Turkish people
Nation | Active
1453 CE to 2057 CE
The Turkish people, or the Turks, are an ethnic group primarily living in Turkey, and in the former lands of the Ottoman Empire where Turkish minorities have been established.
Turkish nationality law, which regulates current Turkish citizenship and nationality, is based primarily on the principle of jus sanguinis.Various Ancient Anatolian civilizations and Thracian peoples have inhabited the area now called Turkey since prehistoric times.
Modern Turkish people primarily descend from these indigenous groups, in addition to neighboring peoples and Turkic peoples, despite speaking a Turkic language, which is adopted by the local populations who predominantly had spoken Indo-European languages.
Turkic languages may date back to 600 BC, and the first mention of the ethnonym "Turk" may date from Herodotus' reference to "Targitas" or from Classical Latin references to people in the forests north of the Sea of Azov.
Chinese sources in the sixth century also use "Tujue" to refer to the Göktürks.
However, it is the Seljuk Turks who bring Turkish language and Islam into Anatolia in the 11th century.
The Ottoman beylik unites Anatolia starting from the late 13th century and creates the Ottoman Empire.
Turkish identity strengthens with the rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire, and the migration of some 7–9 million Turkish-Muslim refugees from the lost territories of the Caucasus, Crimea, Balkans, and the Mediterranean islands into Anatolia and Eastern Thrace during the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.
Turkish nationalism consolidates with the Turkish War of Independence and the subsequent proclamation of the Republic of Turkey.
Turkey has a very diverse culture that is a blend of various elements of the Oğuz Turkic, indigenous Anatolian, Greek, Islamic, Ottoman, and Western cultures.
Due to Ottoman past, the Turkish minorities are the second largest ethnic groups in Bulgaria and Cyprus.
In addition, as a result of modern migration, a Turkish diaspora has been established, particularly in Western Europe, where large communities have been formed in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
There are also significant Turkish communities living in Australia, the former Soviet Union and North America.
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The various nomadic Turkic tribes who once roamed the steppe and desert region southwest of the Urals, in present-day Kazakhstan, begin in the fifteenth century to invade what is now Uzbekistan, an area that had long been the center of a flourishing Persian-influenced Islamic civilization of nontribal, settled irrigationists.
Here they abandon their nomadic tribal existence, establishing “Uzbek” dynasties that dominate the region.
The “Uzbeks” develop from a mingling of the ancient, settled Iranian populations with the nomadic Turkic invaders.
The former are ethnically similar to the Tajiks, and the latter include Kipchaks, a loosely organized Turkic tribal confederation incorporated into the Mongol Golden Horde, and the relatively more Mongolized Karluks and Turks of Samarkand.
Abu'l-Khayr Khan, a descendant of Genghis Khan, rises to the khanship of the Uzbek confederation in Siberia in 1428 at the age of seventeen.
Ruling for forty years, Abu'l-Khayr intervenes either against or in support of several Central Asian Timurid princes and leads the Uzbek tribes southeastward to the north bank of the Syr Darya.
However, a number of Uzbek tribes, adopting the name Kazak, break away and flee east in the mid-1450s; their departure weakens the Uzbeks.
Abu'l-Khayr continues to lead the main Uzbek body until 1468, when he is slain as the Uzbek confederation is shattered in combat with invading Dzungars, a western Mongol people so called because they formed the “dson”—left wing—of the Mongol army.
Additional turmoil erupts when the Ottoman Turks expand their empire into the Balkans.
They cross the Bosporus Straits in 1352, subdue Bulgaria in 1388, and defeat the Serbs at Kosovo Polje in 1389.
Sigismund leads a crusade against them in 1396, but the Ottomans rout his forces at Nicopolis, and he barely escapes with his life.
Tamerlane's invasion of Anatolia in 1402-03 slows the Turks' progress for several decades, but in 1437 Sultan Murad prepares to invade Hungary.
Sigismund dies the same year, and Hungary's next two kings, Albrecht V of Austria (1437-39) and Wladyslaw III of Poland (1439-44), who is known in Hungary as Ulaszlo I, both die during campaigns against the Turks.
After Ulaszlo, Hungary's nobles choose an infant king, Laszlo V, and a regent, Janos Hunyadi, to rule the country until Laszlo V comes of age.
The son of a lesser nobleman of the Vlach tribe, Hunyadi has risen to become a general, Transylvania's military governor, one of Hungary's largest landowners, and a war hero.
He uses his personal wealth and the support of the lesser nobles to win the regency and overcome the opposition of the magnates.
Hunyadi then establishes a mercenary army funded by the first tax ever imposed on Hungary's nobles.
He defeats the Ottoman forces in Transylvania in 1442 and breaks their hold on Serbia in 1443, only to be routed at Varna (where Laszlo V himself perishes) a year later.
In 1456, when the Turkish army besieges Belgrade, Hunyadi defeats it in his greatest and final victory.
Hunyadi dies of the plague soon after.
The Jagiellons will never recover their hegemony over Central Europe, and the ascendancy of the Ottomans foreshadows the eventual subjection of the entire region to foreign rule; but the half century that follows the Battle of Mohács marks an era of stability, affluence, and cultural advancement unmatched in national history and widely regarded by Poles as their country's golden age.
The Teutonic Knights have been reduced to vassalage, and despite the now persistent threats posed by the Turks and an emerging Russian colossus, Poland-Lithuania manages to defend its status as one of the largest and most prominent states of Europe.
The wars and diplomacy of the century yield no dramatic expansion but shield the country from significant disturbance and permit significant internal development.
An "Eternal Peace" concluded with the Ottoman Turks in 1533 lessens but does not remove the threat of invasion from that quarter.
A lucrative agricultural export market is the foundation for the kingdom's wealth.
A population boom in Western Europe prompts an increased demand for foodstuffs; Poland-Lithuania becomes Europe's foremost supplier of grain, which is shipped abroad from the Baltic seaport of Gdansk.
Aside from swelling Polish coffers, the prosperous grain trade supports other notable aspects of national development.
It reinforces the preeminence of the landowning nobility that receives its profits, and it helps to preserve a traditionally rural society and economy at a time when Western Europe has begun moving toward urbanization and capitalism.
Matyas regularly convenes the Diet and expands the lesser nobles' powers in the counties, but he exercises absolute rule over Hungary by means of a secular bureaucracy.
He enlists thirty thousand foreign mercenaries in his standing army and builds a network of fortresses along Hungary's southern frontier, but he does not pursue his father's aggressive anti-Turkish policy.
Instead, Matyas launches unpopular attacks on Bohemia, Poland, and Austria, pursuing an ambition to become Holy Roman Emperor and arguing that he is trying to forge a unified Western alliance strong enough to expel the Turks from Europe.
He eliminates tax exemptions and raises the serfs' obligations to the crown to fund his court and the military.
The magnates complain that these measures reduce their incomes, but despite the stiffer obligations, the serfs consider Matyas a just ruler because he protects them from excessive demands and other abuses by the magnates.
He also reforms Hungary's legal system and promotes the growth of Hungary's towns.
Matyas is a true renaissance man and makes his court a center of humanist culture; under his rule, Hungary's first books are printed and its second university is established.
Matyas's library, the Corvina, is famous throughout Europe.
In his quest for the imperial throne, Matyas eventually moves to Vienna, where he dies in 1490.
Matyas's reforms do not survive the turbulent decades that follow his reign.
An oligarchy of quarrelsome magnates gains control of Hungary.
They crown a docile king, Vladislav Jagiello (the Jagiellonian king of Bohemia, who is known in Hungary as Ulaszlo II, 1490-1516), only on condition that he abolish the taxes that had supported Matyas's mercenary army.
As a result, the king's army disperses just as the Turks are threatening Hungary.
The magnates also dismantle Matyas's administration and antagonizes the lesser nobles.
In 1492 the Diet limits the serfs' freedom of movement and expands their obligations.
Rural discontent boils over in 1514 when well-armed peasants under Gyorgy Dozsa rise up and attack estates across Hungary.
United by a common threat, the magnates and lesser nobles eventually crush the rebels.
Dozsa and other rebel leaders are executed in a most brutal manner.
The Diet of 1514, shocked by the peasant revolt, passes laws that condemn the serfs to eternal bondage and increase their work obligations.
Corporal punishment becomes widespread, and one noble even brands his serfs like livestock.
The legal scholar Stephen Werboczy includes the new laws in his Tripartitum of 1514, which will make make up Hungary's legal corpus until the revolution of 1848.
The Tripartitum give Hungary's king and nobles, or magnates, equal shares of power: the nobles recognize the king as superior, but in turn the nobles have the power to elect the king.
The Tripartitum also frees the nobles from taxation, obligates them to serve in the military only in a defensive war, and makes them immune from arbitrary arrest.
The new laws weaken Hungary by deepening the rift between the nobles and the peasantry just as the Turks prepare to invade the country.
When Ulaszlo II dies in 1516, his ten-year-old son Louis II (1516-26) becomes king, but a royal council appointed by the Diet rules the country.
Hungary is in a state of near anarchy under the magnates' rule.
The king's finances are a shambles; he borrows to meet his household expenses despite the fact that they total about one-third of the national income.
The country's defenses sag as border guards go unpaid, fortresses fall into disrepair, and initiatives to increase taxes to reinforce defenses are stifled.
In 1521 Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent recognizes Hungary's weakness and seizes Belgrade in preparation for an attack on Hungary.
In August 1526, he marches more than one hundred thousand troops into Hungary's heartland, and at Mohacs they cut down all but several hundred of the twenty-five thousand ill-equipped soldiers whom Louis II had been able to muster for the country's defense.
Louis himself dies, thrown from a horse into a bog.
The Polish-Lithuanian alliance exerts a profound influence on the history of Eastern Europe.
Poland and Lithuania will maintain joint statehood for more than four hundred years, and over the first three centuries of that span the "Commonwealth of Two Nations" will rank as one of the leading powers of the continent.
The association produced prompt benefits in 1410 when the forces of Poland-Lithuania defeat the Teutonic Knights in battle at Grunwald (Tannenberg), at last seizing the upper hand in the long struggle with the renegade crusaders.
The new Polish-Lithuanian dynasty, called "Jagiellon" after its founder, continues to augment its holdings during the following decades.
By the end of the fifteenth century, representatives of the Jagiellons reign in Bohemia and Hungary as well as Poland-Lithuania.
This far-flung federation collapses in 1526 when armies of the Ottoman Empire win a crushing victory at the Battle of Mohács (in Hungary), wresting Bohemia and Hungary from the Jagiellons and installing the Turks as a menacing presence in the heart of Europe.
Moravia has accepted the hereditary right of the Austrian Habsburg to rule it and thus escapes the intense struggle between native estates and the Habsburg monarchy that is to characterize Bohemian history.
The Moravians have a poorly developed historical or national consciousness, make few demands on the Habsburgs, and are permitted to live in tranquillity.
Late in the eighteenth century, the Margravate of Moravia will be abolished and merged with Austrian Silesia.