History
Although numerous modern genetic studies have indicated that the historical Anatolian groups are the primary source of the present-day Turkish population, the first Turkic people lived in a region extending from Central Asia to Siberia and were palpable after the 6th Century BC. Seventh century Chinese sources preserve the origins of the Turks stating that they were a branch of the Hsiung-nu (Huns) and living near the "West Sea", perhaps the Caspian Sea. Modern sources tends to indicate that the Turks' ancestors lived within the state of the Hsiung-nu in the Transbaikal area and that they later, during the fifth century, migrated to the southern Altay.
By the ninth century, when the Great Seljuk Empire had emerged, the Turks began their expansion to the west directly colliding with the Byzantine Empire. In 1071, the Seljuk Turks defeated the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert; the Turkish language and Islam were introduced to Anatolia (present day Turkey) and gradually spread over the region and the slow transition from a predominantly Christian and Greek-speaking Anatolia to a predominantly Muslim and Turkish-speaking one was underway. The Mongols invaded Transoxiana, Iran, Azerbaijan and Anatolia; this caused Turkomens to move further to Western Anatolia. In the time of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish-speaking Anatolian population had spread throughout the Balkans, Cyprus, North Africa, and the Middle East, and remnants of these Turkish minorities still exists. As the Ottoman Empire gradually shrank in size, military power and wealth, many Ottoman Turks and Balkan Muslims migrated to the Empire's heartland in Anatolia, along with the Circassians fleeing the Russian conquest of the Caucasus.
Read more about this topic: Turkish People
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)