re: #120 Dark_Falcon

For what do you blame the Ottomans?

Being boring for hundreds of years. The clergy had a ton of power and attempts to modernize education got met with “No ‘cuz god” a lot. Everything was entrenched, it was difficult to change any system. There were no strong leaders with great interest in science, whereas there were in the West. Power was more concentrated, which meant more stagnant. Finally, they didn’t rely on naval power as much as the West did, and a hell of lot of the original advances which go the Enlightenment going were solving problems in naval warfare and travel. Ottoman naval science was almost all about mediterranean fleets, which is very different from ocean-crossing fleets.