I recently started listening to the Great Courses' lecture series on the history of
the Ottoman Empire. It's been a while since I played the Ottomans, but is there any game mechanic that corresponds to the absolutely massive role that the slave trade played in their economy and country? I mean, the most famous role of slavery is with the
devshirme and the forced recruitment of East European Christians to serve as janissaries, but Ottoman slavery was way bigger than that.
Despite the fact that very few households could purchase slaves, there are
estimates that even by 1609, one-fifth of the empire's total population was slaves. (The course I listened to indicated that the tax on slave trade accounted for about 1/3 of the Sultan's income each year). From what I can tell, most of Ottoman slavery was based on sexual slavery (given the mention of how high a price "young boys and virgin girls" would sell for, and how much slave traders focused on supplying those to the markets), though there was a considerable amount of typical labor slavery, plus the weirdly high-status slavery of the army and governmental administration.
Per
the BBC, between 1500 and 1900, five million Africans were bought by Muslim slave traders and sold around the Indian Ocean (it also indicates up to 17 million African slaves were taken by Muslims, but that number seems to date from 630 AD).
Per
Wikipedia, the Crimean Khanate launched slave raids into Russia and Eastern Europe, seizing about three million slaves (The lecture series called this a very conservative estimate), mostly to supply the Ottoman slave markets.
Also per
the wiki, the Barbary States (quasi-autonomous Ottoman provinces) were responsible for another 1 million slaves between 1530-1780, from both Europe and North Africa.
Across roughly the same time period, the trans-Atlantic slave trade accounted for about 12.5 million slaves to European possessions in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the American South. Ottoman slave trade is roughly comparable in size, but probably had a greater impact on their culture and society, given that almost all of those slaves were brought back and settled in the Empire itself. (Imagine if Portugal had brought back all ~4 million slaves back to Lisbon, rather than Brazil. Likewise for Spain, the Dutch, the English and French). The slave trade financed the government, comprised a huge portion of the Ottoman economy, drove Ottoman strategy in both military and diplomacy.
How much of that is reflected in the game? If I remember correctly, the only appearance of slaves are as a colony resource, after civs secure 'Atlantic Access' and build colonies in the New World. How much of Ottoman gameplay is based on or affected by this mechanic? (Same applies to the Crimean Khanate, and to whatever civ we decide to add in North Africa).
bonus for the tile, but the basic code to enable an inland city to produce sea units and coastal buildings is there. I'd love to see this component become part of the next version of RFCE.
