TURKS

TURKS. Originating in the regions of central Asia between the Caspian Sea and the Altai, Turkic-speaking tribes that expanded in conquest or else fled stronger cousins were the frequent concern of Byzantium (q.v.) from the 5th c. until the end of the Empire. In 1071 Alp Arslan led the Seljuk Turks to a victory over the Byzantine army at Mantzikert, in the extreme east of present-day Turkey, which resulted in the permanent Turkish occupation of Asia Minor (q.v.), a fact confirmed a century later at the battle of Myriokephalion (1176) where the Emperor Manuel I lost the army a second time. Out of the different tribes occupying Anatolia, the Ottomans began their rise to dominance in the early 14th c. until they took the place of the defeated Christian Empire in 1453 under Mohammed II.

Asia Minor was cleared of its remaining Greek presence with the population exchanges following the Treaty of Lausanne in 1924. The massacre of the Armenians just prior to that, together with continuing pressures on the Jacobite communities inhabiting the borderlands near Syria (qq.v.), have largely emptied what is now Turkey of any lingering Christian population. The Kurds, however, remain in the regions to the east where once Armenians and Syriac-speaking Christians had lived. They look to be somewhat more intractable a problem for the Turkish state, though efforts have been continuous since Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s to reduce this Muslim people to Turkification. The Turkish-speaking peoples of Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan in the former Soviet Union have been showing interest in the idea of a greater Turkey, in some quarters at least, though this is likely to remain rhetoric for the present time.