Turkey. Republic (official name, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, Republic of Turkey) whose territory is located in Southeastern Europe and Southwest Asia ; It is bordered to the northwest by Bulgaria and Greece, to the north by the Black Sea, to the northeast by Georgia and Armenia, to the east by Iran, to the south by Iraq, Syria and the Mediterranean Sea, and to the west by the Aegean Sea. The capital is Ankara.
The modern Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal from the Ottoman Empire After its collapse after the First World War. It became a secular state in 1928 and in 1950 a multi-party political system was established. Apart from a brief period of government led by a military junta between 1960 and 1961, Turkey had civilian governments until 1980, when in a period of political instability, inflation and terrorist acts, the Army took control of the country. At the end of 1983 the civil government in Turkey was restored.
The first important civilization in Anatolia was that of the Hittites, around 1900 – 1200 BC, a people originating from the central plateau. This civilization was destroyed by the invasions of the ‘peoples of the sea’, who devastated Asia Minor and Syria at the end of the 12th century BC The destruction of Troy, a city in western Anatolia, was an event that probably occurred during these invasions and that later it was commemorated in Greek legends.
One of the groups of the ‘peoples of the sea’, the Phrygians, established a kingdom that happened to be the dominant power in Anatolia between the 9th and 8th centuries BC During this period, the Greeks founded Miletus, Ephesus, Priene and many other cities in Ionia, an area located along the coast of the Aegean Sea. Around 700 BC the hegemony of the Phrygians ended at the hands of the Cimmerians, a nomadic people who settled in western Asia Minor.
In the 7th century BC, the Lydians founded a kingdom on the Aegean coast whose capital was Sardis. This kingdom was occupied by the Persians under Cyrus II the Great in 546 BC
From the middle of the 6th century to 333 BC most of the territories of Asia Minor, including Anatolia, belonged to the Persian Empire, although Greek cities often enjoyed of considerable autonomy. In the 4th century BC, Persian power declined and shortly after 333 BC the territory was occupied by Macedonian Alexander III the Great. In the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, Asia Minor was progressively occupied by the Romans.
In the 4th century AD, Asia Minor became part of the Byzantine Empire, whose capital was Constantinople or Byzantium (today Istanbul), located on the European side of the Bosphorus, in the center of the western coast of Anatolia. During the 11th century, Asia Minor was invaded by the Seljuk Turks.
In 1071 they defeated the Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert and during the 12th century they occupied most of central Anatolia. Although at that time the objective of the Seljuks was not to attack the Byzantines but to eliminate the heterodox threat of the Islamic Shiites, represented by the Fatimids of Egypt, some members of the Seljuk dynasty established the Sultanate of Rum (whose capital was Konya), from where they would rule central Anatolia during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Most of the nomadic tribes that made possible the first victories of the Seljuks, were quickly pushed towards the west of Anatolia, where they faced the last Byzantine defenses. Although the Sultanate of Rum imitated the Seljuk government of Baghdad, the presence of a significant number of Christians within its borders generated an environment different from that of the rest of the Islamic states, facilitating the basis of the systems of government and society. Ottomans that would emerge in the fourteenth century.
According to SOFTWARELEVERAGE, the Seljuks of Baghdad and Konya were soon defeated by the invasions of the Mongol people, under Genghis Khan, which would culminate in the occupation and sacking of Baghdad in 1258. In Anatolia the Turkmen nomads took advantage of the ensuing anarchy to form a series of principalities, nominally under the sovereignty of Rum which was already dominated by the Mongols. These principalities were maintained thanks to the incursions that they carried out among themselves and the raids carried out in the last Byzantine territories that resisted in western Anatolia.
