Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
separated from the next, hindered the creation of tribal alliances that might have challenged
Ottoman control in the areas closer to the Caucasus and the Middle East. Indeed, because
geography made for social “disruption” in eastern Anatolia, organized dynasties like the
Seljuks and Ottomans could rule for hundreds of years at a time from their base in faraway
as the dizzying topography of eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East made it hard to or-
ganize a challenge to the European-based Russians, the same with Anatolia and the Otto-
man Turks—except that because Anatolia had long borders with seas, the rulers in Con-
stantinople were much less paranoid about incursions on their peripheries than were the
Russians. Anatolia is compact; Russia sprawling.
Thus, Turkish demography has accentuated Turkish geography. Anatolia is further re-
moved from the Middle Eastern heartland than the Iranian plateau, and the northwestern
spatial arrangement of the Turkish population in recent centuries has only made it more
so. Ottoman military forays into Central Europe, which had the flavor of nomadic wan-
derings and culminated in 1683 with the siege of Vienna, were eased by Europe's own
political fragmentation. France, Great Britain, and Spain were focused on outmaneuvering
one another, and on their colonies in the New World across the Atlantic. Venice was in-
volved in a long struggle with Genoa. The Papacy was entangled in other crises. And the
Slavs of the southern Balkans were divided against themselves, another case of a moun-
tainous geography encouraging social and political division. Finally, as the early-twentieth-
century foreign correspondent Herbert Adams Gibbons writes, “From Europe, Asia Minor
meant that in order to truly consolidate the barren stretches of Anatolia and expand into
the Middle East, the Ottoman Turks first required the wealth that only the conquest of the
Balkans could provide. Facilitating this fluid arrangement between Europe and the Middle
East was the location of the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, a safe harbor granting ac-
cess to the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and North Africa, while also the terminus of cara-
van routes from Persia, the Caucasus, and beyond.
Arising from this geography came a sprawling, multinational empire that by the late
nineteenth century was in its death throes, with the Ottoman Sultanate only giving up the
ghost in the aftermath of its defeat in World War I. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (Father Turk),
the only undefeated Ottoman general, who forged a modern state in Anatolia following the
imperial losses in the Balkans and the Middle East, was an authentic revolutionary: that
is, he changed his people's value system. He divined that the European powers had de-
feated the Ottoman Empire not on account of their greater armies, but on account of their
greater civilization, which had produced the greater armies. Turkey would henceforth be
Western, he said, marching culturally and politically toward Europe. Thus, he abolished the
Muslim religious courts, forbade men to wear the fez, discouraged women from wearing
