THE ORIGINS AND NATURE OF TURKISH POWER

Özet

In this year 1971, it is most fitting that the scholarly world give recognition to the 900th anniversary of an event which changed decisively thecourse of world history. I am speaking of the victory of the Seljuk Turks överthe Byzantine Empire near the town of Manzikert in the year 1071, a victorywhich opened up Asia Minör to Turkish conquest and settlement, soundedthe death knell of the East Roman Empire and laid the foundations for thesubsequent expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe, Asia and Africa.Two centuries after Manzikert, the Osmanli (Ottoman) Turks began drawingupon the, by then firmly entrenched ethnic and cultural reservoir of TurkishAsia Minör to propel itself into the position of a world power in Europe andthe Eastern Mediterranean, a position which it held from the fifteenth upto the nineteenth centuries. While students in North America and WesternEurope have traditionally received an exaggerated picture of the grandeurof 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, aboutwhom 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?"