Turkey

A Short History

Norman Stone

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780500771549
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

A virtuoso performance by historian Norman Stone, who has lived and worked in the country since 1997, this concise survey of Turkeys relations with its immediate neighbours and the wider world from the 11th century to the present day. Stone deftly conducts the reader through this story, from the arrival of the Seljuks in Anatolia in the eleventh century to the modern republic applying for EU membership in the twenty-first. It is an historical account of epic proportions, featuring rapacious leaders such as Genghis Khan and Tamerlane through the glories of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent to Kemal Atatürk, the reforming genius and founder of modern Turkey. At its height, the Ottoman Empire was a superpower that brought Islam to the gates of Vienna. Stone examines the reasons for the empires long decline and shows how it gave birth to the modern Turkish republic, where east and west, religion and secularism, tradition and modernity still form vibrant elements of national identity. Norman Stone brilliantly draws out the larger themes of Turkeys history, resulting in a book that is a masterly exposition of the historians craft.

ONE Origins

ORIGINS

The centrepiece of the Ottoman Empire was the Topkapı Palace, on the small peninsula that Fritz Neumark’s ship rounded on its way to the dock in the harbour of the Golden Horn. It is a palace unlike any other: vast in acreage, but not in height. It is laid out in courtyards, with many pavilions, some of them very intricate, which are called köşk (the origin of our own word, ‘kiosk’), and this reflected the rulers’ own understanding of their origins. The palace is an elaborate version of the tented headquarters of a nomadic chieftain, and the Ottoman symbol was the horsetail: the more such standards outside the tent, the higher the rank; when the army was on the march, the tents were often tremendous works of art. The best display of them is in Cracow, where they were taken after the siege of Vienna in 1683.

The early Turks came from the Altai region in Central Asia, on the western border of present-day Mongolia, and may even have had some distant links across the straits to Alaska (the Eskimo word for ‘bear’ is the Turkish ayı). The first written reference to them is a Chinese tyu-kyu of the second century BC, a name that appears here and there, subsequently, in Chinese sources of the sixth century. It denoted nomadic warrior tribes, practised at raiding superior civilizations: the word ‘Turk’ was the name of the dominant tribe, and means ‘strong man’. These nomads, related to the Mongols and perhaps also to the Huns, spread out over the vast tableland of Central Asia, and caused much trouble for the Chinese, sometimes establishing steppe empires that lasted for a generation or two before being absorbed by the more settled natives. Much of Chinese history is about these battles on the long, open frontier; the necessity for the Great Wall being a case in point. The steppe empire that really stood out was that of the Uyghurs, of around 800 AD, who took literacy and much else from the Chinese. There were dynasties with obvious Turkish antecedents, including that of the fabled Kublai Khan (Kubilay is a common enough first name in Turkey), who in 1272 established Hanbalık, ‘city of the ruler’, the modern-day Beijing.

Some of these Turkish connotations may be no more than romantic speculation. Does ‘Kirghiz’ mean in Turkish ‘the forty-two’ (tribes), or something else, such as ‘nomad’? In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Marco Polo referred to Chinese Turkestan as ‘Great Turkey’, and the place names are obvious: the river Yenisei in Russia takes its name from yeni çay or ‘new river’; and the earlier name of Stalingrad, Tsaritsyn, has nothing to do with ‘Tsar’ but comes from sarı su, ‘yellow water’. There are some oddities. Tundra is dondurma, which nowadays means ‘ice cream’. The linguistic descendants of old Turkish have, of course, grown in some cases far apart, although Anatolian Turks say they find Kirghiz quite easy, despite the thousands of miles in between. The grammar is regular, but different from English, in that prepositions, tenses and the like are added to the main word, with the vowel changing according to the main word’s dominant vowel. This is maybe best illustrated by the word ‘pastrami’, one of none-too-many words that we owe to these old Turks. It is an Italian version of the original pastırma, nowadays sold as very thin slices of dried beef, preserved in a cake of spices, of which cumin (çemen) is chief. Pas is the stem of a verb meaning ‘press’. Tır (the dotless ı pronounced something like a French ‘eu’ and marking a vowel change that is used after an ‘a’) indicated causation, and ma (also a vowel change: it could have been me) turns it all into a verbal noun or gerund. This foodstuff, kept under the saddle, maintained nomadic horse archers for hundreds of miles across the Central Asian steppe.

The earliest writing in Turkish (with a runic alphabet) dates from the eighth century, around Lake Baikal, and refers to dokuz oğuz ‘nine tribes’, but quite soon the Uyghur version of the language, written vertically in the Chinese manner, prevailed, and it was used in the diplomatic correspondence of the great Mongol conqueror, Genghis Khan (c. 1167–1227).¹

Otherwise these early Turks do not leave a literary trace and you have to study them using outside sources – Chinese, Persian, Arab, Byzantine. They moved west and south-west, towards the great civilizations on the periphery of Central Asia. They came in waves, two of them of tidal proportions, as we shall see. Genghis Khan, in the early thirteenth century, led a federation of related Mongol and Turkish (or Tatar) tribes. He had a successor a century later, a wrecker of world proportions, Tamerlane (c. 1336–1405), of Turkish origin (Timur is a variant of the word meaning ‘iron’ and lenk means ‘lame’). They and their descendants took over China, much of Russia, and India; ‘Mughal’, a version of ‘Mongol’, reflects this: in Turkish, Taj Mahal means ‘crown quarter’; and the language of Pakistan, Urdu, is a variant of the word ordu, meaning ‘army’. There is a famous French book on these matters, René Grousset’s L’empire des steppes (1939), and there are Turkish connections all over the area, including Afghanistan, where you can often be understood if you use the language; but the important link, as far as the Anatolian Turks is concerned, is with Persia. This was, of course, the greatest historic civilization of the whole Middle East and there are controversies as to the Turks’ relationship with it – controversies that involve not just cultural borrowings, but Islam itself.

As early as the eighth century, Turkish mercenaries had made their appearance in Persia, in the then capital of which, Baghdad, the Caliphate reigned over all Islam. Some had gone on to Syria or Egypt. However, the decisive moment came in the later tenth century, when one of the Oğuz (western Turks) tribes arrived on the Persian outskirts. Its chief was one Selçuk, meaning ‘little flood’ in Arabic and maybe something else in Turkish. The Turks brought a religious iconography that came from the world of Siberia: shamanism, with its own druids, the emblems being a peregrine and a hawk – tuğrul and çağrı – which are still used as first names. In 1055 they entered Baghdad and penetrated the state: at a great age, their leader, Tuğrul Bey, married the daughter of the Caliph in a ceremony under Turkish rites: as a French historian, Jean-Paul Roux, says, it was the equivalent of marrying an African chief to a Habsburg to the sound of tom-toms.

Then these Turks took over Persia altogether. To this day, the school textbooks reflect ancient quarrels or hard-luck stories. Little Greeks or Iranians learn that their ancestors, elegantly clad in white, discussed poetry in the subjunctive while dignified matrons beamed over gambolling sheep, and flaxen-haired maidens stirred the pot, all under clear skies, until, out of the blue, squat and hairy savages, offering rapine, arrived. These are the Turks, their oppression lasting for centuries. Little Turks on the other hand, learn that effete civilizations, eunuchs, etc., were given some sort of vigour by the arrival of their ancestors. When, in the 1930s, Turks were compelled to adopt names in the European manner, Cenk, Tusa (although that one is probably Balkan) and Savas, meaning ‘battle’, were quite popular, and Zafer, Galip, Mansur, Kazan, denoting ‘victory’, even more so. And there are many words for fighting in Turkish.

The main trick was for Turkish warriors to appear, and, as a military elite, take over an old-established state. They were extraordinarily adaptable and learned from the peoples whom they penetrated. In some, but not all, cases they took over the religion. In the case of the Mongols, this was Buddhism or a form of Christianity; but otherwise, in India or Persia, it was generally Islam, which at that time, around 1100, was the most civilized form of religion (as the buildings of Samarkand especially show). The Persians, heirs to one of the great civilizations of the world, got a Turkisharistocracy and to this day wonder why the Turks brought off first an empire and then a working modern state, whereas they did not (modern Turkey contains a million refugees from that region).

The most interesting synthesis is Russian. Napoleon famously said, scratch the Russian and you discover the Tatar. Russia in the thirteenth century succumbed, for two centuries, to the Mongols, or Tatars (originally, as with ‘Turk’ itself, just the name of a dominant tribe). A third of the old aristocracy had Tatar names: Yusupov (from ‘Yusuf’) or Muravyev (from ‘Murat’), and Ivan the Terrible himself was descended from Genghis Khan. The Tatars knew how to build up a state – reflected by the Russian words for ‘handcuffs’ and ‘treasury’. The Russian princes eventually copied the Tatars, Moscow most successfully, and in 1552, Ivan the Terrible conquered the Tatar capital, Kazan, on the Volga. Nineteenth-century warhorses then presented Russian history as a sort of crusade in which indignant peasants freed themselves from ‘the Tatar yoke’. But that phrase was first used only in 1571, when the Orthodox Church was trying to resist Ivan the Terrible, who used Tatars to build up a state that did not tolerate Orthodox pretentions. Before then, the relationship was a great deal more complicated, including intermarriage.

The Persian Turks were called ‘Great Seljuks’, but their lesser cousins, still in many cases nomadic, drove into Anatolia. Their chief, Alp Arslan (r. 1064–72), was really leading his horde (that word again comes from ordu) into Syria, a rich country. Along the way, his men were probing the eastern frontiers of Byzantium, the eastern Roman Empire, and upsetting Byzantium’s clients, Christian states in the southern Caucasus, who looked to Constantinople. An emperor, Romanus Diogenes, foolishly decided to march an army all the way to the east. In 1071, there was a battle, at Manzikert, now Malazgirt, an undistinguished place on a high plateau north of Lake Van, and the Byzantines lost, severely weakening their hold on eastern and central Anatolia. Over the next two centuries, the Seljuk Turks established themselves in much, though not all, of Anatolia; Byzantium was confined to the area of Constantinople, parts of the Balkans, and a few coastal places.

The Seljuks left the Christian population of Anatolia alone. In Cappadocia, some four hours’ drive east of Ankara, there are valleys where Christians lived undisturbed, building rock churches with frescoes that are now one of the world’s tourist sites. The frescoes painted in the era of Byzantine revival, in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, have a magnificent quality, and one of them was taken to newly Christian Russia, as Our Lady of Vladimir. After the Seljuk conquest, the frescoes become crude, but they are evidence that the Turks developed a tolerant and law-abiding civilization. They were not interested in suppressing other people’s religions, and in any case there were too few of them, with a Christian population all around. There was much intermarriage and trade instead. A Byzantine princess of literary disposition, Anna Comnena, said in the twelfth century that the inhabitants of Anatolia divided between Greeks, barbarians, and ‘mixo-barbarians’, meaning intermarried Turks.

The Seljuk capital, Konya (the old Roman Iconium), and a major city, Kayseri (the old Caesarea in Cappadocia), have some splendid architecture, in the style of the great places of Samarkand and Bukhara in Central Asia.² Grand mosques were constructed, to which schools, hospitals, and so forth were sometimes attached, as education was practised. But the early Turks were not very good at religious rules. They were more inclined to put up small prayer-houses than grand mosques, as more suited to their version of Islam, and their women went uncovered; wine was drunk; there was dancing, much to the scandal of a fourteenth-century Arab traveller, Ibn Battuta.

Eventually, Byzantium did collapse, but it happened from the west, not the east. There had always been rivalry between Rome and Constantinople, and it became worse, because the Pope, as Bishop of Rome, claimed to be the head of the entire Church, whereas Byzantium developed its own form of Christianity: Orthodoxy. Western – ‘Latin’ – Crusaders, a combination of Normans and Venetians, attacked Byzantium in 1204, and w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other Titles of Interest
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Prelude
• 1. Origins
• 2. World Empire
• 3. Zenith
• 4. Shadows
• 5. Changing Balance
• 6. The Long Defensive
• 7. End of Empire
• 8. Crash
• Epilogue: The Turkish republic
• Map
• Chronology
• Further Reading
• List of Illustrations
• Index
• Copyright