The Long-Ago Battle That Completely Changed The World

With the fiftieth anniversary of the Turkish invasion of Northern Cyprus this week let's review this posting because this battle that took place nearly a thousand years ago is really where the trouble began.

Remember that the country formerly spelled as "Turkey" now wants to be spelled as "Turkiye".

Near the eastern end of Turkiye is a place that is very important. There is a town known as Malazgirt. It used to be called Manzikert. A battle took place there nearly a thousand years ago. It really changed the world.

The Byzantine Empire was what was once had been the eastern half of the Roman Empire. It spoke Greek and it's capital city was Constantinople. It was there that the Hagia Sophia was located, which would be the largest church in the world for a thousand years.

To the east of Byzantium was an Islamic Turkic empire known as the Seljuks. It does not seem that the Seljuks had designs on Byzantium, but many of the Turkic people had a nomadic way of life and began entering Byzantine territory. Byzantium decided to send it's army to the frontier and confront the Seljuks. The result was the battle of Manzikert, in which the Seljuks emerged victorious.

It is almost difficult to imagine the long-term consequences of this battle.

It opened the way for Turkic people to move westward into Asia Minor, also known as the Anatolian Peninsula. This began the downward spiral of Byzantium, and ultimately it's end. The Turkic people who moved in would found an empire, which would grow to be one of the greatest empires the world had ever seen. They became known as the Ottomans.

By the time the Byzantines lost the Battle of Manzikert, in 1071, they had already split from the Catholics, in the Great Schism of 1054, to found the Eastern Orthodox Church. Even though the Byzantines were no longer Catholics, the Catholic Church hierarchy was alarmed at the news of this Moslem victory and that they were moving into what once had been Catholic territory.

The pope responded with the first of the Crusades. This was the medieval efforts to take back control of the Holy Land from the Moslems. It is important that the split happened before the Battle of Manzikert because, if the Byzantines had still been Catholics the effort that went into the Crusades would likely have been sent to Asia Minor to help the Byzantines and the Crusades, with their far-reaching effects on the world, would likely never have happened.

The Ottomans captured territory, moving ever-closer to Constantinople. In 1453, the city finally fell and the Ottomans renamed it as Istanbul. The Hagia Sophia became the standard for Ottoman architecture and, to show that they too were capable of such architecture, built what is known as the Blue Mosque facing the Hagia Sophia.

But the fall of such an important Christian city, as well as what had been the largest church for a thousand years, had very far reaching effects.

One effect of the fall of Constantinople to Moslems was the move of the center of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Kiev would seem to be a logical choice, it was Prince Vladimir that had made the Byzantine rites so important by choosing it over the Catholic rites for his kingdom known as the Kievan Rus. But Kiev had been devastated by the Mongols to such an extent that it would not regain it's importance until the Nineteenth Century.

This ended up with the headquarters of the Eastern Orthodox Church moving much further north, to a place called Moscow. This is what started Moscow, as well as the country of Russia, on it's way to being so important.

Another effect of the fall of Constantinople to Moslems was the movement of scholars, with large numbers of manuscripts on pack animals, westward. The tremendous enlightening effect that this new knowledge would have on Europe became known as the Renaissance. This is what turned the medieval world into the modern world.

The Renaissance could be thought of as the trunk of a tree with several branches of how it changed the world. Among these old manuscripts of the Bible that were close to the originals. This brought about the Reformation, which was the religious branch of the Renaissance. The scientific branch of the Renaissance was the Enlightenment. The political branch of the Renaissance was the French Revolution, which opened the modern political era. The technical branch of the Renaissance was the Industrial Revolution, which contributed the printing press to provide the necessary documentation to spread all of the other branches. I think of the leaves on the branches of the tree as the documents, printed by a printing press, that made the branch grow.

The Crusades left a tradition of travel to distant places by ship, which resulted in the Age of Discovery several hundred years later, which spread the ideas of the branches of the Renaissance across the world.

The Ottomans had one of the greatest empires in history and advanced far into eastern Europe, reaching as far as Vienna. This indirectly made possible another world-changing event. Martin Luther is the figure most closely associated with the beginning of the Reformation. The Holy Roman Emperor of the time, Charles V, was a devout Catholic who opposed the Reformation. He could probably have brought it to an end but knew that Luther had supporters and needed all the support he could get to oppose the Ottomans. So, the Reformation proceeded.

A branch of the Ottoman Empire was the Pasha Dynasty that ruled Egypt, and which we saw in our visit to "Cairo". It was the Pashas, who ruled until the overthrow of King Farouk in 1952, that really created modern Egypt. They also founded Khartoum, which is the capital city of Sudan. The overthrow of King Farouk set a pattern for the replacement of kings with military rulers that would be repeated in countries like Libya and Iraq.

This Ottoman advance far into Europe left a legacy in the region with later rivalry between the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, even though the two would ultimately end up on the same side in the First World War.The seizing of Bosnia, which had been under Ottoman control, by Austria-Hungary was the primary factor leading to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which was the spark that set off the First World War.

The First World War brought major changes to the world, including the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of modern Turkiye. It is sometimes referred to simply as "The War That Changed Everything". It was what really brought the world from the Nineteenth into the Twentieth Century. Among it's many changes was the October Revolution that brought an end to the Romanov Dynasty and ushered in Communism. The retooling of America's wartime industrial production to consumer goods brought about the "Roaring Twenties", but then the devastating economic crash of 1929, which ultimately led to a Second World War, and the postwar order that shaped the world after that, including the "Baby Boom" generation and it's rock music.

So much of the conflict in the Middle East today is simply due to the fact that the region was dominated by the Ottoman Empire for so long that it has not yet reached a new equilibrium since the end of that empire.

The end of the Ottoman Empire, following the First World War, brought about the republic of Turkiye. The president of the country, Ataturk, began an ambitious program of modernization and westernization, adopting the Latin alphabet for the Turkish language.

The Shah of neighboring Iran, Reza Shah, was a friend of Ataturk and also sought modernization reforms. Under his son and successor, these reforms would become known as the White Revolution. But this would alienate much of the Moslem community in the country. The ultimate result would be the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah, that we saw in "The Great Revolution Of Our Time", on this blog.

The Byzantine Empire included what is now both Turkiye and Greece. The Ottomans permanently conquered Turkiye, but not Greece. Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire until the early Nineteenth Century. This continues on as the tension between Turkiye and Greece today.

It all started with the Battle of Manzikert.