Jack of Harts

The original Arab invasions were a mass migration that conquered half of Rome’s farflung empire, but the French, the Eastern Roman Empire, and the Indians drove them back from their core regions of power. But not before they converted a large number of mountain Turks to their new religion. Then the Mongols drove into Europe and the Middle East and brought the Black Death that wiped out between half and a third of the local populations before disappearing back into the East.

The Turkic tribes of the high mountains walked into that power vacuum with a smile. The Afghan Turks conquered most of India with the help of Persian Turks while Anatolian Turks conquered the plague-weakened Eastern Roman Empire, including Constantinople. The new Ottoman Empire quickly controlled three quarters of the old Roman Empire, from South-Eastern Europe to North Africa, while their fellows ruled modern day Iran and India as well.

And the Turks ruled in a rather de-centralized manner over the regions they conquered. They weren’t even all allied with each other. They fought and betrayed each other almost as much as they fought with Europeans in fact. Maybe more. The next few hundred years have more rising and falling tribes and peoples than European minds are really equipped to understand. For us, the French have been French for a thousand years, and the Gauls before them were kinda proto-French. Ditto the Germans, the Poles, the Scandinavians, and the Russians. But the various Turk and Turk-adjacent and Resisting-The-Turk tribes and peoples seem to remember all of it, and can tell you in detail every single one of them. Every time they were on top and every time those people two villages over were on top. It is just one long series of migrations from place to place as the tribes wax and wane in strength.