Quote Originally Posted by The Mad Arab View Post
I wonder. I do not think that a sizable part of the Ottoman population was purely Turkish. The official language of administration used to be Persian (under the Seljuqs and their tributary states in Anatolia), many words were Persian. The Seljuqs were largely Persianised, and after their destruction, the cultural Persian sphere of influence reached far into Anatolia. Maybe they were still ethnically Turkish (to some degree) and spoke some form of Turkish (with a lot of loanwords from Persian and Arabic), but their culture was largely Persian. This intrigues me.
Ottomans were an empire, there were a lot of ethnicities. The rulers spoke Turkish, now we called it Ottoman Turkish. Yes the culture was deeply effected by Persian culture and ıslam (arabic as well) on the other hand, they knew how to use all their people, they made clever people statesmen the others soldiers.
I have no proof for it but I can guess that Turks might have been majority in Asia Minor / Anatolia and in Crimeaia. They failed to conquer Persia although defeated them many times. Yes they had many similarities with Roman Empire (I still call them as Muslim Rome) and yes They claimed themselves as a successor to Roman empire. If I have any demografic map I can share it with you I should check census records. Modern Turkey does not record census on ethinicities because of homogenization policy of Turkey.

I am not a Turk but live in Turkey and to dare to talk this thing in public can easily make you on some black lists. I do not want to kill the topic more.