Editing Middle East (section)

=== Ottoman Period (1300 - 1918) ===
The Ilkhanate hordes of Tulai were kept out of Arabia, although the Seljuks fell to them completely. But as has been established in many other articles featuring the Mongols, they weren't very good at REMAINING Mongol once they ran out of things to put arrows in; in this case they discovered Islam and for once decided that some outsider's religion was actually their kind of thing, probably having to do with a similar bloodthirstiness towards "the other".  What succeeded them was the Ottoman empire. Starting around east of Marmara, Bursa (then Prusa) Over the next 500 years the Ottomans would largely reunite all of the former Roman territories east of Cisalpine Gaul, into a massive, mostly-Islamic caliphate held together by the Turks, Greeks, and Egyptians that formed its foundation.  

The power that held the Ottomans together was the [[Space Marines|Janissaries]], a healthy dose of gunpowder and religious cunning. A Janissary was a Christian male from the Balkan areas of the Empire, forcibly conscripted in youth and forced to convert to Islam (including getting circumcised, since the conscriptees would have been mostly Orthodox), and then subjected to a rigorous military training that made them one of the most elite fighting forces of their time.  They were forbidden to marry before forty, but were paid a lifetime salary. Although a brutal system, the resulting army was exceptionally professional, impartial to the empire's many tribes and territories, and utterly loyal to the Sultanate.  The net effect of the Janissaries were that the individual animosities of various sects were dampened under Ottoman rule, in favor of the [[Tau|greater greed]] of the Sultanate.  

For most of it's life, the Ottoman empire wasn't a terribly bad place to live if you were a Muslim. There was relative peace and prosperity due to flourishing trade as it stood at the crossroads between the Mediterranean and the sea routes to the far east. There was religious freedom as long as taxes were paid (except for non-monotheists) and all the wealth and luxuries of the world to be found in their markets.  Interestingly, there were THREE separate, government sanctioned court systems, specifically one system for muslims, another for christians & jews, and the trade courts which handled civil and commercial disputes.  The good times ended however when the Europeans discovered that it was slightly cheaper to sail all the fuck way around Africa than to pay Ottoman taxes. Adding the fact that the majority of state revenues were [[Roman Empire|auctioned income of "tax farming" sales and war plunder (including slaves)]], this archaic method couldn't compete with the gradually reforming European institutions, new trade routes and industrialization.

During the Wars of Religion, the Ottomans were chiefly aligned against the Habsburgs, Portugal, and Venice, fighting repeatedly over two hundred years for control of Austria and various Mediterranean islands, as well as control over the trade routes with India.  They never made any serious overtures to cooperate with any of the European powers, being more of a constant opportunistic threat that kept the Holy Roman Empire from being able to focus on France or Great Britain.   By the 19th century the decline of the empire was apparent, with the French making moves in Egypt and the Russians pushing on the Balkans and the Caucasus. A bunch of Western educated Turks with spiffy fez and an axe to grind, Committee of Union and Progress(CUP) organized and pushed for a reform called Tanzimat aimed at granting the Empire religious and ethnic equality. It merely ended up with the new civil servants who were the rare literati simply steal massive amounts of land, now free from tax farming, sell the land to mostly enterpreneurial Jews (Israel wasn't a mere British project) and fuck off to Constantinople and retire in undeserved wealth. Any other planned reforms collapsed entirely, Muslim Kurds now openly sizing up their neighbour Armenians to plunder(in 1915, Kurdish Hamidiyeh Brigades were enthusiastic about wiping them off and seizing everything the Armenians owned), and Balkan ethnicities did a Hail Mary attempt at breaking off realizing the centralization will stop their clay seizing process. Cherry on top, Anatolian Muslims started to call these CUP men Freemason Satanist Crypto-Christians and did an epic chimpout which had to be suppressed by Mustafa Kemal and an Army composed of Turks, Albanians, Greeks and Jews. [[FAIL|Haphazard and from on top to a population frozen in time, Tanzimat went as well as you'd expect.]]

The Ottomans entered WW1 on the side of Germany essentially because their greatest existential threat was Russia.  The war brought into full view the hopeless state of the Ottoman government and economy.  They were ill prepared for war and ultimately their entry gave France and Britain a reason to move to openly annex territories the Ottomans had been holding in name only for decades. CUP men fled abroad like little bitches and were hunted down by Armenians for a little...thing happening in 1915. One of their younger ex-members, Mustafa Kemal organized what's left, took back what he could, and then exiled the crap circus that became the House of Osman.

[[image:ModernMiddleEast.jpg|thumb|300px|right|We've come a long way, eh sadiq?]]