(More.)īy the time the Ottoman Empire came to an end in 1922, half of the urban population of Turkey was descended from Muslim refugees from Russia. That is why, according to Ottoman documents, the Muslim population outnumbers the Christian in many towns during the first centuries of the Turkish domination.With the extinction of many independent Muslim states and their absorption into the empires of European powers, that myth of the caliphate became a useful weapon in the Ottoman diplomatic armoury and was exploited by Abdülhamid as a means of deterring European powers from pressing him too hard, lest he create dissension within their own territories.Despite military reforms which reconstituted the Ottoman Modern Army, the Empire lost its North African territories and the Dodecanese in the Italo-Turkish War (1911) and almost all of its European territories in the Balkan Wars (1912-1913).The Ottoman Empire was now almost entirely Muslim, and more importantly, overwhelmingly a Turkish state, i.e.By the time the Ottoman Empire came to an end in 1922, half of the urban population of Turkey was descended from Muslim refugees from Russia.

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