Turks

Generic term for peoples of central Asia, comprising various tribes, languages and cultures. Originally nomadic steppe-dwellers, many Turkic peoples adopted the sedentary life of the urban Middle East or eastern Europe after successive waves of invasion and conquest from the 7th century onward.

The original homeland of the Turks was around the Orhon river in southern Siberia; by the sixth century, when they first appear in history, they had come to dominate the vast steppe that stretches from China to Iran.

Their powerful nomadic states and tribal confederations rarely lasted long, but they established a sedentary state based in Turfan that survived until the Mongol conquest of 1206.

Around 1000, Turkish tribes started moving into Iran (where they had already been employed as soldiers) and in 1038 created the Great Seljuk state, their first power base in the Middle East.

An overwhelming victory over Byzantium in 1071 led to the foundation of a Seljuk state in Anatolia, a prime ground for the war against the Infidel that many Turkish tribes joined. When the Seljuk state broke up in the late thirteenth century, Osman, one of the tribal leaders, set up an independent principality in northwestern Anatolia in 1299. His descendants, the Ottomans, conquered Constantinople in 1453 and eventually ruled all the Near East, southeast Europe and north Africa. Although in constant decline from the mid-seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire survived till the First World War. The victory of Atatürk’s nationalists sealed their fate; the last sultan was deposed in 1922 and Turkey became the republic that exists today.