ASIA MINOR

ASIA MINOR. The region approximately embracing the modern state of Turkey (q.v.), less the latter’s territories in Europe, it has been playing a role in recorded history beginning with the Hittite Kingdom of the second millennium B.C. through to the Persians, the Greeks (settled on its coast from the 6th c. B.C.), and on to the present. It was the site of the ancient cities and later Christian centers of Ephesus (q.v.), Smyrna, Chalcedon (q.v.), Nicaea, Ancyra (q.v.), Caesarea (q.v.) in Cappadocia (q.v.), Trebizond and Sinope-to name a few. During the Byzantine era it formed the bulk of Constantinople’s territories, following the loss of Egypt and Syria (qq.v.) in the 7th c., until the disastrous battle of Mantzikert in 1071. This marked the beginning of the Empire’s terminal decline and the inauguration of Turkish Muslim rule, beginning with the Seljuk Sultanate of Icononium (modern Konya) and followed in turn by the Ottoman Empire (q.v.), and finally the Republic of Turkey. The process of Islamicization also began with Mantzikert and would eventually see the disappearance of Orthodox Christianity, a loss capped by the Armenian slaughters and by the expulsion of the ancient Greek community in the population exchanges of 1924.