History of Turkey

From 2000 BC, Anatolia, the eastern part and the heart of present-day Turkey, was traversed by groups of “hunter-gatherers”.

During the Bronze Age, 2500–1700 BC, the Hatti, an indigenous people, traded with the Assyrians. Indo-European peoples mixed with the local population, creating kingdoms and then a Hittite empire, which reached its height in 1350–1322 BC, dealing on equal terms with Egypt before breaking up into small kingdoms.

In the same period, Greek colonists settled on the Aegean coast. Around 800 BC the Phrygians created a powerful state with Gordion (near Ankara) as its capital. One of their kings, Midas (715–676 BC), had, according to legend, the power to turn everything he touched into gold.
The wealth of Croesus (561–542 BC), king of Lydia, has remained proverbial. At this time Anatolia became Persia, and the revolts of the Greek cities of Ionia were the cause of the Persian Wars, which set Athens and Sparta against the Achaemenid Empire.

In 334 BC, Alexander the Great conquered Asia Minor, extending his conquests as far as the Indus and Egypt. On his death in 323, his generals disputed his empire, and the Seleucid dynasty ruled Asia Minor until the Roman occupation. Thanks to the “Pax Romana”, this province of Asia Minor enjoyed a prosperity without equal.

In AD 285–286, the Emperor Diocletian divided the empire, which had become too large, into two entities: the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire.

In AD 305, Constantine (272–337) defeated his adversaries and partly reunified the empire, but he created his new capital, Nova Roma, on the site of an ancient Greek colony, Byzantium. This city was soon called Constantinople, that is, the city of Constantine. He, without persecuting the followers of the other religions, favoured Christianity, and this Church of the East separated from Rome in 1054, thus becoming the Orthodox Church. In 476 the last emperor of the West, Romulus Augustus, was deposed by Odoacer, and the emperors of the East then considered themselves the sole holders of the imperial title and tried, but in vain, to reconstitute the empire.

In 610, Heraclius (575–641) took the title of Basileus, that is, king in ancient Greek, and the historians of the 19th century then spoke of the Byzantine Empire. But this empire, over time, undermined by dynastic struggles, incessant theological quarrels, the corruption of the elite, the rapacity of Venice, eager to eliminate a competitor, and the attacks of the Turks, disappeared for good with the capture of Constantinople in 1453. But the rise of the Ottoman Empire had begun, well before this event, with the conquest of the Balkans and of Anatolia.

Constantinople, after its conquest by Mehmed the Conqueror, became, under the name Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, which reached its height under Selim the Grim (1470–1520) and Suleiman the Magnificent (1494–1566).

But the same destiny as Byzantium awaited the Ottoman Empire. As succession was not by primogeniture, Sultan Mehmed II (1432–1481) instituted, in order to avoid civil wars, the Law of Fratricide, later replaced by lifelong confinement, in apartments called “the golden cage”, of the brothers of the new sultan. But this did not prevent the intrigues of the seraglio, and the accession of incapable sultans who most often left power to the Sultan’s Mother.

Despite the competence of the Grand Viziers and of the High Administration, all formed of Christians taken from their families and converted to Islam (the devshirme system), the necessary reforms came up against the weight of tradition, both civil and religious.
The Corps of Janissaries, once the elite of the Ottoman army, grew rigid and ended by making and unmaking the sultans, until their extermination on 16 June 1826 on the orders of Sultan Mahmud II (1785–1839).

As the trade routes had turned away from the Mediterranean, and with the loss of European and Maghrebi provinces, the state was deprived of important revenues. This situation obliged Turkey to borrow from European banks, which in return obtained concessions from which they drew substantial revenues. In the words of Tsar Nicholas I, Turkey had become “the Sick Man of Europe”.

Abdülhamid II (1842–1918), barely come to power in 1876, suspended the new liberal constitution. He brutally repressed the insurrections of the last European provinces and, which earned him the nickname of the Red Sultan, had more than 200,000 Armenians massacred in 1895. In 1908 he was deposed by the political party of the “Young Turks”, and Mehmed V (1844–1918) succeeded him, but without any real political power. It was under the government of the Young Turks that a new genocide of Armenians took place in 1909, and the Italo-Ottoman war (1911–1912) and the Balkan wars (1912), which ended in disaster.

In 1913, Talaat Pasha (1874–1921) obtained full powers and, out of fear of Russia, entered the First World War on Germany’s side. Between 1915 and 1916 this ultra-nationalist government carried out not only the genocide of the Armenians, but also that of Aramaean and Greek populations.

Despite undeniable successes in the Caucasus and at the Dardanelles, Turkey had to sign the armistice of Mudros on 30 October 1918. The Treaty of Sèvres of 10 August 1920, signed by Mehmed VI (1861–1926), dismembered the empire, even ceding the Turkish Aegean coast to Greece. General Mustafa Kemal, hero of the Dardanelles, rallied all the nationalist forces and, between 1916 and 1921, defeated the French, the Italians and the British, who, weary of this conflict, withdrew, leaving the Greek and Turkish armies face to face alone. In 1922 a Turkish army, modernised and equipped by the Soviet Union, defeated the Greek armies and entered Smyrna, present-day Izmir. The Convention of Mudanya, signed on 11 October 1922, ended the conflict but also ratified a vast transfer of populations.

In 1923, after the deposition of the last sultan, Mehmed VI (1861–1926), Mustafa Kemal became the first president of the new Turkish republic and made Ankara the new capital. After the creation of a single party – the Republican People’s Party – which had crushed all opposition, he ruled the country with an iron hand, driving it at a forced pace towards modernity. The caliphate was abolished in 1924, as were the Sufi brotherhoods and religious dress. The replacement in 1928 of the Arabic alphabet by the Latin alphabet also allowed spelling to be simplified. In 1924 the right to vote was granted to women, polygamy was forbidden and sharia was abolished. Trade, agriculture and industry were encouraged and modernised.

Mustafa Kemal, who had become Kemal Atatürk, that is, the Father of all the Turks, never having taken care of his health and exhausted by all this work, died on 10 November 1938.

During the Second World War, Turkey joined the side of the Allies only two months before the capitulation of Germany. New political parties were authorised, but the army, worried by the return of religious forces and guarantor of “Kemalism”, took power in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997.

Since 2002 the AKP party of Tayyip Erdoğan has led the country.