THE ORIGINS AND NATURE OF TURKISH POWER

In this year 1971, it is most fitting that the scholarly world give recognition to the 900th anniversary of an event which changed decisively the course of world history. I am speaking of the victory of the Seljuk Turks över the Byzantine Empire near the town of Manzikert in the year 1071, a victory which opened up Asia Minör to Turkish conquest and settlement, sounded the death knell of the East Roman Empire and laid the foundations for the subsequent expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe, Asia and Africa. Two centuries after Manzikert, the Osmanli (Ottoman) Turks began drawing upon the, by then firmly entrenched ethnic and cultural reservoir of Turkish Asia Minör to propel itself into the position of a world power in Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, a position which it held from the fifteenth up to the nineteenth centuries. While students in North America and Western Europe have traditionally received an exaggerated picture of the grandeur of the Spanish, the Austrian, the British, the French or the Russian Empires, seldom until recently have either teachers or students asked themselves, "Who were the Ottoman Turks, those great protagonists of Europe, about whom so many of the leading literary and religious figures of Western Europe, not to mention the diplomats and politicians, were pıeoccupied from the fifteenth to the nineteeenth centuries?"