Turkic peoples are any of various peoples whose members speak languages belonging to the Turkic subfamily of the Altaic family of languages. They are historically and linguistically connected with the Tujue, the name given by the Chinese to the nomadic people who in the 6th century A.D. founded an empire stretching from what is now Mongolia and the northern frontier of China to the Black Sea. With some exceptions, notably in the European part of Turkey and in the Volga region, the Turkic peoples live in Asia. Their most important cultural link, aside from history and language, is with Islam, for, with the exception of the Sakha (Yakut) of eastern Siberia and the Chuvash of the Volga region of Russia, the vast majority of Turkic peoples are Muslim.
The Turks were the last of Asia’s Albinos to be chased out of East and Central Asia by the Mongols. The movement of Albinos out of Asia began with a people modern European Albinos have incorrectly named Aryans: heading south and invading their former home of India in about 1,500 B.C. (Aryan was actually what Black Persian Nobility called themselves: the purpose for Albinos conflating the two is unknown). Shortly thereafter different tribes of Asian Albinos went west and invaded Southern Europe: reaching Greece circa 1,200 B.C. Modern European Albinos have chosen to call them Greeks, Latins, and Romans, but those are some of the names of the indigenous Black Europeans. The Albinos effect on Black Europe is indirectly chronicled by Egyptian and Anatolian history, where their presence caused many Black southern Europeans and Mediterranean Islanders to flee for safety in Egypt, the Levant, and Anatolia: these fleeing Blacks were known as "The Sea People". The Sea People were not welcome immigrants, and many battles were fought before they could be settled. As evidenced by ancient Southern European "Tomb Art" showing Blacks, Albinos, and Mulattoes, these invading Albinos were eventually assimilated into Black Europe.
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The Roman Emperor Diocletian divided the Roman Empire into four regions, each ruled by a separate emperor, (the Tetrarchy). Confident that he had fixed the disorders that were plaguing Rome, he abdicated along with his co-emperor, but the Tetrarchy soon collapsed. Order was eventually restored by Constantine the Great, who became the first emperor to convert to Christianity, and who established Constantinople Anatolia as the new capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. During the decades of the Constantinian and Valentinian dynasties, the empire was divided along an east–west axis, with dual power centres in Constantinople and Rome. The reign of Julian, who attempted to restore Classical Roman and Hellenistic religion, only briefly interrupted the succession of Christian emperors. Theodosius I, the last emperor to rule over both East and West, died in 395 AD after making Christianity the official religion of the empire.
At the beginning of the "Modern Era," the last of Asia’s Albinos were chased-out of Asia, beginning with the Germanics and soon followed by the Slav's: then finally, the Turks were chased out of Asia by the Mongols (0-600 A.D.).
The Western Roman Empire began to disintegrate in the early 5th. century as Germanic migrations and invasions overwhelmed the capacity of the Empire to assimilate the migrants and fight off the invaders. The Roman Empire had assimilated so many Germanic peoples of dubious loyalty to Rome that the empire started to dismember itself. Most chronologies place the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476, when Romulus Augustulus was forced to abdicate to the Germanic warlord Odoacer. By placing himself under the rule of the Eastern Emperor, rather than naming himself Emperor (as other Germanic chiefs had done after deposing past emperors), Odoacer ended the Western Empire by ending the line of Western emperors.
It is not known when Black Arabs first started to import Turkish Slave Soldiers (Mamluks) to supplement their army, but the Tajikistanian (Central Asian) poet Rudaki (858-941), in a poem about the Samanid emir's court in Persia, describes how “row upon row” of Turkish slave guards were part of its adornment.
As is clear from "Orientalist Art", from the very beginning, Black Arabs showed a clear and unhealthy fascination for Albino females.
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Today that fascination is anecdotally attested to by the fact that the Mulattoes created by Albino Turks and the indigenous Blacks of North Africa, Southern and Eastern Europe, The Middle-East, Arabia, and Turkey (Anatolia): out-number even the Hispanic Mulattoes of the Americas and Caribbean Sea hemisphere. While Black Arabs appear to be a dying breed, or are well hidden by the Albinos and Mulattoes.
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Ghilman is a general term for slave-soldiers and/or mercenaries in the armies of the Abbasid, Ottoman, and Persian Safavid, Afsharid and Qajar Empires.
Mamlūk, also spelled Mameluke, were (Turkish) slave soldiers, a member of the armies of slaves that won political control of several Muslim states during the Middle Ages. Under the Ayyūbid sultanate, Mamlūk generals used their power to establish a dynasty that ruled Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1517. The name is derived from an Arabic word for slave.
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The use of Mamlūks as a major component of Muslim armies became a distinct feature of Islāmic civilization as early as the 9th century A.D. The practice was begun in Baghdad by the ʿBlack Arab Abbāsid caliph al-Muʿtaim (833–842), and it soon spread throughout the Muslim world. Moreover, the political result was almost invariably the same: the slaves exploited the military power vested in them to seize control over the legitimate political authorities, often only briefly but sometimes for astonishingly long periods of time. Thus, soon after al-Muʿtaim’s reign, the caliphate itself fell victim to the Turkish Mamlūk generals, who were able to depose or murder caliphs almost with impunity. Although the caliphate was maintained as a symbol of legitimate authority, the actual power was wielded by the Mamlūk generals; and by the 13th century, Mamlūks had succeeded in establishing dynasties of their own, both in Egypt and in India, in which the sultans were necessarily men of slave origin or the heirs of such men.
Although the Ottoman Empire is not considered a European kingdom per se, Ottoman expansion had a profound impact on a continent already stunned by the calamities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the Ottoman Turks must, therefore, be considered in any study of Europe in the late Middle Ages. The ease with which the Ottoman Empire achieved military victories led Western Europeans to fear that ongoing Ottoman success would collapse the political and social infrastructure of the West and bring about the downfall of Christendom. Such a momentous threat could not be ignored and the Europeans mounted crusades against the Ottomans in 1366, 1396, and 1444, but to no avail. The Ottomans continued to conquer new territories.
One of a number of Turkish tribes that migrated from the central Asian steppe, the Ottomans were initially a nomadic people who followed a primitive shamanistic religion. Contact with various settled peoples led to the introduction of Islam and under Islamic influence, the Turks acquired their greatest fighting tradition, that of the gazi warrior. Well trained and highly skilled, gazi warriors fought to conquer the infidel, acquiring land and riches in the process.
Gazi Warrior - A title given to Islamic warriors who distinguished themselves as conquerors of unbelievers, the gazis acquired wealth and property on the frontiers of Islam, becoming the local nobility.
The Oghuz, Oguz or Ghuzz Turks were a western Turkic people who spoke the Oghuz languages from the Common branch of Turkic language family. In the 8th century, they formed a tribal confederation conventionally named the Oghuz Yabgu State in central Asia. The name Oghuz is a Common Turkic word for "tribe". By the 10th century, Islamic sources were calling the Muslim, as opposed to shamanist or Christian Oghuz, the Turkmens. By the 12th century this term had passed into Byzantine usage and the Oghuzes were overwhelmingly Muslim.
The Oghuz confederation migrated westward from the Jeti-su area after a conflict with the Karluk branch of Uigurs. The founders of the Ottoman Empire were descendants of the Oghuzes. Today the residents of Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Khorezm, Turkmens of Afghanistan, Balkans, Iraq and Syria are descendants of Oghuz Turks and their language belongs to the Oghuz (also known as southwestern Turkic) group of the Turkic languages family.
In the 9th century, the Oghuzes from the Aral steppes drove Bechens from the Emba and Ural River region toward the west. In the 10th century, they inhabited the steppe of the rivers Sari-su, Turgai, and Emba to the north of Lake Balkhash of modern-day Kazakhstan. A clan of this nation, the Seljuks, embraced Islam and in the 11th century entered Persia, where they founded the Great Seljuk Empire.
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Pressured out of their homes in the Asian steppes by the Mongols, the Turkish tribes converted to Islam during the eighth and ninth centuries. By the tenth century, one of the Turkish tribes, the seljuk, had become a significant power in the Islamic world and had adopted a settled life that included Islamic orthodoxy, a central administration, and taxation. However, many other Turkish groups remained nomadic and, pursuing the gazi tradition, sought to conquer land for Islam and to acquire war booty for themselves. This led them into conflict with the Seljuk Turks, and to pacify the nomadic tribes, the Seljuks directed them to the eastern domain of the Byzantine Empire, Anatolia. The tribe known as the Ottomans arose from one of the smaller emirates established in northwestern Anatolia after 1071. The dynasty was named for the Oghuz Turk tribal leader Osman (1259-1326), who began to expand his kingdom into the Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor, moving his capital to Bursa in 1326.
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The oldest known reference to Anatolia – as “Land of the Hatti” – appears on Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets from the period of the Akkadian Empire (2350–2150 BC).
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In English, the name of Turkey for ancient Anatolia first appeared 1369. It derives from the Medieval Latin Turchia (meaning “Land of the Turks"), a name originally used by Europeans to designate those parts of Anatolia controlled by the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum after the Battle of Manzikert (1071). The Eastern Roman Empire - the name Byzantium came to refer to the Eastern Roman Empire, the "Byzantine" Empire, whose capital Constantinople stood on the site of ancient Greek city of Byzantium. Constantinople was the capital city of the Roman/Byzantine Empire. It was reinaugurated in 324 A.D. from ancient Byzantium as the new capital of the Roman Empire by Emperor Constantine the Great, after whom it was named, and dedicated, on 11 May 330 AD.
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Whereas Mamluks and other older forms of Ghilman soldiery were drawn from slave markets on the fringes of the Islamic world, and were embedded in old Turkic military traditions, the Janissaries were recruited by way of a systematized bureaucratic levee known as the Devshirme. The Devshirme consisted of a tribute of christian boys at or below the age of 18, collected as a tax. These Christian boys were then brought back to the capitol to be trained in warfare & converted to Islam. Curiously, there was a tradition barring a single family from having multiple sons taken per Devshirme cycle but even so, many families offered up more sons in the hopes that they could achieve great things through the Devshirme. (It's also important to note that slaves from the Devshirme would not necessarily end up as Janissaries - those more suited to policy, theology, or scholarship were sorted to serve as court slaves & bureaucrats rather than as soldiers.)
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Military Focus - Since the Mamluks were steeped in the martial culture of the nomadic Turks, the cream of their military corps were cavalry based - heavily armored & skilled in bow, lance, sword, and mace. By contrast, the Ottomans (being Turks themselves) started out with a strong cavalry force in the form of the Sipahi and thus developed the Janissaries as an infantry force both to expand their combined-arms approach to warfare and to create an effective counter to the power of the cavalry-based local nobility. Turks & other Muslims were specifically barred from the Devshirme for centuries in order to maintain the separation of power. In addition, Janissaries were barred from marriage and producing heirs until the reforms of Selim II in 1566.
While the Gazi warriors fought for Islam, the greatest military asset of the Ottoman Empire was the janissaries, originally created in 1330 by Sultan Orhan (d.1359), to counter the challenges of the gazi nobility. Murad I (1319-1389) transformed the new military force into the elite personal army of the Sultan. They were rewarded for their loyalty with grants of newly acquired land and other janissaries quickly rose to fill the most important administrative offices of the Ottoman Empire.
During the early history of the Ottoman Empire, political factions within the Roman Empire employed the Ottoman Turks and their janissaries as mercenaries in their own struggles for imperial supremacy. In the 1340's, a usurper's request for Ottoman assistance in a revolt against the Roman Emperor provided the excuse for an Ottoman invasion of Thrace on the northern frontier of the Byzantine Empire. The conquest of Thrace gave the Ottomans a foothold in Europe from which future campaigns into the Balkans and Greece were launched and Adrianople became the Ottoman capital in 1366. Over the next century, the Ottomans developed an empire that took in Anatolia and increasingly larger sections of Byzantine territories in Eastern Europe and Asia Minor.
Ottoman expansion into Europe was well underway in the late fourteenth century. Gallipoli was conquered in 1354 and at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1394, the Ottomans crushed a vast crusading army, taking many European leaders hostage. The disaster was so great that the first survivors to return to France were imprisoned as liars. But Nicopolis was only the beginning. The appearance of the Tatars under Tamarlane early in the fifteenth century temporarily delayed Turkish advances but the Ottomans soon resumed attacks on Byzantium and Eastern Europe. A Hungarian-Polish army was decimated at Varna in 1444 by Murad II (c.1403-1451) and Ottoman conquests were virtually unchecked during the reign of his son, Mehmed II the Conqueror (1432-1481).
Tamarlane - Timur historically known as Amir Timur was a Turco-Mongol (perhaps Mulatto) conqueror. As the founder of the Timurid Empire in Persia and Central Asia, he became the first ruler of the Timurid dynasty. He was born into the Barlas confederation in Transoxiana (modern-day Uzbekistan) on 9 April 1336. Timur envisioned the restoration of the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan. He justified his Iranian, Mamluk, and Ottoman campaigns as a re-imposition of legitimate Mongol control over lands taken by usurpers. Timur's armies were inclusively multi-ethnic and were feared throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe, sizable parts of which his campaigns laid to waste. Scholars estimate that his military campaigns caused the deaths of 17 million people, amounting to about 5% of the world population at the time.
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Constantinople itself was captured in 1453, sending a shock wave across Europe. With the fall of Byzantium, a wave of Byzantine refugees fled to the Latin West, carrying with them the classical and Hellenistic knowledge that provided additional impetus to the burgeoning humanism of the Renaissance. Athens fell in 1456 and Belgrade narrowly escaped capture when a peasant army led by the Hungarian Janos Hunyadi held off a siege in the same year. Nevertheless, Serbia, Bosnia, Wallachia, and the Khanate of Crimea were all under Ottoman control by 1478.
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The Turks commanded the Black Sea and the northern Aegean and many prime trade routes were closed to European shipping. The Islamic threat loomed even larger when an Ottoman beachhead was established at Otranto in Italy in 1480. Although the Turkish presence in Italy was short-lived, it appeared as if Rome itself must soon fall into Islamic hands. In 1529, the Ottomans had moved up the Danube and besieged Vienna. The siege was unsuccessful and the Turks began to retreat. Although the Ottomans continued to instill fear well into the sixteenth century, internal struggles began to deteriorate the once overwhelming military supremacy of the Ottoman Empire. The outcome of battles was no longer a foregone conclusion and Europeans began to score victories against the Turks.
The Ottoman/Holy Roman Empire wars: were fought from the 16th through the 18th centuries between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire (centered in the Kingdom of Germany). The wars were dominated by land campaigns in Hungary (including Transylvania and Vojvodina), Croatia and Central Serbia.
By the 16th century, the Ottomans had become a serious threat to the European powers, with Ottoman ships sweeping away Venetian possessions in the Aegean and Ionian seas and Ottoman-supported Barbary pirates seizing Spanish possessions in the Maghreb. The rebellious European Albinos and their Protestant Reformation, the France–Habsburg rivalry and the numerous civil conflicts of the Holy Roman Empire, served as distractions to the "CATHOLIC" Christians from their conflict with the oncoming Ottomans. Meanwhile, the Ottomans had to contend with the Persian Safavid Empire and to a lesser extent the Mamluk Sultanate, which was defeated and fully incorporated into their empire.
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Initially, Ottoman conquests in Europe made significant gains with a decisive victory at Mohács, reducing around one third of the (central) part of Kingdom of Hungary, to the status of an Ottoman tributary. Later, the Peace of Westphalia and the Spanish War of Succession in the 17th and 18th centuries respectively left the Austrian Empire as the sole firm possession of the Holy Roman Empire. Following the Siege of Vienna in 1683, the Holy Roman Empire was able to assemble a large coalition of European powers known as the Holy League, allowing them to effectively combat the Ottomans and to regain control over Hungary. The Great Turkish War ended with the decisive Holy League victory at Zenta. The wars came to an end following the Holy Roman Empire participation in the war of 1787-1791, which the Holy Roman Empire fought in alliance with Russia.
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Despite the military success of their expansion, there remained problems of organization and government within the Ottoman Empire. Murad II attempted to limit the influence of the nobility and the gazi by elevating faithful former slaves and janissaries to administrative positions. These administrators came to provide an alternative voice to that of the nobility and, as a result, Murad II and successive Sultans were able to play one faction against the other, a feature that came to typify the Ottoman Empire. The power of the janissaries often overrode a weak sultan, and this elite military force occasionally acted as 'king-makers.'
Another weakness of the Ottoman Empire was that primogeniture (firstborn son to inherit his parent's entire or main estate) was not used in Islam, and the transference of power from a deceased sultan to his son was frequently disputed. If a Sultan died without a male heir or if he left several sons, succession was violently contested. In the early period, to prevent ongoing rivalries, all male relatives of a newly crowned Sultan were put to death. Later, however, the potential rivals were merely imprisoned for life. Some historians consider that this policy of imprisonment contributed to the decline of the Ottoman Empire as mentally unstable and politically inexperienced Sultans were rescued from prison and placed upon the throne. Nevertheless, despite frequent disputes over succession, the Ottoman Empire managed to produce effective leaders in the late Middle Ages and a comprehensive government policy developed.
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Despite the difficulties of succession and administrative control, the Ottomans had a number of advantages that contributed to their success, the enormous wealth of the Empire being the most significant asset. As the Ottoman Empire expanded, it acquired control of the trade routes to the East and many European powers, such as Venice and Genoa, paid great sums for the privilege of access to these routes.
Although Ottoman expansion was greatly feared in the late Middle Ages, the Ottomans generally allowed religious groups to continue to practice their own faiths within the conquered territories. They also tended to preserve the established feudal institutions and, in many cases, permitted the co-existence of law codes to regulate the different ethnic and religious groups. Their administrative and governmental systems were well developed and highly effective, and most lands under Ottoman control were well managed during this time. The Empire reached its apex under Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century when it stretched from the Persian Gulf in the east to Hungary in the northwest; and from Egypt in the south to the Caucasus in the north. The empire came to an end in the aftermath of its defeat by the Allies in World War I. The empire was dismantled by the Allies after the war ended in 1918.
The Ottomans were also forced to evacuate the parts of the former Russian Empire in the Caucasus (in present-day Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan), which they had gained towards the end of World War I, following Russia's retreat from the war with the Russian Revolution in 1917.
The Qajar dynasty was an Iranian royal dynasty of Turkic origin, specifically from the Qajar tribe, which ruled Persia (Iran) from 1785 to 1925.The state ruled by the dynasty was officially known as the Sublime State of Persia. The Qajar family took full control of Iran in 1794, deposing Lotf 'Ali Khan, the last Shah of the Zand dynasty, and re-asserted Iranian sovereignty over large parts of the Caucasus. In 1796, Mohammad Khan Qajar seized Mashhad with ease, putting an end to the Afsharid dynasty, and Mohammad Khan was formally crowned as shah after his punitive campaign against Iran's Georgian subjects. In the Caucasus, the Qajar dynasty permanently lost many of Iran's integral areas to the Russians over the course of the 19th century, comprising modern-day Georgia, Dagestan, Azerbaijan and Armenia.
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The guardian.com - Jerry Brotton, Saturday 19 March 2016. Quote: Is this the real model for Othello? The Moroccan ambassador to Elizabethan London who has striking similarities to Shakespeare’s noble Moor.
Abd al-Wahid bin Masoud bin Muhammad al-Annuri isn’t the kind of name usually associated with Elizabethan portraiture, better known for its pallid, blank-faced English aristocrats. But in the autumn of 1600, Al Annuri, recently arrived in London as the ambassador of the Sa’adian ruler of Morocco Mulay Ahmed al-Mansur, sat for his portrait, the earliest surviving picture of a Muslim painted from life in England.
The painting is an enigma. Its painter and provenance are unknown prior to its appearance at a Christie’s sale in 1955, when it was bought, then sold to its current owner, the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute. It shows Al-Annuri dressed in a long black robe (or thawb) and white linen turban, with a richly decorated steel scimitar, a Maghreb nimcha (sword), hanging from his waist. His piercing gaze meets ours, challenging, confident, perhaps slightly amused. This is no humble black servant, but an ambassador – possibly a warrior – of stature on significant diplomatic business. The inscriptions on the portrait reveal as much. It is dated 1600, and shows his anglicised name and age (42) and his title (Legate of the King of Barbary to England).
Al-Annuri had landed in England in August leading a 16-man Moroccan delegation of merchants, translators and holy men to conclude a military alliance between the Protestant Tudors and Muslim Morocco against their common enemy, Catholic Spain. It was the culmination of 50 years of amicable Anglo-Moroccan relations that saw a thriving trade in Moroccan saltpetre (used to make gunpowder) and sugar (that played havoc with Queen Elizabeth’s teeth), in exchange for English cloth and munitions. It led to a cordial correspondence between Elizabeth and Al Mansur and the creation of London’s Barbary Company in 1585, which was soon shipping hundreds of tonnes of merchandise back and forth.
When Al-Annuri’s retinue rode into London in August 1600 he was accompanied by the city’s Barbary merchants, who gave them a house on the Strand where they stayed for nearly six months, to the fear and amazement of many Londoners. One wrote that they “are strangely attired and behavioured”. The city’s chronicler John Stow observed that they “killed all their own meat within their house” and “turn their faces eastward when they kill any thing; they use beads, and pray to Saints”. The gossipy diarist John Chamberlain thought it was “no small honour to us that nations so far remote, and every way different, should meet here to admire the glory and magnificence of our Queen”. Within weeks, Al Annuri was given audiences with the same queen, first at Nonsuch Palace and then Oatlands. There, he put forward a remarkable proposal: a military alliance between Muslim Morocco and Protestant England, in which they would “join forces against the King of Spain, their common foe and enemy” and reconquer Spain for Islam. Even more audaciously he proposed “they could also wrest the East and West Indies from the Spanish”, the first and last time that a Protestant–Muslim confederation was proposed to rule Latin America.
As Al-Annuri awaited the outcome of these negotiations in the final weeks of 1600, his portrait was painted to commemorate the imminent ratification of an Anglo-Moroccan alliance that would transform the balance of power in Europe. But it was not to be. Elizabeth discovered that Al-Annuri was a Morisco, a Spanish-born Muslim forcibly converted to Christianity who had found his way to Morocco and reverted. She tried to “turn” Al-Annuri by proposing he and his fellow Moriscos join the Protestant struggle against Spain. The offer seems to have caused a rebellion among the Moroccan delegation. Stow reported that Al-Annuri remained loyal to Al Mansur, but “poisoned their interpreter being born in Granada”, another Morisco, “because he commended the estate and bounty of England”. Talks broke down, and by February 1601 Al Annuri was back in Morocco. Two years later Elizabeth and Al-Mansur were dead, with England’s new king, James I, negotiating a peace deal with Spain that would end the need for an Anglo-Islamic alliance, consigning Al-Annuri’s embassy into an embarrassing historical footnote.
But Al-Annuri was not the only person with whom Elizabeth was fostering relations. In the 1560s she wrote to the Persian Shi’a ruler, Shah Tahmasp, offering a commercial alliance between him and her newly formed Muscovy Company. Once Pope Pius V formally excommunicated her in 1570, Elizabeth was free to ignore the papal edicts forbidding Christian trade with Muslims, and by 1581 she had lodged an English ambassador in Constantinople, signed formal commercial treaties with the Ottomans and founded the Turkey Company (the forerunner of the Levant Company). She pursued extensive correspondence with Sultan Murad III and his mother over three decades, exchanging diplomatic gifts that included cloth, cosmetics, horse-drawn carriages and a clockwork organ. In one poignant act of religious retribution Elizabeth allowed lead stripped from deconsecrated Catholic churches to be shipped to Constantinople to make munitions, much to the indignation of the watching Spanish and Venetian ambassadors.
Both Sunni and Protestant authorities saw the benefits of pushing a strategic anti-Catholic alliance. Elizabeth addressed herself in letters to Murad as the “defender of the Christian faith against all kind of idolatries, of all that live among the Christians, and falsely profess the name of Christ”. In response the Turks wrote letters to the “Lutheran sect” in the Low Countries, encouraging them to rebel against the Spanish, suggesting they shared Islam’s rejection of idolatry and belief in the unmediated power of their holy books.
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In Arabia, the domination of Mecca and Medina by puritanical Wahhabi Muslims was a serious embarrassment to the Ottoman sultan, who was the titular overlord of the Arabian territory of the Hejaz and the leading Muslim sovereign. At the invitation of Sultan Mahmud II (1808-39), Muhammad Ali sent an expedition to Arabia that between 1811 and 1813 expelled the Wahhabis from the Hejaz. In a further campaign (1816-18), Ibrahim Pasha, the viceroy's eldest son, defeated the Wahhabis in their homeland of Najd, and brought central Arabia under Albanian control.
In 1820-21 Muhammad Ali sent an expedition up the Nile and conquered much of what is now the northern Sudan. By so doing, he made himself master of one of the principal channels of the slave trade, and began an African Empire that was to be expanded under his successors. The conquest of the Sudan was intended to provide recruits. But the slaves, encamped at Aswan, died wholesale, and Muhammad Ali had to look elsewhere for his troops. In 1823 he took to conscripting Egyptian peasants for the rank and file of his new army. On the other hand, the officers were mostly Turkish Ottomans, while the director of the whole enterprise, Sulayman Pasha (Colonel Sève), was a former French officer. The conscription was brutally administered.
Following WW I, the conglomeration of territories and peoples that formerly comprised the Ottoman Empire was partitioned into several new states. The Turkish War of Independence (1919–1922), initiated by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his colleagues against the occupying European Allies, resulted in the abolition of Turk monarchy in 1922 and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, with Atatürk as its first president. Atatürk enacted numerous reforms, many of which incorporated various aspects of Western thought, philosophy, and customs into the new form of Turkish government.
Under the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres, the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire was solidified. The new countries created from the former territories of the Ottoman Empire currently number 39, among them are: Albania, Algeria, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Egypt, Eritrea, Greece, Hungary, Iraq, Palestine/Israel, Jordan, Kosovo, Libya, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Syria, Tunisia, Ukraine.
The Turks of Saudi Arabia and Yemen had split from the Ottomans by 1914. The Turks of Algeria, Tunisia and Libya also followed another course. In all of these countries, the Albino Turks and their Mulattoes maintained complete control of the governments.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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In population genetics, research has been made to study the genetic origins of the modern Turkish people in Turkey. These studies sought to determine whether the modern Turks have a stronger genetical affinity with the Turkic peoples of Central Asia from where the Seljuk Turks began migrating to Anatolia following the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, which led to the establishment of the Anatolian Seljuk Sultanate in the late 11th century; or if they instead largely descended from the indigenous peoples of Anatolia who were culturally assimilated during the Seljuk and Ottoman periods, with assimilation policies such as the devshirme system and the jizya tax.
Autosomal studies with recent methodology estimate the Central Asian contribution in Turkish people at 13–15% noting that results may indicate previous population movements (e.g. migration, admixture) or genetic drift, given the fact that Europe and South Asia have some genetic relatedness.
The largest autosomal study on Turkish genetics (on 16 individuals) concluded the weight of Central Asian migration legacy of the Turkish people is estimated at 21.7%. The authors conclude on the basis of previous studies that "South Asian contribution to Turkey's population was significantly higher than East/Central Asian contributions, suggesting that the genetic variation of medieval Central Asian populations may be more closely related to South Asian populations, or that there was continued low level migration from South Asia into Anatolia." They note that these weights are not direct estimates of the migration rates as the original donor populations are not known, and the exact kinship between current East Asians and the medieval Oghuz Turks is uncertain. For instance, genetic pools of Central Asian Turkic peoples is particularly diverse and modern Oghuz Turkmens living in Central Asia are with slightly higher West Eurasian genetic component than East Eurasian.
Several studies have concluded that the genetic haplogroups indigenous to Western Asia have the largest share in the gene pool of the present-day Turkish population. An admixture analysis determined that the Anatolian Turks share most of their genetic ancestry with non-Turkic populations in the region and the 12th century is set as an admixture date. However, isolates with dominant Central Asian genetic makeup were found at an Afshar village near Ankara.
The question to what extent a gene flow from Central Asia to Anatolia has contributed to the current gene pool of the Turkish people, and what the role is in this of the 11th century settlement by Oghuz Turks, has been the subject of several studies. A factor that makes it difficult to give reliable estimates, is the problem of distinguishing between the effects of different migratory episodes. Thus, although the Turks settled in Anatolia (peacefully or after war events) with cultural significance, including the introduction of the Turkish language and Islam, the genetic significance from Central Asia might have been slight.
Some of the Turkic peoples originated from Central Asia and therefore are possibly related with Xiongnu. A majority (89%) of the Xiongnu sequences can be classified as belonging to Asian haplogroups and nearly 11% belong to European haplogroups. This findings indicate that the contacts between European and Asian populations were anterior to the Xiongnu culture, and it confirms results reported for two samples from an early 3rd century B.C. Scytho-Siberian population.
According to another archeological and genetic study in 2010, the DNA found in three skeletons in 2000-year-old elite Xiongnu cemetery in Northeast Asia belonged to C3, D4 and including R1a. The evidence of paternal R1a support the Kurgan expansion hypothesis for the Indo-European expansion from the Volga steppe region. As the R1a was found in Xiongnu people and the present-day people of Central Asia Analysis of skeletal remains from sites attributed to the Xiongnu provides an identification of dolichocephalic Mongoloid, ethnically distinct from neighboring populations in present-day Mongolia.
According to a different genetic research on 75 individuals from various parts of Turkey, Mergen et al. revealed that the "genetic structure of the mtDNAs in the Turkish population bears similarities to Turkic Central Asian populations".
Overall, modern Turks are most related to neighbouring West Asian populations. A study looking into allele frequencies suggested that there was a lack of genetic relationship between contemporary Mongols and Turks, despite their linguistic and cultural relationship. In addition, another study looking into HLA genes allele distributions indicated that Anatolians did not significantly differ from other Mediterranean populations. Multiple studies suggested an elite dominance-driven linguistic replacement model to explain the adoption of Turkish language by Anatolian indigenous inhabitants.
According to Cinnioğlu et al. (2004), there are many Y-DNA haplogroups present in Turkey. The majority of the haplogroups found in the people of Turkey are shared with their West Asian and Caucasian neighbours. The most commonly found haplogroup in Turkey is J2 (24%), which is widespread among the Mediterranean, Caucasian and West Asian populations. By contrast, Central Asian haplogroups are rarer (N and Q – 5.7%) but this figure may rise to 36% if K, R1a, R1b and L (which infrequently occur in Central Asia, but are notable in many other Western Turkic groups) are also included. Haplogroups that are common in Europe (R1b and I – 20%), South Asia (L, R2, H – 5.7%) and Africa (A, E3*, E3a – 1%) are also present.
J2=24% - J2 (M172) Typical of Mediterranean, Caucasian, Western and Central Asian populations.
R1b=15.9% Widespread in western Eurasia, with distinct "west Asian" and "west European" lineages.
G=10.9% – Typical of people from the Caucasus and to a lesser extent the Middle East.
E3b-M35=10.7% (E3b1-M78 and E3b3-M123 accounting for all E representatives in the sample, besides a single E3b2-M81 chromosome). E-M78 occurs commonly, and is found in northern and eastern Africa, and in western Asia. Haplogroup E-M123 is found in both Africa and Eurasia.
J1=9% – Typical amongst people from the Arabian peninsula and Dagestan (ranging from 3% from Turks around Konya to 12% in Kurds).
R1a=6.9% – Common in various Central Asian, Indian, Central- and Eastern European populations.
I=5.3% – Common in Balkans and eastern Europe, possibly representing a back-migration to Anatolia.
K=4.5% – Typical of Asian populations and Caucasian populations.
L=4.2% – Typical of the Indian subcontinent and Khorasan populations. Found sporadically in the Middle East and the Caucasus.
N=3.8% – Typical of Uralic, Siberian and Altaic populations.
T=2.5% – Typical of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, Northeast African and South Asian populations
Q=1.9% – Typical of Northern Altaic populations
C=1.3% – Typical of Mongolic and Siberian populations
R2=0.96% – Typical of South Asian population
Others markers than occurs in less than 1% are H, A, E3a , O , R1*.
A study in Turkey by Gökçümen (2008) took into account oral histories and historical records. They went to four settlements in Central Anatolia and didn't do a random selection from a group of university students like in many other studies. Accordingly, here are the results:
1) In an Afshar village near Ankara where, according to oral tradition, the ancestors of the inhabitants came from Central Asia, the researchers found that 57% of the villagers had haplogroup L, 13% had haplogroup Q, and 3% had haplogroup N; thus indicating that the L haplogroups in Turkey are of Central Asian heritage rather than South Asian, although these Central Asians probably received the L markers from the South Asians at the beginning. These Asian groups add up to 73% in this village. Furthermore, 10% of these Afshars had haplogroups E3a and E3b, while only 13% had haplogroup J2a, the most common in Turkey.
2) The inhabitants of an older Turkish village which didn't receive much migration had about 25% of haplogroup N and 25% of J2a, with 3% of G and close to 30% of R1 variants (mostly R1b).
A study regarding Turkish genetics in 2014 has utilized the whole genome sequencing of Turkish individuals. Led by Can Alkan at the University of Washington in Seattle, the study has been published in the journal BMC Genomics. The authors of the study show that the genetic variation of the contemporary Turkish population clusters with South European populations, as expected, but also shows signatures of relatively recent contribution from ancestral East Asian populations. They estimate the weights for the migration events predicted to originate from the East Asian branch into current-day Turkey was at 21.7%.
"(B) A population tree based on “Treemix” analysis. The populations included are as follows: Turkey (TUR); Tuscans in Italy (TSI); Iberian populations in Spain (IBS); British from England and Scotland (GBR); Finnish from Finland (FIN); Utah residents with Northern and Western European ancestry (CEU); Han Chinese in Beijing, China (CHB); Japanese in Tokyo, Japan (JPT); Han Chinese South (CHS); Yoruba in Ibadan, Nigeria (YRI); Luhya in Webuye, Kenya (LWK). Populations with high degree of admixture (Native American and African American populations) were not included to simplify the analysis. The Yoruban population was used to root the tree. In total four migration events were estimated. The weights for the migration events predicted to originate from the East Asian branch into current-day Turkey was 0.217, from the ancestral Eurasian branch into the Turkey-Tuscan clade was 0.048, from the African branch into Iberia was 0.026, from the Japanese branch into Finland was 0.079."
Another study published in PLOS Genetics journal in 2015 addressed the genetic origin 22 Turkic-speaking populations, representing their current geographic range, by analyzing genome-wide high-density genotype data. This study showed that Turkic-speaking peoples sampled across the Middle East, Caucasus, East Europe, and Central Asia share varying proportions of Asian ancestry that originate in a single area, southern Siberia and Mongolia. Mongolic- and Turkic-speaking populations from this area bear an unusually high number of long chromosomal tracts that are identical by descent with Turkic peoples from across west Eurasia. This study also showed that genetic admixture signal in these populations indicates that admixture occurred during the 9th–17th centuries, in agreement with the historically recorded Turkic nomadic migrations and later Mongol expansion.
Other studies
In 2001, Benedetto et al. revealed that Central Asian genetic contribution to the current Anatolian mtDNA gene pool was estimated as roughly 30%, by comparing the populations of Mediterranean Europe, and Turkic-speaking people of Central Asia. However some similar early studies have a high probability of errors and biased estimates, which concluded even up to over 60% Central Asian origin of Y-DNA microsatellites. In 2003, Cinnioğlu et al. made a research of Y-DNA including the samples from eight regions of Turkey, without classifying the ethnicity of the people, which indicated that high resolution SNP analysis totally provides evidence of a detectable weak signal (<9%) of gene flow from Central Asia, but this was an underestimate summarizing only haplogroups C, Q, O and N. It was later observed that the male contribution from Central Asia to Turkish population with reference to the Balkans was 13%, for all non-Turkic speaking populations the Central Asian contribution was higher than in Turkey. According to the study "the contributions ranging between 13%–58% must be considered with a caution because they harbor uncertainties about the state of pre-nomadic invasion and further local movements." A 2001 study concluded that the Central Asian contribution to Anatolia for Y-DNA is 12%, mtDNA 22%, alu insertion (autosomal) 15%, autosomal 22%, with respect to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uyghur, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan. By that method, for Y-DNA, Alu, mtDNA except Iraq (13%) and Armenia (6%) for females, the Central Asian contribution to the hybrids (Armenia, Georgia, Northern Caucasus, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon) were similar or even higher than to those of Turkey and Azerbaijan.
In 2011 Aram Yardumian and Theodore G. Schurr published their study "Who Are the Anatolian Turks? A Reappraisal of the Anthropological Genetic Evidence." They revealed the impossibility of long-term, and continuing genetic contacts between Anatolia and Siberia, and confirmed the presence of significant mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome divergence between these regions, with minimal admixture. The research confirms also the lack of mass migration and suggested that it was irregular punctuated migration events that engendered large-scale shifts in language and culture among Anatolia's diverse autochthonous inhabitants.
According to a 2012 study on ethnic Turkish people, "Turkish population has a close genetic similarity to Middle Eastern and European populations and some degree of similarity to South Asian and Central Asian populations." At K = 3 level, using individuals from the Middle East (Druze and Palestinian), Europe (French, Italian, Tuscan and Sardinian) to obtatin a more representative database for Central Asia (Uygur, Hazara and Kyrgyz), clustering results indicated that the contributions were 45%, 40% and 15% for the Middle Eastern, European and Central Asian populations, respectively. For K = 4 level, results for paternal ancestry were 38% European, 35% Middle Eastern, 18% South Asian and 9% Central Asian. K= 7 results of paternal ancestry were 77% European, 12% South Asian, 4% Middle Eastern, 6% Central Asian. However, Hodoglugil et al. caution that results may indicate previous population movements (e.g. migration, admixture) or genetic drift, given Europe and South Asia have some genetic relatedness. The study indicated that the Turkish genetic structure is unique, and admixture of Turkish people reflects the population migration patterns. Among all sampled groups, the Adygei population (Circassians) from the Caucasus was closest to the Turkish samples among sampled European (French, Italian), Middle Eastern (Druze, Palestinian), and Central (Kyrgyz, Hazara, Uygur), South (Pakistani), and East Asian (Mongolian, Han) populations.
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(We are using the news story of the study rather than the study itself because at this late date we do not wish to waste the time to debunk every Albino lie in the study. It is far easier to deal with the lies in a condensed version like a news story. The study is called “Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans” and it is located Here:>> https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v548/n7666/full/nature23310.html).
An analysis of ancient DNA has revealed that Ancient Minoans and Mycenaens were genetically similar with both peoples descending from early Neolithic farmers.
They likely migrated from Anatolia to Greece and Crete thousands of years prior to the Bronze Age. Modern Greeks, in turn, are largely descendants of the Mycenaeans, the study found.
The discovery of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations on the island of Crete and on mainland Greece in the late 1800s gave birth to modern archaeology and opened a direct window into the European Bronze Age. This period of history had previously been glimpsed only though Homer's epics, the Iliad and Odyssey.
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Knossos: Fakes, Facts, and Mystery
Mary Beard
August 13, 2009 Issue
Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism
by Cathy Gere
University of Chicago Press, 277 pp., $27.50
The masterpieces of Minoan art are not what they seem. The vivid frescoes that once decorated the walls of the prehistoric palace at Knossos in Crete are now the main attraction of the Archaeological Museum in the modern city of Heraklion, a few miles from the site of Knossos. Dating from the early or mid-second millennium BC, they are some of the most famous icons of ancient European culture, reproduced on countless postcards and posters, T-shirts and refrigerator magnets: the magnificent young “prince” with his floral crown, walking through a field of lilies; the five blue dolphins patrolling their underwater world between minnows and sea urchins; the three “ladies in blue” (a favorite Minoan color) with their curling black hair, low-cut dresses, and gesticulating hands, as if they have been caught in mid-conversation. The prehistoric world they evoke seems in some ways distant and strange—yet, at the same time, reassuringly recognizable and almost modern.
The truth is that these famous icons are largely modern. As any sharp-eyed visitor to the Heraklion museum can spot, what survives of the original paintings amounts in most cases to no more than a few square inches. The rest is more or less imaginative reconstruction, commissioned in the first half of the twentieth century by Sir Arthur Evans, the British excavator of the palace of Knossos (and the man who coined the term “Minoan” for this prehistoric Cretan civilization, after the mythical King Minos who is said to have held the throne there). As a general rule of thumb, the more famous the image now is, the less of it is actually ancient.
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Most of the dolphin fresco was painted by the Dutch artist, architect, and restorer Piet de Jong, who was employed by Evans in the 1920s (and whose watercolors and drawings of archaeological finds in Athens, Knossos, and elsewhere were featured in a 2006 exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens, curated by John Papadopoulos). The “Prince of the Lilies” is an earlier restoration, from 1905, by the Swiss artist Émile Gilliéron (see illustration on page 60). In this case it is far from certain that the original fragments—a small piece of the head and crown (but not the face), part of the torso, and a piece of thigh—ever belonged to the same painting.
The records of the original excavation suggest that they were found in the same general area of the ancient palace, but not particularly close together. And despite Gilliéron’s best efforts, the resulting “prince” (there is, of course, no evidence beyond the so-called “crown” for his royal status) is anatomically very awkward; his torso and head apparently face in different directions. The history of the “ladies in blue” is even more complicated. This painting was first recreated by Gilliéron after the discovery of a few fragments in the early years of the twentieth century, but that restoration was itself badly damaged in an earthquake in 1926 and re-restored by Gilliéron’s son (also Émile).
From the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York
Quote: This group of three women was originally restored by E. Gillieron, pere on the basis of other fragments of frescos from Knossos, mostly of a much smaller scale. It has been shown that details of the facial outline of the "Cup-bearer" fresco, a reproduction of which is displayed in the exhibition, supplied the model for the faces of the "Ladies in Blue", which are not preserved at all.
This copy reproduces the few fragments of burnt and abraded original fresco, represented as slightly offset from the restoration, and shows the extent to which the Gillierons recreated the scene. Extensive restorations like this one led the writer Evelyn Waugh after a visit to the Archaeological Museum in Herakleion in 1929 to state it is not easy to judge the merits of Minoan painting "since only a few square inches of the vast area exposed to our consideration are earlier than the last twenty years, and it is impossible to disregard the suspicion that their painters have tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate predilection for the covers of Vogue." The original is in the Archaeological Museum of Herakleion, Crete.
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