children)

As a person from the Balkans I'd say at least they would be more chill about religion but worse on the slavery related part.

But it's hard to say really how they would have evolved.

[–]PropJoesChair 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Speaking of being on the wrong side of history....

[–]HomoThatRages 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Nobody would know about anything native americans because they would cease to exist before anyone else in the world would have known about them.

[–]AccountSettingsBot 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I don’t know about what would have happened if any other Islamic empire had found America.

But let me, an Alevi, tell you this: The Ottoman Empire would have had turned America into Islamist TNO Burgundy.

People really underestimate how totalitarian the Ottoman Empire was.

[–]Zalekiv 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Imagine muslim USA attacking christian Iran x)

[–]SirJedKingsdown 5 points6 points  (0 children)

"Chippity choppity, I'm gelding my property!"

[–]Hackeringerinho 0 points1 point  (0 children)

More realistically was if the Chinese found the Americas. That would be funny. They'd get disease debuff, but also war debuff?

[–]TheProfoundDarkness 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Eviler? Ask the Armenian how kind the ottomans were

[–]McGillis_is_a_Char 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The problem with this what if is the question of why the hell would the Ottoman Empire go to America? When Columbus had his first voyage it was 1492. The Ottomans were busy consolidating in Anatolia and worried about the Knights of Rhodes doing pirate stuff. They had just come off the Ottoman-Mamluk War which they lost. Meanwhile the pretender to the throne, Cem Sultan posed a constant threat as the figurehead for a potential crusade.

[–]RyuZero_417Decisive Tang Victory -1 points0 points  (0 children)

What's with sudden surge in ottoman related memes lately? Y'all still salty about constantinople? You know we already have a subreddit for that called r/byzantinememes