re: #21 Honorary Yooper

And the Byzantines had been fighting them for over 400 years before that.

Actually, the Ottoman Dynasty lasted 723 years (starting in 1299), but the Ottomon Caliphate didn’t really become official until the early 1500s.

I guess the difference is, for the first two hundreds years, the Ottomans just thought of themselves as the supreme warlords of the region, but after they had firm control, they assumed the religious mantle as the official representatives of Islam to the rest of the world.