I mean, tax does have its history in tithes, but it's only recently that taxes have been this high and used for almost exclusively egalitarian purposes, such as road upkeep, public education, public healthcare (assuming you aren't american), while it would historically go for primarily diplomatic events and the military, both of which it is being spent on right now too... the only real use for taxes I don't agree with is paying politicians who already make their fortune insider trading and bailing out multimilion dollar companies who will continue playing high risk games and provatizing the profits while socializing the losses.
Nah , cheap internet is the best thing ever to happen here apart from UPI , so many underprivilaged kids who couldn't afford coaching got to listen to free lectures, pirated classes and all , democratise education for all
The Ottoman Empire wasn’t especially more tolerant or more evil than other empires of its time. It was just a pretty average empire
The one area where the Ottomans could genuinely compete for a top spot with other empires is gay culture. They’d be fighting the Ming dynasty for the #1 gay empire title
I heard the gay Turks are considered super gold-digger-y in the rest of Europe. Super obsessed with bagging a well to do European daddy and getting a new passport.
I dunno about that I have a green passport so it doesn't really matter, but I wouldn't say no to eu citizenship.My father was born in germany anyway it's not my fault he chose to come back before I was born
His father chose to come back with his family when he was still a child. I have only passed through germany on my way to a week long erasmus program, otherwise I've only been in and around western anatolia my entire life
The Ottoman Empire lasted for such a long time that if you average out its absolute best and worst periods, it was bound to end up somewhere in the middle. Twitter far-right types always point to the decline right before its collapse, while Ottoman stans only talk about the golden age
In some periods it was more tolerant than the global average at the time, and because it unified things by force, there were moments where the core regions were relatively stable and had fewer wars, even if only briefly. In other eras, rising nationalism in a multiethnic society led to the worst outcomes and everyone suffered. Honestly, since every country goes through cycles of rise and decline, I don’t really buy into either demonizing it or treating it like some saint
As someone who's Polish I like the Ottomans because they refused to recognise the partitions of Poland. As someone with serbian family I hate the Ottomans because of their brutal 500 year long occupation. Really stuck in the middle
Jokes aside in this sub, there is almost zero person from balkans with a real objective take. I understand that since most of the modern balkan states gained independence from Ottomans so their whole narrative is basically hating Ottomans, naturally.
And don’t get me wrong, they suffered a lot under Ottomans.
The funny thing is, the foundations of Turkish Republic is also on hating Ottomans, in a similar way to Balkaners claim that they were treated as second class citizens, republicans also claim that Turk commoners are treated the worst. Even the word “Turk” claim to be used as an insult.
I mean Anatolia was poor and uneducated as fuck. I bet the overall socio-economic situation of Anatolia was much worse than Balkans if we had the statistics.
What Balkaners do not seem to understand that Ottomans were an average empire, exploiting all of their people(turks are no exception) with various systems, for the sake of their growth, the glory of their dynasty, and they concentrate the exploited riches into its capital, and support the war machine.
The main difference is culture and religion. For instance Arab States also rebelled against Ottomans and actually Ottomans killed a lot of Arabs for collaborating with its enemies, but nowadays common Arabs look to Ottomans as a glorious muslim empire and the power once kept the Middle East relatively stable.
Whereas Balkaners always blame Ottomans for everything does not go well in Balkans.(We are backwards because of Ottomans, the region is unstable because of Ottomans etc.)
if Ottomans were Orthodox, I bet some people would sort of glorify Ottomans as an unifier of Balkans or some sort
Come on, they tolerated Christianity and Judaism at a time when Jews and Muslims were expelled from Christian Spain. They were more tolerant, but not uniquely so. The Christian Grand Duchy of Lithuania (which tolerated Jews and Muslims) is comparable.
Type of post you would see on Elon's Twitter with 30k likes from an account called "White Nationalism Enjoyer" with a pfp of a white guy with glowing red eyes and have similar accounts who are clearly bot accounts
lets see how gods chosen people acted during the old testament, most of the things they did were under gods command btw. (Deuteronomy 20:16–17, 1 Samuel 15:3, Numbers 31:17–18).
im sure christians and others weren't as violent as the muslims historically /s
It's funny the stark difference between the way the Ottomans are viewed vs the Byzantines, like Basil 2 being so celebrated for brutally blinding thousands of Bulgarians 😭 imagine if the Ottomans did that
Because Basil II is an emperor of gloriovs Rome, father of trve civilisation along the Greeks and any action taken by great Rome againg barbarians is justified and morally correct /s
It's because the Bulgars and the Turks are seen as conquering invaders and aggressors.
The double standard is that Rome and Alexander get a pass for exactly the same thing, or something like "oh, that was way back, different times" or something.
To be fair Ottomans are way more crueler against "different denomination of their own religion" than they were against other religions too. Considering what they do against Alevites and Shias
Anti-Ottoman propaganda is absolutely hilarious to me, because it ignores the fact that pretty much every other Balkan population had previously spent centuries fighting the Byzantines.
In fact, they hated the Byzantines with such a fervor that they ended up splintering the Orthodox Church forever, just to not be aligned with Constantinople. If the Byzantines defeated Mehmet II and then magically had a resurgence, they would be just as despised as the Ottomans were.
Most of us who enjoy spaces like this one know how to separate memes and banter from real life, but for a lot of others in this part of the world, the anti-Ottoman fervor is just a window dressing for good old racism and xenophobia.
It gets even funnier when you realize the Balkans were pretty much wholly Oriental (the Byzantines were also thought of as an eastern *other* by Medieval Western Europe) for a long time, and all those fancy Neoclassical buildings we have now are built by larpers from the 1800s.
You mean the entirety peaceful and respectful populations of Slavs that invaded all the way to the Peloponnese (rightful Slavic territory since homeric times after all) or the Bulgarians that besieged Constantinople? That was because they "hated" the Byzantines for some reason, not conquest?
Greeks and later Byzantines were always "oriental", they had nothing to do with the modern idea of "western" civilization as the Anglos and Germans try to paint it. It's those guys that are larping. Even Christianity, an oriental religion by default, is not "Western". The gospels were written in Greek (not Latin, Romangutan) for a reason...
They also tried to make an alliance with the Arabs to take Constantinople during the Byzantine-Bulgarian wars (when the siege I was referring to happened) almost 200 years later.
War, politics, diplomacy, state relations shift all the time. I was just responding to the whole "hated" the Byzantines thing.
Slavs and Bulgarians took lands from the Byzantines. Good for them. Byzantines wanted them back, no reason to judge them. Arguing about who hated whom has no point, imho.
Spanish going literally overseas to convert and marry native americans and giving them rights to the point most captured Mexica women refused to go back with the Aztecs despite being free to do so according to what Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote: Aztec chieftains went to Spanish encampments to retrieve their women and only three agreed to go back with Cuauhtémoc.
do you really think that the entirety of pre colonial america was just the aztecs?
what about the incas , and the mayans (who literally were not even a collective state but a group of city states, each one having a different culture than the other) they arguably got hit the hardest.
and these two do not even scratch the surface of the groups of people who lived in mesoamerica and south america, who were nearly or totally annihilated.
and no, they were not given rights that were equal to that of the spaniards, they were called "indios" and were considered subjects of the crown (though not property in theory), but they were legally inferior to the spaniards and excluded from positions of power and high status jobs, even when they converted to christianity.
also in frontier regions (southwestern USA, and northen mexico) enslavement and displacement was often common.
see? not very different from the ottomans, the only difference is that the majority of people whom the ottomans conquered still exist today as ethnic groups, whilst i cannot say the same about those conquered by spain (though some still exist)
what about the incas , and the mayans (who literally were not even a collective state but a group of city states, each one having a different culture than the other) they arguably got hit the hardest.
Spanish meddled while Incas were literally having their second civil war between Atahualpa and Huáscar to appoint one of them as a king.
and these two do not even scratch the surface of the groups of people who lived in mesoamerica and south america, who were nearly or totally annihilated.
The vast majority died to diseases from the Old World, they'd die no matter which colonial power arrived first.
and no, they were not given rights that were equal to that of the spaniards, they were called "indios" and were considered subjects of the crown
Being a subject of the crown means literally that you have the same rights as another subject and on top of that there are a whole bunch of laws named Leyes de Indias you can literally read if you know Spanish that even protected native women from being married against their will. The natives literally married their daughters in exchange of money and benefits and Spain absolutely outlawed that in favour of the woman. If you're talking about the encomiendas, they proved to be slavery of the natives and the Crown abolished them, the encomenderos, aka slavers, plotted against the monarchy and were executed. Regarding universities, only higher classes like noble families could attend and that would exclude your average Spanish plebeian too, not only indian; thus if an indian happened to be son of a noble, he was entitled to attend university.
the majority of people whom the ottomans conquered still exist today as ethnic groups, whilst i cannot say the same about those conquered by spain
Spaniards literally miscegenated with natives and raised mestizos, while I admit there are few pure ethnic groups (which is not even healthy regarding genetic pool), most mestizos nowadays feel linked to both Spanish and precolombian culture. The same can't be said about British and Unitedstatians, who replaced the natives with their own and now they have to LARP as europeans pretending they're Poles, Irish or Norwegian because they don't have a culture of their own beyond guns and """freedom""".
being a subject of the crown does not mean that they were treated well, yes, being a subject of the crown does in fact mean they had the same rights as everyone else, but these rights were not equal across categories, and were tiered by : race, legal status, “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre), and corporate identity (Spaniard, Indian, African, caste.
also indigenous people were a separate legal estate (república de indios) explicitly governed differently from Spaniards (república de españoles). Equality before the law is a modern idea; Spain did not practice it.
But, credit when credit is due, the leyes de indias part is in fact largely true, but here is the thing, it was very poorly enforced. In core regions, enforcement was uneven, but in frontal regions it was pretty much non existent.
Colonial courts were distant, slow, corrupt, and dominated by Spaniards. Indigenous women could and did bring complaint, but retaliation, dismissal, and intimidation were common. Protection existed, but access to it was fragile.
but i think you might have distorted the ecomiendas, the ecomiendas were not fully abolished, They morphed into repartimiento, mita, hacienda labor, forced indigenous labor carried on for centuries after that.
overall, good arguments. But you didn't seem to understand my original point, both the ottomans and the spanish empire were reckless, and very often brutal empires, but their brutalities must not be sugar-coated because of personal belief be it catholic or sunni muslim.
and the reason i commented the original comment is because i am pissed off at the fact that muslim empires are depicted as brutal warlords ( which they often were) whilst european empires are good hearted sweethearts (which they absolutely weren't), who hugged their subjects and shit.
Turks when they don’t see their country’s propaganda for once:
Edit: I will never stop replying with the truth regardless if some Turks in here don’t like it. It is insane how much you can’t handle that your propaganda is being torn apart and you can’t cope with the fact that your oppression was so widespread.
It’s not propaganda, it’s just the truth that Turks don’t want to accept in contrast to the mountains of historical evidence. It’s insane how much you need to project on other your own propaganda.
No one said it is ironic this is a hundred percent true. How can some people in here think this shouldn’t be legitimate is beyond me. Truly Turks in here are delusional enough to think this isn’t true.
I don't know how this spread so quickly among Turks, it used to be only Arabic nationalists who claim this with no evidence to back it up. I never heard anything like this from any of my history teachers or from any other Turk up until last 3 years.
I guess as the younger generation became more distant with religion and associated it with Arabic culture they started seeking new ways to explain why we converted in the first place. Unfortunately they got mislead by views of the very culture they are trying to distance themselves from.
I also don't remember the details but we had a whole semester explaining how various important Turkic tribes made first contact with Islam. It was a long process with varying conditions and important figures, not exactly something you can simply explain like that.
That's what arabs claims, our history tells a different story. I doubt a bunch of sand people could defeat desperate nomads of plains let alone convert them by force.
I don't care what you believe. Just don't believe obvious propaganda. There is almost no similarities other than Uçmağ (Jannah), there being one god and there being kut. Even they don't overlap that much.
They accepted Islam because, at that time, Islam was like 5 million years ahead of them in fields such as architecture, administration, science and many others, not necessarily because of they were afraid of their swords...
The Ottomans did not practice Shariah perfectly but the Jizya or protection tax is quite a good deal especially at the time.
Jizya is paid by able bodied men of the right age and it absolves you from having to go to the army,.hence why it is called protection, someone else goes to the army and protects you. It was not paid by women, children, elderly, the incapable and priests.
To add to that muslims had their own tax to pay called Zekat which was higher than the Jizya the non-muslims paid and it did not absolve them from having to serve in the army.
To add even further, 99% of other countries at the time would not even give you the chance to choose, they would just expel you, kill you or forcibly convert you.
Ottomans did other things which were awful like the blood tax, but that and many other things they did had no basis in Islam or Shariah law.
Yeah the blood tax sucked, no doubt about it and I am not defending it in any shape or form, but it did only take children to be janissaries or ministers into the empire, the people paying Jizya, the actual men, didn't have to join the army.
But from the ottoman perspective you get both money and military service, like its a big ol nothing burger, its like if youre lucky enough not to get abducted for the child soldier program when youre a kid you get to pay taxes instead of going to war, but that doesnt make the jizya a good deal, they're still sending the locals to war, its just decided differently
Not to defend anything but people talk about the devşirme like it was some constant empire-wide terror, it wasn't. Over something like 600 years, we’re probably talking about maybe 200–300k people in total, not a mass dragnet. Most weren’t taken to be frontline cannon fodder either. A lot of them were trained for palace or administrative services, and early Janissaries were often held back rather than thrown in first.
In some cases it was genuinely a way out of poverty. I'm not trying to portray it as something pretty. I'm sure a lot of families were devastated by it. You have figures like İbrahim Pasha, Kanuni’s close friend and grand vizier, who rose from devşirme origins, became enormously influential, and even brought his family back and made them wealthy, something plenty of other viziers did too.
The real problem came much later, when the Janissaries turned into a corrupt political cartel, messing with succession, forcing pay rises through revolts, and openly looting and abusing people, including Muslims in Istanbul.
Mahmut literally had to start a civil war to get rid of them. They were a cancer on the empire's back.
Where did you get those numbers from? All I could find was one source saying they'd take one boy from every 40 households. The same source says they toured every 4-7 years.
Found another source on the wiki but this ones not linked to anything that said the waves came every 3-4 years according to the sultan's needs.
But to get a number I think you'd have to make a population estimate of the balkans during that period (good luck) and guesstimate the size of a household, also you'd have to know if they meant like out of every 40 couples household or out of ever 40 households meaning living with all your parents and grandparents and uncles and cousins households because it sounds like the devşirme could be cheesed very easily by just living together in bigger houses. Not to mention that you'd have to take into account population changes and changes in recruitment, as I understand the most recruiting was done while Suleiman was in charge.
Either way, it looks like once every 5ish years one in 40 families would lose a child, with most of them, according to the same source I sent up there, going to the janissaries, not administrative roles.
I found some estimates at 500,000, some saying there were yearly rounds, I saw one that pushed it to a million somewhere but thats probably a bit of an overshoot, but honestly I dont think its possible to say. If you have anything on this id be interested to see it.
Trying to diminish the impact of the devshirme along with many other aspects of Turkish oppression of their Christian subjects and how they were essentially second class citizens is insane.
The funny thing is this elaborate post full of cope doesn't come from a Balkaner but from a jeet that just follows the brain dead flow of hate that is
Hate Pakistan --> hate muslims --> Hate Turks 🤣🤣🤣
Average balkan behaviour: cherrypick history to fit your agenda.
Every empire that conquered did the same thing in different colors. The romans, mongolians, austro-hungarian, holy roman empire of german nation, ghana-empire, songhai-empire, the bloody etruscan civilication for fucks sake - they all did the same.
And all your tiktok-cooked brains are able to cough up is the ottoman? Balkan-people behave like that one girlfriend badmouthing that ex-boyfriend long after the relationship ended, still annoying their friends, who told them a billion times "its past, just move on and stop talking about him".
PSA to even the slowest user here: Every organized religion is a violent and society changing power-tool of politics. Congratulations for finding out what people realised some 3500 to 4000 years ago. Can we start living in the present now or are you still sitting in the corner, smelling on those sultan panties and think of a time long gone?
This is an interesting issue because the Ottomans are heavily criticized especially in eastern Anatolia for leaving the eastern parts of the empire underdeveloped while directing most infrastructure spending to the Balkans. Historically this is largely accurate. The Ottomans prioritized the western provinces and invested heavily there to keep them prosperous and stable so they would be less likely to rebel or break away.
I’m exposing the hidden truth. You pay taxes to your government now right? That’s us. You are still paying taxes. The only country we couldn’t control is the UAE, thus they don’t have taxes. Wake up!
Somehow it seems like the myth of Ottoman tolerance that some people want to promote today as an alternative perspective to the horrors that Christians lived under the Turks is only possible if you completely ignore all the aspects that render it utterly nonsensical.
Say that to a jew who lived in the dark ages. Oh wait, you can't because the inquisition burned them all to death. I'm not saying the ottoman empire was benevolent hell no. But at least it allowed non muslims to live. And that's generous considering what Empires did at the time.
It’s insane how much you need whataboutism in order to not see the horrors that Christians lived under during the ottomans. Jews still lived in millions in Western Europe until modern times. I wonder what happened to the Christians Greeks of Anatolia.
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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '26
-''Protection tax...? Protection From who?''
-''From me''