Jack of Harts

The Turkish mass migration into South Eastern Europe is obvious for all to see, both in the coming and in the going. At its height, in the general 1600s to 1700s era, the Ottoman Empire controlled most of it, and the Turkish Muslims moved in to take over local Christian churches and turn them into mosques. The European Christians did not greet this with friendly eyes. The Turks faced opposition from the Holy Roman Empire and its allies and vassals, and it was a full scale holy war between the polities that lasted for centuries. The kind of treatment Vlad the Impaler is famous for is one example that history remembers of this time, but was not at all one of a kind. The Ottoman expansion was famously halted at the walls of Vienna when the Polish Winged Hussars broke the Ottoman assaults.

The various European powers then spent a long and slow march going from Vienna to Constantinople that took centuries. It even included a series of revolutions when captive populations in the Balkans broke free of their Ottoman overlords. Many of the Turkish Muslim populations migrated back into modern day Turkey during this long series of reversals. Sometimes willingly. Sometimes to escape with their lives ahead of the executioners who remembered what their ancestors did to their ancestors. In some regions, you can still see their influence today. In others you absolutely cannot. Neither are an accident.