This Turkish, Islamic empire supplanted the Orthodox Byzantine Empire in the 15th Century and since then it has had a continuing, if not always whole-hearted, ambition to expand further westwards into the heart of Europe. In living memory, Turkish armies have reached the gates of Vienna, Austria, only to be turned back by the steadfast defenders. Turkish expansionism has always been a part of palace politics: when a Sultan has felt secure at home he has attacked Europe; when a Sultan has felt threatened by his Janissary military commanders, he has sent them to attack.
Empire Total War Serbia
Tsardoms: Total War is a total modification for M2TW Kingdoms set in late middle ages, featuring a campaign centered on Italy, Balkans and Asia Minor. The reason we decided to make a mod like this is, firstly because we are familiar with the history of the region, and secondly (and most importantly) because this part of the world has pretty much been ignored by TW games and mods and we thought it would be fun to play and learn from it.
Habsburg-ruled Austria-Hungary wished for a continuation of the existence of the Ottoman Empire, since both were troubled multinational entities and thus the collapse of the one might weaken the other. The Habsburgs also saw a strong Ottoman presence in the area as a counterweight to the Serbian nationalistic call to their own Serb subjects in Bosnia, Vojvodina and other parts of the empire. Italy's primary aim at the time seems to have been the denial of access to the Adriatic Sea to another major sea power. The German Empire, in turn, under the "Drang nach Osten" policy, aspired to turn the Ottoman Empire into its own de facto colony, and thus supported its integrity. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Bulgaria and Greece contended for Ottoman Macedonia and Thrace. Ethnic Greeks sought the forced "Hellenization" of ethnic Bulgars, who sought "Bulgarization" of Greeks (Rise of nationalism). Both nations sent armed irregulars into Ottoman territory to protect and assist their ethnic kindred. From 1904, there was low-intensity warfare in Macedonia between the Greek and Bulgarian bands and the Ottoman army (the Struggle for Macedonia). After the Young Turk revolution of July 1908, the situation changed drastically.[19]
Citizens of Turkey regard the Balkan Wars as a major disaster (Balkan harbi faciası) in the nation's history. The Ottoman Empire lost all its European territories west of the River Maritsa as a result of the two Balkan Wars, which thus delineated present-day Turkey's western border. By 1923, only 38% of the Muslim population of 1912 still lived in the Balkans and majority of Balkan Turks had been killed or expelled.[44] The unexpected fall and sudden relinquishing of Turkish-dominated European territories created a traumatic event amongst many Turks that triggered the ultimate collapse of the empire itself within five years. Paul Mojzes has called the Balkan Wars an ''unrecognized genocide''.[45]
The Serbian contribution to the Allies' joint efforts was considerable. According to Conrad von Hötzendorf, he employed almost 400,000 of his troops on the Serbian front throughout 1914, in contrast to 921,000 on the Russian front. The total casualties of the Balkan front climbed to 273,813 (28,285 dead, 122,122 wounded, 46,716 with maladies, 76,690 captured or disappeared) in 1914, and 29,000 dead, wounded and captured in 1915.[59] In 1915, the Germans suffered some 12,000 casualties and the Bulgarians some 30,000 on the Serbian front alone.[60]
The Serbian Army once again proved its reputation gained during the Balkan Wars. It twice overcame far superior and better-equipped Austro-Hungarian armies (in August and December 1914). In the 1914 campaign, the monarchy employed almost one-third (400,000) of its total forces, and total casualties climbed to 273,813. The third offensive against Serbia in the fall of 1915 led by German Field Marshall von Mackensen, in spite of the tremendous tenacity of the Serbian Army, brought success for the Central Powers, and Serbia was occupied for the next three years. The remnants of the army that had crossed the mountains of Montenegro and Albania was gathered and reorganized into a new fighting force on Corfu and later shifted to the Salonika front. Once again, those forces had important role in the several offensives in 1916 and 1918.
The House of Habsburg ruled Austria continuously from the 13th century through to the end of World War One. At various times, their domain included everything from Belgium to Naples to Portugal to Mexico. On the eve of the war, however, their holdings had dwindled to a diverse range of central European territories known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire (or Austria-Hungary for short). This multi-ethnic imperium wasn't well suited to the nationalistic spirit of the times. Serbia wanted to incorporate the empire's Serbian- and Croatian-speaking territories into its own kingdom, a move that Austria-Hungary saw as a fundamental challenge to their core governing ideology: Habsburg dynastic legitimacy trumps ethnic nationalism.
Italy did not join the war in its first year, and had been allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary during the pre-war years. But Italian nationalists had designs on some Italian-speaking lands still ruled by the Habsburgs as well as elements of the Adriatic coast that had historically been ruled by the Republic of Venice. In the 1915 Treaty of London, the Allies succeeded in tempting Italy to enter the war on their side, promising them healthy slices of Austro-Hungarian territory. The actual fighting on the Italian Front was even more static and futile than the Western Front. So much so that there were 12 different Battles of the Isonzo, fought near a river in contemporary Slovenia. These 12 battles together accounted for half of Italy's total casualties during the war and as illustrated on the map scarcely moved the frontier at all. In essence, Italy's war dead served as a massive diversionary tactic, occupying Austro-Hungarian and German troops who otherwise could have been fighting in Russia or France.
In 1915, frustrated by early setbacks in the war, leaders of the Muslim-majority Ottoman empire launched a campaign to purge non-Muslim elements. They began persecuting the Armenians, a Christian ethnic group whose ancestral homeland straddled the border between the Russian and Ottoman empires. Hundreds of thousands of Armenian men, women, and children were slaughtered. According to some estimates, as many as three quarters of the 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were killed. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians fled their homeland, producing significant Armenian diaspora populations in the United States, Russia, and elsewhere. No one was punished for these attrocities, and to this day it's a sensitive topic for the Turkish government. As recently as 2007, diplomatic pressure from Turkey dissuaded Congress from officially recognizing the incident as a genocide.
Germany was blessed with excellent military leadership that allowed the nation to hold its own against numerically superior foe. But it had a problem that couldn't be overcome with military tactics alone. Britain and France could draw on the resources of their vast overseas empires, and trade with neutral countries, to get the resources they needed to win the war. Thanks to the British blockade, the Central Powers were cut off from the rest of the world. So conditions in Germany, for soldiers and civilians alike, steadily deteriorated. This map, based on a map from a book published by the United States government in July 1918, shows the food situation in Europe as the war was drawing to a close. While the US government might have been tempted to exaggerate Germany's hardship, this map is basically accurate. By 1918, the Central Powers were facing severe food shortages, and things could have gotten a lot worse if the war had dragged into the winter of 1919. An increasingly desparate German citizenry began pressuring the German government for peace.
The war officially ended when Germany agreed to lay down its weapons on November 11, 1918. In 1919, the victorious Allies, led by Britain, France, and the United States, met in Paris to decide the fate of the empires they had defeated. Their decisions transformed Europe's borders. The Austro-Hungarian empire was carved up into six new countries. One of these, the awkwardly named Czechoslovakia, would split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992. The former Serbia was combined with territories annexed from Austria-Hungary to form Yugoslavia, a national home for South Slavic peoples. It, too, disintegrated in the early 1990s, producing several small nations that exist in the Balkans today. The Soviet Union lost some of the Russian Empire's former territory to the new Baltic states and to Poland. Poland, along with France, got chunks of Germany. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia are gone, but the other new states persist today, so it's fair to say that World War I set the contours for the modern European state system.
At the start of the campaign (1700), this faction controls most of the Middle East and the Balkans, making it the largest faction in terms of number of initial regions. However, this impressive empire is tempered by the poor quality of its lands, as well as the low quality of the Ottomans' undisciplined troops. Early-period Ottomans are unfit for combat with equal numbers of Western soldiers, their low morale and poor accuracy preventing them from going toe-to-toe in melees or line. On the other hand, Ottoman artillery and cavalry is of decent quality, especially the potent carbineers of the Deli Horse and the fearsome 64-pounder artillery and Organ Guns. 2ff7e9595c
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