A Brief History
The modern Republic of Turkey dates only from 1923, but the
history of the land within its borders stretches back to the dawn of
humanity. Widespread finds of Stone Age implements in cave excavations
show that Anatolia was already inhabited during the Middle of the
Palaeolithic period (about 200,000 to 40,000 years ago). By Neolithic
times, organized communities had arisen, such as the one at Çatalhöyük,
near Konya, Turkey’s most important prehistoric site. This town, which
flourished between 6500 and 5500 b.c. , had flat-roofed houses of mud
and timber decorated with wall-paintings, some of which show patterns
that still appear on Anatolian kilims.
The advent of the Bronze Age (about 3200 b.c. ), and the
spread of city-states ruled by kings, is marked by the appearance of
royal tombs containing bronze objects in such places as Troy in the
west, and Alacahöyük near Ankara. Around this time the Sumerian
civilization living in Mesopotamia (the region between the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers in present-day Iraq) founded and developed the
cuneiform script, the world’s oldest form of writing on record. The
technique was introduced by Assyrian traders 1,000 years later into
Anatolia, where it was quickly adopted by the indigenous Hatti
people, who, at this point, had already reached an advanced state of
civilization.
The Hittites
The capital of the Hatti was Kanesh (modern Kültepe, near
Kayseri). Cuneiform tablets found here record the arrival in Anatolia
of warlike invaders around the second millennium b.c. Their origins
remain a mystery (their written language was finally deciphered in
1915), but they came from the direction of the Caucasus mountains,
spreading destruction and disorder throughout Anatolia. It was two
hundred years before they were firmly entrenched in their newly
conquered empire.
The newcomers were the Hittites, and their domination of
Anatolia can be divided into three distinct periods: the Old Kingdom
(c. 1600–1450 b.c. ), then the New or Empire Period (c. 1450–1200 b.c.
), and the Late Hittite Period (c. 1200–700 b.c. ). Their first capital
city was Hattusa (now Bo‘azköy, near Ankara), which dates from the 13th
century b.c. and has tombs, fortifications, enclosed temples, and a
citadel containing an impressive library of more than 3,300 cuneiform
tablets.
During the Empire Period, an ambitious Hittite king,
Mutawallis, defeated the forces of the Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses II, at
Kadesh (Syria) in 1285 b.c. Ramses was too proud to accept defeat,
commissioning obelisks that celebrated his “victory. ” But he was
sufficiently wary of the formidable strength of the Hittite Empire to
make peace with the next king, Hattusili III. The Treaty of Kadesh,
recorded on clay tablets on display in the Museum of the Ancient Orient
in Istanbul (see page 39), is the oldest known example of an
international treaty.
The Hittite Empire eventually collapsed following invasion
from the west by the Achaeans, the Phrygians, and a mysterious force
known only as the “Sea People. ” The Hittites were forced to flee south
into the mountains, where they remained until they were absorbed by the
Assyrians.
Troy and the Greeks
While the Hittite Empire declined, other momentous events
were taking place on the shores of the Aegean. The ancient Greeks
traditionally took the fall of Troy, as recounted by Homer, as the
starting point of their history. Much academic debate surrounds the
exact date of the Trojan War, if indeed it ever took place. Modern
archaeologists studying the ruins of Troy have discovered nine
superimposed cities, ranging from Troy I (3000–2500 b.c. ) to Troy IX
(350 b.c. –a.d. 400); the city of King Priam, described in the Iliad
and the Odyssey, is thought to be either Troy VI, which was destroyed
by an earthquake in 1275 b.c. , or its successor Troy VIIa. Some say
the Trojan War never took place at all, and that the decline of Troy
was due to the mysterious “Sea People” mentioned earlier.
Whatever really happened, the Mycenaean Greeks who were
supposed to have conquered King Priam’s city soon found their own
civilization in decline. A race known as the Dorians came to power in
southern Greece, forcing many mainland Greeks to leave their homeland
and cross the Aegean to settle on the coast of Anatolia. Their
colonization of the coast took place in successive waves of
immigration. First came the Aeolians, who settled the region to the
north of Smyrna (now Izmir), then the Ionians, who settled the coast
south of Smyrna as far as the River Maeander. The Dorians followed,
installing themselves south of the Maeander, in the region known as
Caria.
Around 1000 b.c. mainland Greece entered a “dark age” of
limited achievements, but not so the Ionians, who developed an
outstanding civilization. By the eighth century b.c. the 12 main
city-states of Ionia, including Ephesus, Priene, and Miletus, had
formed what was known as the Pan-Ionic League. Science, philosophy, and
the arts flourished, and the Ionians founded further colonies.
Lydians and Persians
Inland from Ionia lived the wealthy and powerful Lydians,
with their capital at Sardis. They reached their peak during the reign
of Croesus (560–546 b.c. ), who owed his fortune to gold panned from
the River Pactolus. His lasting legacy was the invention of coinage,
which led to the beginnings of our money-based economy. His
expansionism brought the bulk of Ionia under Lydian rule, but also
resulted in conflict with the advancing Persians in the east, where he
was roundly defeated. Driven back to Sardis, he witnessed the sacking
of his city by the army of Cyrus the Great, in 546 b.c.
With Lydia defeated, the Greek coastal cities lay open to
the Persians, who swiftly incorporated them into their empire. Ionia’s
revolt around 499 b.c. , supported by Athens, was easily subdued.
However, Athenian involvement provoked the Persian king Darius to
invade the Greek mainland. He was defeated at the famous Battle of
Marathon in 490 b.c. , and ten years later his son Xerxes lost the
Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis. Xerxes suffered a further
humiliating defeat in 479 b.c. , when his army was beaten at Plataea on
the same day that his fleet lost to the Greeks at Mycale.
As a result of the Persian Wars, the Greek cities of
Anatolia were encouraged to join the Delian Confederacy, paying tribute
to Athens in return for protection against the Persians. Athens became
so attached to this source of easy money that dissent soon grew among
the member cities, and Sparta led the confederacy from Athens after the
Peloponnesian War (413– 404 b.c. ). The Persians, sensing weakness in
the ranks, launched another offensive, resulting in the Aegean coast
cities coming under Persian control in 387 b.c.
Alexander the Great
Meanwhile, King Philip II of Macedon dreamed of driving out
the Persians from northern Greece and unifying the entire Greek world.
His dreams were fulfilled, and even surpassed, by his son Alexander the
Great, in a brief but action-filled lifetime of only 33 years (356–323
b.c. ). In 334 b.c. , aged only 22, he led his army across the
Hellespont (now the Dardanelles), and paused at Troy to make a
sacrifice at the temple of Athena and pay homage to his hero Achilles,
before going on to defeat the Persians at the Battle of Granicus and
liberating the Ionian cities. After conquering the entire Aegean and
Mediterranean coasts of Anatolia, and subduing Syria and Egypt, he took
the great prize of Persepolis, the Persian capital, before advancing
farther still into India. During his 12-year campaign Alexander
established some 70 cities, and built the greatest empire the world had
yet seen.
After Alexander the Great’s death, the conquered territory
was divided among his generals, whose mutual antagonism and
expansionist ambitions led to weaknesses that exposed western Anatolia
to the increasing might of Rome.
Enter the Romans
One of the most prosperous city-states of the Aegean coast
was Pergamum, ruled since 264 b.c. by the Attalid dynasty. The last of
the Attalid kings, Attalus III, is remembered as something of an
eccentric — one of his hobbies was devising new poisons and testing
their efficacy on his reluctant slaves. When he died (of natural
causes) in 133 b.c. , his subjects were dismayed to learn that he had
bequeathed his entire kingdom to the Romans. Thus Pergamum became the
capital of the new Roman province of Asia. Mithridates VI, King of
Pontus (on the Black Sea), resisted Roman occupation, temporarily
occupied Pergamum, and ordered the massacre of all Romans. But
eventually Rome’s power prevailed in this territory.
In 27 b.c. Julius Caesar’s nephew Octavian took the name
Augustus; Rome ceased to be a republic, and became an empire. There
followed a long period of peace and prosperity known as the Pax Romana.
All of Asia Minor (the Roman name for Anatolia) was incorporated into
the Roman Empire. Greek cities were embellished with Roman
buildings.
Soon, news of a new religion that was beginning to cause
trouble for the Roman authorities spread through the empire.
Christianity threatened the establishment because it rejected the old
gods and denied the divinity of the emperor. Paul the Apostle carried
the word. His voyages (a.d. 40–56) led to the founding of many
churches, notably the Seven Churches of Asia addressed in the
Revelation of St. John — Pergamum, Smyrna, Ephesus, Thyatira, Laodicea,
Sardis, and Philadelphia.
Byzantium
Legend claims that the city of Byzantium was founded around
660 b.c. by a Greek named Byzas, after the Delphic Oracle had bidden
him to build his city “opposite the Land of the Blind. ” When he saw
that earlier settlers had built a town on the eastern shore of the
Bosphorus, he decided they must have been blind themselves to overlook
the advantages of an easily defensible point across the water, and
founded Byzantium there, on the site now occupied by Topkapı
Palace.
In the succeeding centuries Byzantium, like the cities of
the Aegean, fell under the sway of Athens, Sparta, Persia, Alexander,
and Rome. It tried to regain its independence from Rome, but proved too
small and weak, and was conquered by Emperor Septimius Severus in a.d.
196. He had the city razed to the ground, but soon saw the advantages
of its strategic location, and began a programme of enlarging and
strengthening the old defensive walls.
A succession of weak and decadent emperors saw the Roman
Empire fall gradually into decline and anarchy. In a.d. 286 Diocletian
sought to reverse the decline by splitting the administration of the
empire in two — he would govern the east, based in Nicodemia, while his
friend Maximian ruled the west from Milan — and later to split it
further into four parts. His policy succeeded for a time, but following
his abdication in a.d. 305, the empire continued to weaken, harassed by
invaders and troubled by internal strife. Constantine the Great (who
was a convert to Christianity) and Licinius ruled east and west
respectively, until in 324 Constantine overthrew his pagan ally and
reunited the empire. He chose Byzantium as his new capital to emphasize
the break with heathen Rome. The city was inaugurated with great
ceremony in 330 and, in honour of the emperor, was renamed
Constantinople. Constantine added new city walls, following a plan he
claimed to have been given by Christ in a vision, and commissioned a
grand central forum decorated with a triumphal column as well as
several other monuments. The “New Rome” soon achieved a preeminence in
the Christian world that it would retain for 1,000 years.
In 392 the Emperor Theodosius proclaimed Christianity to be
the official religion of the Roman Empire, and on his death in 395 the
empire was split once more, between his two sons, and was never again
to be reunited. The Western Empire, ruled from Rome, fell to the
Ostrogoths in 476, while its neighbour, the Eastern, or Byzantine
Empire, became one of the longest-lived empires the world has ever
known, dating from 395 to 1453.
The greatest of the Byzantine emperors was Justinian the
Great (ruler from 527 to 565), who introduced an equitable legal
system, and also extended the boundaries of the empire into Spain,
Italy, and Africa. He greatly encouraged the arts, and commissioned the
building of the magnificent basilica, the Haghia Sophia.
Following the death of the Prophet Mohammed in 632, Arab
armies, united under Islam, poured out of their homeland, and soon took
Egypt, Syria, and Palestine from the Byzantines; Constantinople was
besieged from 674 to 678, but survived because of its defences. The
empire was further diminished by the loss of North Africa and Italy,
and was brought to the brink of civil war by the Iconoclastic Crisis,
before enjoying another brief golden age under Basil II (976–1025). But
the empire’s troubles increased as invaders made further incursions
into Byzantine territory. Most worrying were the Seljuk Turks, who came
out of the east in the 11th century to wrest large parts of Asia Minor
from Constantinople’s control. Converted to Islam in the tenth century,
and fired by religious zeal, the Seljuks overran Anatolia, menacing
Christian holy places and attacking the pilgrims bound for
Jerusalem.
Reluctantly, the Emperor Alexius I sought outside help from
the Christian West. The First Crusade was organized to help the
Byzantines recapture the Holy Land from the “infidel” Muslims, and
resulted in victory for the Crusaders. The Second and Third Crusades,
however, were a disaster for the Christians. The Fourth Crusade,
launched in 1202 and partly inspired by Venetian jealousy of
Byzantium’s trading power, became an excuse to plunder Constantinople
itself. Thus, the city that had held out against so many attacks by the
infidel, became subjected to mindless pillaging by fellow
Christians.
The Crusaders ruled the city from 1204 to 1261, calling
their new state Romania, also known as the Latin Empire. A remnant of
the Byzantine Empire survived in Nicaea (now Iznik), and recaptured
Constantinople in 1261, but the city had been shattered and its great
monuments were stripped of gold, silver, and precious works of art.
The place was never the same again.
The Ottomans
During the 14th century the Turks in Anatolia rallied under
the banner of one Osman Gazi, who had won a great victory over the
Byzantines in 1301. Osman Gazi’s son, Orhan, captured Bursa in 1326,
and set up his capital there, then moved it to Adrianople (Edirne),
which he took in 1361. By the 15th century, the whole of Anatolia and
Thrace, except for Constantinople, was under the control of these
Osmanli (or Ottoman) Turks. The Byzantine Emperor at the time, Manuel
II (1391–1425), tried to appease his enemies by allowing a Turkish
district, mosque, and tribunal within his city, and by courting
Turkish goodwill with gifts of gold, but to no avail. The young Ottoman
Sultan, Mehmet II, who reigned from 1451 to 1481, set about cutting
off Constantinople’s supply lines. The huge fortress of Rumeli Hisarı
on the Bosphorus was built in just four months in 1452. He then
withdrew to his capital in Adrianople to await the spring.
The Byzantines tried to protect the Golden Horn from enemy
ships by stretching a huge chain across its mouth. They repaired and
strengthened the city walls that had saved them so many times in the
past, and waited fearfully for the inevitable onslaught. In April 1453
the Sultan’s armies massed outside the city walls, outnumbering the
Byzantines ten to one. The siege and bombardment lasted seven weeks.
The Ottoman admiral bypassed the defensive chain by having his ships
dragged overland under cover of darkness, opening a second attack. The
final ass ault came on 29 May 1453, when the Ottoman army surged
through a breach in the walls. The last emperor, Constantine XI, fell
in the fighting, and by noon that day Mehmet and his men had taken
control of the sought-after city.
His first act was to ride to Haghia Sophia and order that
it be converted into a mosque; on the following Friday, he attended the
first Muslim prayers in what came to be called Ayasofya Camii (Mosque
of Haghia Sophia). After allowing his soldiers three days of pillaging,
he restored order, acting with considerable leniency and good sense.
Henceforth he became known as “Fatih” (Conqueror), and his newly won
capital city was renamed Istanbul.
Fatih Sultan Mehmet laid claim to all the territories
previously held by the Byzantines, so that his empire incorporated most
of Greece and the Balkans, as well as Anatolia. Expansion continued
under his successors, but it was during the reign of his great
grandson, Süleyman, that the Ottoman Empire reached its greatest and
most celebrated heights. Süleyman the Magnificent, aged 25, ascended
the throne and ruled for 46 years (1520–1566), the longest and most
glorious reign in the history of the Ottomans. Süleyman’s army captured
Belgrade in 1521. Rhodes capitulated in 1523. Six years later he
besieged Vienna for 24 days (unsuccessfully) before going on to take
most of Hungary. Turkish corsairs, notably the infamous Barbarossa,
helped to conquer Algiers and Tunis.
By the mid-17th century the Ottoman Empire had reached its
greatest extent, stretching from Batumi at the eastern end of the Black
Sea to Algeria, taking in Mesopotamia, Palestine, the shores of the Red
Sea (including Mecca and Medina), Egypt, Anatolia, Greece, the Balkans,
Hungary, Moldavia, the North African coast, the Crimea, and southern
Ukraine. With such far-flung territories, dissolution was inevitable,
and began immediately. Northern conquests, including Hungary, had
been lost by the close of the 17th century. The decline of these
territories was drawn out and painful, leaving problems in its wake
that have been the source of trouble and friction in the Balkans and
the Middle East ever since.
Decline and Fall
The year 1821 marked the beginning of the Greek War of
Independence, which resulted in victory for the Greeks in 1832, and
another loss of territory for the Ottomans, whose empire had shrunk
significantly. A century of decadence and intermittent wars had left
the Ottoman sultanate in serious, irreversible decline. Attempts at
reform came too late; by 1876 the government was bankrupt. Sultan
Abdül Hamid II (1876–1909) tried to apply absolute rule to an empire
staggering under a crushing foreign debt, with a fragmented population
of hostile people, and succeeded only in creating ill will and
dissatisfaction amongst the younger generation of educated Turks.
Young army officers and the professional classes were
becoming increasingly interested in Western ways of government and
social organization. European literature was widely studied. Robert
College, an American school, and the Galatasaray Lycée, the French
Academy in the city, were turning out young men imbued with dreams of
democracy. These intellectuals formed an underground group known as
the “Young Turks,” centred on Salonica, where revolt broke out. In 1909
Abdül Hamid was deposed and replaced by his brother, Mehmet V.
There followed the Balkan Wars, in which Turkey lost
western Thrace and Macedonia, then World War I, into which Turkey
entered on Germany’s side. In the notorious Gallipoli campaign of 1915,
the Turks, under the leadership of General Mustafa Kemal, defeated the
Allied attack on the Dardanelles.
At the end of the war, the Treaty of Sèvres formally ended
the existence of the Ottoman Empire. Greece was given large
concessions, Armenia was to become an independent state in the east,
and the Middle East was to be divided among the Arab leaders who had
fought with Colonel Lawrence (under British and French “spheres of
influence”).
The subsequent period of internal strife between the Turks
and the Greeks and Armenians was dominated by Mustafa Kemal, who had
risen from the status of war hero to become the leader of the Turkish
nationalist movement. In 1920, with army support, he was elected
president of the Grand National Assembly in Ankara in defiance of the
Sultan’s government in Constantinople. From 1919 to 1922 he waged war
with the Greeks, who had invaded at Smyrna, and ultimately managed to
defeat them and force their withdrawal from Asia Minor.
He was then faced with the delicate task of abolishing the
sultanate without antagonizing the religious elements within his party.
This meant deposing Sultan Mehmet VI, who as caliph (leader of the
Islamic world) and sultan stood for the old tradition of combined
secular and religious power. Kemal handled the problem with his usual
vigour and eloquence in a speech to the Assembly, by linking the power
of the caliphate with that of the Assembly: “… It was by force that the
sons of Osman seized the sovereignty and Sultanate of the Turkish
nation… Now the Turkish nation has rebelled and has put a stop to these
usurpers, and has effectively taken sovereignty and the Sultanate into
its own hands. This is an accomplished fact. ”
In the early morning of 10 November 1922, Mehmet VI slipped
quietly away to a waiting British warship, to end his life in exile. He
was replaced as caliph by his cousin, whose powers were strictly
limited by secular laws, until that position, too, was abolished in
1924.
The Republic of Turkey
In 1923 the Treaty of Lausanne defined the present borders
of the Turkish Republic. An exchange between Greece and Turkey of
expatriate populations resulted in the movement of thousands of people,
and the wholesale desertion of Greek villages and districts.
From 1925 to 1935 several wide-ranging reforms were
introduced by President Kemal. He secularized institutions, reformed
the calendar, adapted the Latin alphabet for the Turkish language,
emancipated women, and improved agriculture and industry. He introduced
the Western idea of surnames (until then Turks had a single name) and
made everyone choose a family name, which they had to hand down to
their children. For himself he chose Atatürk, or Father of the
Turks.
His proved an appropriate choice, as he almost
single-handedly created the modern Turkish state. He was enormously
popular with the common Turkish people, and when he died in 1938
thousands of mourners lined the railway track to salute the white
presidential train as it carried him from Istanbul for burial in
Ankara, the new capital.
Turkey remained neutral during World War II until 1945,
when it entered the war on the side of the Allies. It joined NATO in
1952. The Democratic Party was elected in 1950, and remained in control
until 1960, when, faced with increasing social and economic
difficulties, it was overthrown by a military coup. A new constitution
consolidating liberal reforms was drawn up, and approved by a
referendum held in 1961. However, further unrest led to more coups in
1971 and 1980, after which yet another, more restrictive, constitution
was prepared.
Turgut Özal, leader of the Motherland Party and former
world banker and economist, was elected as prime minister in 1983, and
served until his death in 1993. Under his leadership Turkey adopted a
Western-style economy and in 1987 applied for membership of the
European Community (now Union).
He was succeeded by Tansu Çiller, Turkey’s first woman
leader. She inherited the country’s rampant inflation and the conflict
between Kurdish separatists and the security forces in the southeast.
These political and economic difficulties helped the fundamentalist
Refah party later win the largest share of the vote in 1995. The Refah
party was officially outlawed in 1998, though it continues to be widely
supported. Despite these political tensions, Turkey is becoming an
increasingly popular tourist destination, offering all the trappings of
a Mediterranean paradise and a wealth of fascinating history.
