Most of Turkey's territory lies on the Anatolian Peninsula, which has been home to several significant civilizations since Neolithic times. Among these were the Hittite Empire, Lydia, and Phrygia. Troy, the legendary city of Homer's Iliad, was also located on the Anatolian Peninsula. During the Christian era, Constantinople, later renamed Istanbul, on the Balkan Peninsula, was the seat of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire. This empire collapsed with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
The Ottoman Empire was a major world power from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. At its apex during the seventeenth century, it controlled Cyprus, Greece, the Balkans, and large portions of the Arabic-speaking world, including Egypt, Palestine, and Mesopotamia.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the Ottoman Empire dramatically declined in military and cultural vitality. During World War I the Ottomans allied themselves with the Germans. Their defeat led to the partitioning of most of the remaining empire by the victorious Allied powers. The Ottomans retained control of most of the Anatolian Peninsula, although part of it was awarded to Greece in 1920.
In May of 1919 an Ottoman general named Mustafa Kemal, later known as Kemal Ataturk, launched a Turkish rebellion against the weakened Ottoman regime. In April, 1920, he was
Kemal Ataturk (center), founder of Turkey’s modern secular state. (Library of Congress)
Elected president of the provisional government of Turkey. The modern Turkish republic was founded on October 29,1923. The following year Ataturk declared Turkey a secular state and introduced the new nation's first constitution. Ataturk aggressively enforced a policy of secularization until his death in 1938.
World History
