THE ORIGINS AND NATURE OF TURKISH POWER

Year 1968, Issue: 10, 241 - 285, 01.05.1968

Carl Max Kortepeter

https://doi.org/10.1501/Tarar_0000000388

Abstract

In this year 1971, it is most fitting that the scholarly world give recognition to the 900th anniversary of an event which changed decisively the
course of world history. I am speaking of the victory of the Seljuk Turks över
the Byzantine Empire near the town of Manzikert in the year 1071, a victory
which opened up Asia Minör to Turkish conquest and settlement, sounded
the death knell of the East Roman Empire and laid the foundations for the
subsequent expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe, Asia and Africa.
Two centuries after Manzikert, the Osmanli (Ottoman) Turks began drawing
upon the, by then firmly entrenched ethnic and cultural reservoir of Turkish
Asia Minör to propel itself into the position of a world power in Europe and
the Eastern Mediterranean, a position which it held from the fifteenth up
to the nineteenth centuries. While students in North America and Western
Europe have traditionally received an exaggerated picture of the grandeur
of the Spanish, the Austrian, the British, the French or the Russian Empires,
seldom until recently have either teachers or students asked themselves,
"Who were the Ottoman Turks, those great protagonists of Europe, about
whom so many of the leading literary and religious figures of Western Europe,
not to mention the diplomats and politicians, were pıeoccupied from the fifteenth to the nineteeenth centuries?" 

Keywords

ORIGINS, NATURE, TURKISH POWER