why Turkish culture, for the most part, is Mediterranean and has very little, if any, influence from the customs and lifestyle of Central Asian steppe dwellers.
that is more of mixing of cultures over the many 1000's of yrs, why its easier in some ways today to relate to Turks, say, then Saudi's or more remote peoples. Most Persians are highly literate and developed.......
Well, the Persians are an ancient Indo-European people just as much as Norwegians are Indo-European, though the latter are younger than the Persians, so I don't see why they would be considered "remote." In any case, there was never any widespread migration of Turks from Central Asia into Anatolia. They assembled an elite military aristocracy under the headship of beys and sultans, though the majority of their soldiers were taken from local populations. That is to say, hardly any Turkic women and children and infrastructure made the journey from the steppe near the Altaic mountains to the Bosphorus, nor even into Iran.
When the Turks arrived, they simply employed the local engineers and craftsmen to copy the infrastructure and architecture of the Greeks and other peoples nearby. Meanwhile, most people continued to live in the fashion they always had, minus the changes made for Mohammedanism, of course. But there was no Turkish architecture or city-planning or restaurant style or whatever, since the Turkic military elite derived from nomadic horsemen who never had any of these things. That is to say, the House of Osman simply placed themselves atop a pre-existing edifice, much like the Mohammedan Caliphate did in Spain and North Africa and the Middle East. The Arabian tribesmen who followed Mohammed did not have vast city-states, craftsmen, and engineering, either; they, too, were able to take advantage of the technical and urban accomplishments of the conquered, contributing very little themselves to the culture and means of the societies that followed thereafter.
Turks seem more militant despite their size of the time of conquest, like the Mongols, never very large in numbers, but highly efficient.....others either joined with them or subjected and vassals.....or killed off (Khan good at that)
Exactly.
For the purposes of the restoration of the entire Mediterranean to Christendom, then,
it is clear that the problem is chiefly religious and cultural and economic --
it is not racial now, nor was it racial five hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred, or two thousand years ago. Through only a little bit of Latin and Greek colonisation (as a means of spreading Roman culture) and a monopoly of force maintained by hereditary monarchs anointed by the Church, our missionaries could be sent forth, and Mohammedanism could be eradicated rather quickly. The illusion of an iron curtain of a monolithic Islam married to the domination of ethnically-proud Arabs is just that. Even in North Africa, roughly one quarter to one third of the population still speak Berber, and the majority of the people are not Arabs at all. Mohammedanism, despite all of its power and its threats to Christendom over the past fifteen hundred years, has only an incredibly fragile grasp over the Mediterranean and Central Asia.
Furthermore, during the Late Roman Empire, Syrian Christian merchants from their port at Sidon were the major source of Western European imports, whereas textiles from what is now Belgium were sent to the East from Marseille (which, by the way, was racially very Greek and North African back then, as now, despite being Gallo-Roman in culture). The historian Henri Pirenne discusses how the the Merovingian Kingdom of the Franks and the Late Roman Empire, especially in Constantinople, were becoming more and more culturally oritentalised through exposure and trade with Syria, Anatolia, Armenia, and -- especially -- Persia/Iran.
Trade stopped after the Mohammedan conquest, which essentially shut down the Mediterranean, which before was a highway of exchange between the Christians that lined it on every coast. Then the Latin and Celtic and Germanic synthesis we know as the Early Middle Ages succeeded that world, after Charlemagne re-united the disparate tribes and patrician families under his military aristocracy. During the Crusades, the Mediterranean once again fulfilled its ancient function from a mere five centuries before, the cultural legacy of which we see in the Levantine elements of the great Gothic (i.e., French) cathedrals and which can be heard in the songs of the troubadours and trouvères. This, the cultural world of the High Middle Ages, the high-water mark of the integral Social Reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ, was ended by the growth of the middle classes, whose decadence first manifested itself in the luxury of their feasts and games and can be witnessed in the so-called Flamboyant Gothic style. After the loss of Constantinople and Jerusalem and Acre, as well as the rise to prominence of jurists and the burghers in the towns, the Renaissance soon followed. And the Enlightenment, which is nothing if not the cultural and religious legacy of the rise of Northern Europe in England and Germany, is just the logical consequence of Catholics becoming too lukewarm. We were no longer fighting for Our Lord in order to bring the reign of His adorable Heart to all the nations in order to save the greatest number of souls; we lost focus and, in our pride, fought instead for our city life, our self-images as sophisticated people, our own luxury, and entertainment, etc.
In any case, we are not so far away from the world of a single, coherent Roman Empire -- and the organic cultural fusion of all the Indo-European and Mediterranean peoples under the banners of Our Lord -- as we might now think. The cultural and ethnic framework is all there. The powder keg of the great restoration only needs the necessary spark. Rome still stands, Jerusalem still stands, the peoples of the Mediterranean are the same as they ever were, just under different kinds of apostasy -- one coming from the North, the other from the Southeast. Indeed, if we study the evidence enough, we should be able to see that the more things have changed, the more they have also stayed the same.