>start small
>build better institutions than neighbors
>conquer and integrate them to catch up to bigger enemies
>snowball until you're the strongest state in the region and eventually the world
Why didn't more countries just do this?

>>17788357 (OP)
Ottomans had a centralized modern institution in a very feudal world

This is why they snowballed easily

The Ottoman empire was a shithole lol

>>17788366
No they were rich and powerful

>>17788370
Their richest province was Rumelia, which should tell you how poo they were.
And Europeans by the 16th century were already building global empires while the Ottomans had to steal children to form an army.
Overrated shithole. Pakis love it though.

>>17788391
If they were so weak and poor they would have succumbed to the Austrians

>>17788539
...they did

>>17788391
>>17788838
kek

>>17788908
and these austrians in the infobox... are they with us in this room now?

>>17788357 (OP)
ironically that's what the original Romans did. perhaps they were the worthiest successors after all.

>>17789770
well it certainly weren't the b*zantine retards

>>17788366
a destitute shithole that fought off half of europe united, multiple times

>>17789805
although they inherited the Roman empire the Byzantines were unworthy of it. They lacked the bravery, strength, aggression, and selflessness that made the original Roman empire so great to begin with.

>>17789885
>They lacked the bravery, strength, aggression, and selflessness that made the original Roman empire so great to begin with.
Rome itself began to falter in these areas as well. Even before Christianity

>>17789885
>>17789805
They were more worthy than the western romans, cope and seethe

>>17788357 (OP)
ok how tf do you pull something like thus up when you are surrounded by powerful turkish neighbours and the roman empire?

>>17788357 (OP)
Growing up, I had no idea that the Ottomans already had a capital almost in front of Constantinople and Nicaea as early as 1326.
The Byzantines would have been able to strafe them back then, and somehow they failed to do so.
They really didn't deserve to survive

>>17788838
More than 2 centuries after 1453

>>17790044
you mean Bursa? yeah, the b*zantines were truly retarded. all they could bring up with were pointless civil wars (utilizing turkish mercenaries) instead of focusing on the real problem. their tributes to turks is also what made them powerful in the first place.

>>17788357 (OP)
>rodoscuck

>>17788908
kek this, loser

>>17791270
>Three hundred years to achieve a meaningful offensive victory
>Required half of Europe to achieve

>>17791282
>no this doesnt count!!!!!!!11
>member when we conquered that glorified city state in the middle ages? That counts!!!!!11
hearty kek

Here is something more recent

>>17791288
>Spend 300 years launching crusades and getting btfo
>Finally after 300 years an alliance manages to achieve a victory after 15 years of warfare
>Haha you're bad at war!
It's certainly a W for the alliance but it doesn't make the Ottomans look bad as a collective entity over its history

>>17791300
>Look at this empire that's well on the downward slide being defeated
Daily reminder the the House of Hapsburg was extinct for 150 years by this point and Spain had lost all of its colonies almost a century ago. Again you can say it declined but it outlasted the supposedly superior European empires like Bourbon France, the Spanish Empire, and Hapsburg Austria.

>>17791329
>Being the sick man of Europe is a point of pride for Turks
lol

>>17788366
not before the 17th century.

>>17788366
>>17788391
Aww look at the conquered trash coping

>>17791288
>Oh, you beat us 1v20 once?
>We beat you 1.5 times your army to 1 this one more recent time with better preparation! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
dont you have a life to live or, something better to brag about yourself

>>17791504
ESL drivel

>>17791519
I dont care you fucking nigger, what I have written has correct grammar in my eyes, and if you took your time to explain why it's actually wrong, I would not care

>>17791530
Brown

>>17788357 (OP)
The Ottomans had a lot of luck.

What is it about the Ottomans that causes so much seething? It's just some long dead empire that followed the course of all empires rising and falling. It ceased existing before even our great-grandfathers were born. It's like having a grudge against the Tang dynasty or the Kushan Empire.

>>17791636
They were a BIPOC brown superpower in a time crackers dominated

Not only that, but a BIPOC superpower that wrecked crackers at their zenith

>>17791532
low iq response
and im not brown anyways
>hahah heeeheeheee delooshioun-
no nigger im telling you im not brown because i can look at my skin right now and its not any shade of brown.

>>17791941
Extremely brown coded post

>>17788357 (OP)
They did, what you are describing is the transition from feudalism to the early modern period. Initially these institutions that you speak of didn't exist, at least not in western Europe. You need large cities to produce a surplus of literate, educated people that can serve as bureaucrats in the government and you need the legal basis for them to do so. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed it took a few centuries for the cities to recover from all the plague and civil wars that had depopulated them, but eventually we saw the rise of large, well-populated cities again and in them universities that produced lay professional well-versed in law. Rulers once again had access to a group of people who could run the government for them (and make arguments in favor of expanding the state's rights and powers) and no longer had to delegate the governing of land areas to other members of the aristocracy, so now the only thing left to do was to centralize as much as possible and keep taking land from the other landed elite. The Capetians were particularly good at this. Much of the Ottoman's initial success stemmed from them getting to skip the feudal stage because they conquered areas that were already heavily urbanized and ran by a bureaucratic class, it just switched allegiance from the ERE to the Ottomans and now they had a large base to draw taxes from. That, and the fact that they got to fight unorganized and weak states in the Balkans with the biggest power who could have stopped them (Austria) being preoccupied with spending most of their resources fighting France the next few hundred years.

>>17788366
>>17789869
>a destitute shithole that fought off half of europe united, multiple times
Actually true. The Ottoman empire is what happens when a gang (Turkic mercenaries) take over a country, use up all the resources for their pleasure and making a bigger army, then conquer more countries and keep going until they hit a limit. Like a more moderate, slightly more eudaimonic version of the Mongol empire. The Ottomans built nothing, except for a strong army made up and commanded largely by the people they conquered.
As soon as they hit a limit and could no longer sustain their plunder economy, steep decline set in.

>>17788357 (OP)
you must realize that most monarchs have been normies that only cared about status and partying. states only truly prosper when "weirdos" that care more about economy or warfare than socializing and fun take over.

like seriously read about them and you'll see that almost all great rulers either didn't care about anything but power and control, where awkard and weird, or had some borderline manic delusions of grandeur.

>>17788357 (OP)
Achaemenid Empire

>>17788357 (OP)
Achaemenids
Macedonia
Romans

>>17788366
source?

>>17788391
>had to steal children to form an army.
This retard thinks western militaries were any different prior to the 20th century.

>>17788391
I swear this whole board is just LARPer kids who don't know anything about history just parroting the shit they've heard before
devshirme was an extremely small scale thing and its main purpose wasn't forming an army, it was to train government officials
and the janissaries were the infantry and not the main force of the army

>>17790044
Yeah ditto, I always thought the Ottomans originated in the south-east of anatolia for some raisin. Frankly the truth that both pro-Ottomans and anti-Ottomans want to deny is just how functionally Islamic Greek they were.

>>17791636
East Roman Byzantines solicit a peak VGH fetishism. Think of the "how often does a man think about Rome" meme then take the clearest inheritor of Rome. It's why when people conceive of byzantine fantasies and fiction it's almost always in this weirdly retrograde fashion of forgetting the past 1000 years and instead just hyperfocusing on the classical Roman element

>>17792478
yeh. If we're going biological essentialism then all the usual oligarchs/aristocrats/monarchs want is goodies and reproduction, so they are functionally just cavemen with gold lace. It's the autistic driven types who want to do more than just skim the cream off.

>>17791636
>long dead
it died like 100 years ago, multiple countries that exist now revolted and fought against them to have their own countries just 100 years ago, and multiple groups revolted for the same reason and failed 100 years ago
most Romaboos would probably be Roman haters now if Rome was around and ruling over their people just 100 years ago and their grandpa's died fighting it

>>17792478
>almost all great rulers either didn't care about anything but power and control, where awkard and weird, or had some borderline manic delusions of grandeur.

Literally me

>>17788366
unironically yeah
Janissary institutions had to have a strong back to carry this shitty Beylik 2.0 with shitty Iqta agrarian economy to empiredom
they never recovered from their removal as an armed force and their economy fucking crashed out the moment europeans discovered how to put stuff in an assembly line and tax the result.

*ahem*

>>17791944
i do not care

>>17793353
Fucking delete this now