Why didn't the Ottomans Colonise the Americas?
Thus, expansion into the Atlantic and a potential competition with Spain and Portugal for its control never came to fruition. In part, that was the origin of their alliance with England during the reign of Elizabeth I. When they failed in the Siege of Vienna and lost Hungary, the door to the northern European waters also closed.
Even so, it seems there were occasional visits to America. Some eccentric Turkish historians have proposed that their ancestors discovered it before Columbus (in the year 1178, to be exact), relying on Columbus’s mention of a mosque on the island of Juana (Cuba), overlooking the fact that it was merely his way of referring to indigenous temples; even today, Erdoğan insists on this claim.
And as we have already mentioned in another article, when the Ottomans considered Spain one of their provinces, the New World was included in the package: they called it Vilayet Antilia, meaning the Valiate of the Antilles (the vali or vilayet being an administrative subdivision of the Ottoman Empire).
Only, it was not the Spanish forts that saw the red flag with the crescent (by then fully adopted) appear on the horizon, but rather the English colonies of Virginia and even the cold shores of Newfoundland. They did not stay, of course.

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