The history of Turkey

Turkey occupies Anatolia, the great peninsula between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, together with a small corner of south-eastern Europe in Thrace. Few places have been continuously inhabited by so many successive civilisations. Some of the oldest monumental buildings and farming towns on earth stand on its soil, and the Hittites, Phrygians, Lydians, Greeks, Persians, Romans and Byzantines all built states here before Turkish-speaking peoples arrived from Central Asia in the eleventh century. From Constantinople, renamed Istanbul, the Ottoman sultans ruled an empire spanning three continents for more than six hundred years. Out of that empire's defeat in the First World War, and the violence that accompanied it, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk built a secular national republic in 1923, which has since passed through military coups, a long Kurdish insurgency, rapid economic growth and, under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, an increasingly centralised presidency.

Anatolia lay on the edge of the Fertile Crescent, and its south-east played a central part in the Neolithic Revolution, the shift from hunting and gathering to farming. At Göbekli Tepe, near Şanlıurfa, people who had not yet adopted agriculture raised circles of T-shaped limestone pillars from about 9500 BCE, some carved with foxes, boars, snakes and vultures. The site, excavated from the 1990s, overturned the old assumption that monumental building came only after farming, and nearby sites such as Karahan Tepe show it was not unique.

By about 7100 BCE a large settlement had grown up at Çatalhöyük on the Konya Plain, where several thousand people lived in mud-brick houses packed so tightly together that they entered through the roofs. Its inhabitants grew wheat and barley, herded sheep and goats, buried their dead beneath the floors and decorated their walls with paintings and bull horns. The town was occupied until about 5600 BCE and shows little sign of marked differences in wealth. In the following millennia copper working spread, and by the third millennium BCE fortified towns such as Troy, on the Dardanelles, and the rich tombs of Alacahöyük show the rise of local rulers trading in metals.

Early in the second millennium BCE, merchants from Assur in Assyria set up trading colonies in Anatolia, above all at Kanesh near Kayseri, exchanging tin and textiles for silver and gold. Their clay tablets are the first written records from the peninsula. Among the local peoples were speakers of Indo-European languages, the Hittites, Luwians and Palaics, whose languages are the oldest recorded of that family.

Around 1650 BCE a Hittite king made Hattusa, near modern Boğazkale, his capital. The Hittites built a powerful state that raided as far as Babylon, sacked by King Mursili I about 1595 BCE, and in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE ruled most of Anatolia and northern Syria. Their army met that of Ramesses II of Egypt at Kadesh about 1274 BCE, and the two powers later made one of the earliest surviving peace treaties. The Hittite archives also mention Wilusa, probably Troy, the city later celebrated by Homer. In the east, the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni was a rival. Around 1180 BCE, in the general Late Bronze Age collapse, Hattusa was abandoned and the Hittite empire broke apart, though smaller "Neo-Hittite" kingdoms survived in the south-east for several centuries.

In the Iron Age new states filled the vacuum. The Phrygians ruled central Anatolia from Gordion, where the legend of King Midas and his golden touch was set; Midas was a real king of the late eighth century BCE. Further east, the kingdom of Urartu built fortresses around Lake Van. In the west the Lydians, with their capital at Sardis, grew rich on gold from the river Pactolus and were among the first, in the seventh century BCE, to strike coins. Their last king, Croesus, became a byword for wealth.

Along the Aegean coast, Greek settlers founded cities from about 1000 BCE, in Aeolis, Ionia and Doria, and later colonised the shores of the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, including Byzantium, founded according to tradition in the seventh century BCE. The Ionian cities, especially Miletus and Ephesus, were among the most advanced in the Greek world, and Greek philosophy began here with Thales of Miletus and Heraclitus of Ephesus; Herodotus, the first historian, was born at Halicarnassus, modern Bodrum. These cities were part of the wider world of ancient Greece.

In about 546 BCE Cyrus the Great defeated Croesus and took Sardis, and all of Anatolia became part of the Achaemenid Empire, governed through satraps. The revolt of the Ionian Greeks in 499 BCE began the Greco-Persian Wars. Persian rule lasted until 334 BCE, when Alexander the Great crossed the Hellespont, won battles at the Granicus and at Issus, and, according to the story, cut the Gordian knot.

After Alexander's death Anatolia was divided among his successors and smaller kingdoms. The Seleucid Empire held much of the south and east, while Pergamon, under the Attalid dynasty, became a brilliant centre of Hellenistic art and learning, with a library second only to Alexandria's. Celtic Galatians settled around modern Ankara after invading in 278 BCE, and native dynasties ruled Bithynia, Pontus, Cappadocia and Commagene. Greek became the common language of the cities.

Rome entered the region after defeating the Seleucids in 190 BCE, and in 133 BCE the last king of Pergamon bequeathed his kingdom to the Roman Republic, which made it the province of Asia. Mithridates VI of Pontus fought Rome in a series of wars and in 88 BCE ordered the massacre of tens of thousands of Romans and Italians in Asia, but he was finally defeated by Pompey. Under the Roman Empire Asia Minor was one of the richest and most urbanised regions of the Mediterranean, with great cities such as Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamon and Antioch nearby in Syria. Paul the Apostle, a Jew from Tarsus, preached in its towns, and Christianity spread early and widely here; the seven churches of the Book of Revelation were all in western Anatolia.

In 330 CE Constantine I refounded Byzantium as Constantinople, a new Christian capital on the Bosporus. The first ecumenical council of the church met at Nicaea, modern İznik, in 325, and others followed at Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon. When the western half of the empire fell in the fifth century, the eastern half, known to historians as the Byzantine Empire, survived for another thousand years with Anatolia as its heartland. Justinian I rebuilt the Hagia Sophia, consecrated in 537, which remained the largest church in Christendom for centuries; the history of the city itself is told in Istanbul.

The seventh century brought catastrophe. War with the Sasanian Empire was followed by the Arab conquests, which took Syria and Egypt and brought raids deep into Anatolia almost every year. Constantinople survived Arab attacks in the 670s and a great siege in 717 and 718, defended by its walls and by "Greek fire". The Byzantines reorganised Anatolia into military districts called themes, and the frontier with the Abbasid Caliphate stabilised along the Taurus Mountains. Disputes over religious images, iconoclasm, divided the empire in the eighth and ninth centuries. From the mid-ninth century Byzantium recovered, and under Basil II, who died in 1025, it expanded into Armenia, Syria and the Balkans.

Turkic peoples originated in the steppes of Inner Asia. The Oghuz Turks, who converted to Islam in the tenth century, were led west by the Seljuk family, whose Seljuk Empire conquered Iran and in 1055 took Baghdad. In 1071 the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan defeated and captured the emperor Romanos IV Diogenes at Manzikert, north of Lake Van. Byzantine civil wars followed, and Turkmen tribes poured into central Anatolia. Within a decade a Seljuk prince ruled from Nicaea, and Turkish dynasties such as the Danishmendids held the north-east.

The First Crusade, called partly in answer to Byzantine appeals, recovered Nicaea and western Anatolia in 1097, and the Crusades passed repeatedly across the peninsula. In 1204, though, the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople itself, and Byzantine rule survived only in successor states at Nicaea, Trebizond and Epirus until the city was retaken in 1261. Meanwhile the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, with its capital at Konya, became a prosperous Persian-influenced state that built caravanserais, mosques and madrasas across Anatolia. The mystic poet Jalal al-Din Rumi lived and taught in Konya, where he died in 1273. In 1243 the Mongol Empire defeated the Seljuks at Köse Dağ, and the sultanate became a vassal of the Mongol Ilkhanate. As Mongol power faded, Anatolia broke into a patchwork of Turkish principalities, or beyliks, and the Greek-speaking, Christian peninsula gradually became mainly Turkish-speaking and Muslim, through migration, conversion and intermarriage.

One of the smallest beyliks, in north-western Anatolia near the Byzantine frontier, was led by Osman I, who began to raid and expand around 1299. His son Orhan took Bursa in 1326, which became the first Ottoman capital, and in 1354 the Ottomans crossed into Europe at Gallipoli. Edirne, the former Adrianople, became their capital in the 1360s. Victories at Kosovo in 1389 and Nicopolis in 1396 made them masters of much of the Balkans, as recounted in the histories of Bulgaria and Serbia. In 1402, however, Tamerlane crushed and captured Sultan Bayezid I at the Battle of Ankara, and the state almost dissolved in a civil war among his sons before Mehmed I reunited it in 1413.

On 29 May 1453 Mehmed II took Constantinople after a siege of seven weeks, ending the Byzantine Empire; the fall of Constantinople made the city the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and Hagia Sophia became a mosque. Mehmed went on to conquer Serbia, the Morea and Trebizond and to bring the last Anatolian beyliks under his rule. His grandson Selim I defeated the Safavid shah Ismail at Chaldiran in 1514, then destroyed the Mamluk Sultanate in 1516 and 1517, adding Syria, Egypt and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and with them the Ottoman claim to lead the Islamic world as caliphs.

Under Suleiman the Magnificent, who reigned from 1520 to 1566, the empire reached the summit of its power. He took Belgrade in 1521 and Rhodes in 1522, destroyed the Hungarian army at Mohács in 1526 and besieged Vienna in 1529, competing with the Habsburg Charles V for mastery of Europe. In the east he conquered Baghdad and Iraq from the Safavid Empire, and his fleets dominated the Mediterranean and reached the Indian Ocean. The Ottomans knew Suleiman as the Lawgiver for his codification of state law. His architect Mimar Sinan built the Süleymaniye mosque, and later the Selimiye at Edirne for his son,, and Istanbul became one of the largest cities in the world.

The empire was a dynastic, multi-religious state. A slave-based system, the devshirme, levied Christian boys from the Balkans, converted them to Islam and trained them as janissary soldiers and administrators, some of whom rose to be grand viziers. Non-Muslim communities, Orthodox Christians, Armenians and Jews, among them many Jews who arrived after their expulsion from Spain in 1492, were organised as self-governing religious communities, later called millets, paying a special tax and subject to legal inequalities but generally free to worship.

After 1566 the empire's expansion slowed. The defeat of its fleet at Lepanto in 1571 was soon made good, and Crete was conquered in 1669, but the failure of the second siege of Vienna in 1683 was followed by the loss of Hungary in the Treaty of Karlowitz of 1699. The seventeenth century brought rebellions in Anatolia, palace intrigue and fiscal strain, yet also long stretches of stability, and the "Tulip Era" of the early eighteenth century saw a fashion for European styles and the first Ottoman printing press.

From the later eighteenth century the Russian Empire became the empire's most dangerous enemy. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774 lost the Crimean Khanate, and the Balkan peoples began to break away: Serbia gained autonomy in stages after 1804 and Greece won independence in 1830 after a revolution begun in 1821. Muhammad Ali, governor of Egypt, made that province independent in all but name and nearly toppled the sultan. Mahmud II destroyed the janissaries in 1826, and in 1839 his successors launched the Tanzimat, the "reorganisation", which created modern ministries, schools and law codes and proclaimed the equality of Muslim and non-Muslim subjects. Britain and France fought alongside the Ottomans against Russia in the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856.

A constitution and parliament were introduced in 1876, but Sultan Abdul Hamid II suspended both in 1878 after a disastrous war with Russia that brought the independence of Romania, Serbia and Montenegro and autonomy for Bulgaria. He ruled as an autocrat for thirty years, promoting pan-Islamism, railways and schools, while the empire went deeper into debt to European creditors. In 1894 to 1896 hundreds of thousands of Armenians, possibly between 100,000 and 300,000, were killed in the Hamidian massacres. Millions of Muslim refugees from the Caucasus and the Balkans, fleeing Russian conquest and the new Christian states, settled in Anatolia in the same decades.

In 1908 the Young Turk Revolution, led by the Committee of Union and Progress, forced the restoration of the constitution, and the committee took effective power in a coup in 1913. Italy seized Libya in 1911 and 1912, and in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 the empire lost almost all its remaining European territory.

The Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of Germany in late 1914. Its armies suffered a heavy defeat by Russia at Sarıkamış in the Caucasus, but in 1915 and 1916 they repulsed the British and French landings at Gallipoli, where a young officer, Mustafa Kemal, made his name. In Mesopotamia they forced the surrender of a British army at Kut in 1916, but British forces and the Arab Revolt eventually took Baghdad, Jerusalem and Damascus.

On 24 April 1915 the government arrested Armenian community leaders in Constantinople, and over the following months Armenian men were massacred and women, children and the elderly were deported on death marches into the Syrian desert, where many more died of starvation, disease and killings. Between 1915 and the early 1920s an estimated 1 million to 1.5 million Armenians were killed, and Armenian life in eastern Anatolia, continuous for more than two thousand years, was destroyed. Assyrian and Greek Orthodox communities suffered massacres and deportations in the same years. The great majority of historians and genocide scholars describe the Armenian case as genocide, and more than thirty countries have formally recognised it. Turkey rejects the term. Its official position is that Armenians died as a result of wartime conditions, disease, intercommunal violence and a relocation it describes as a security measure, that Muslims also suffered greatly in the same years, and that the question should be left to historians. The history of these events from the Armenian side is told in Armenia.

The empire signed an armistice in October 1918, and Allied troops occupied Istanbul. In May 1919 Greek forces landed at Smyrna, now İzmir, and the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920 proposed to divide Anatolia among Greece, Italy, France, an independent Armenia and a possible Kurdish state, leaving the Turks only a rump. Mustafa Kemal, who had landed at Samsun in May 1919, organised a national resistance, and a Grand National Assembly met in Ankara on 23 April 1920. In the Turkish War of Independence his forces defeated the Armenians in the east and the French in the south, stopped the Greek advance at the Sakarya River in 1921, and in August and September 1922 drove the Greek army out of Anatolia. Much of Smyrna burned as Turkish forces retook it, and its Greek and Armenian inhabitants fled or were killed.

The sultanate was abolished on 1 November 1922. The Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923 recognised the new Turkish state within roughly its present borders, and a compulsory exchange of populations sent about 1.2 million Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece and about 400,000 Muslims from Greece to Turkey. The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed on 29 October 1923 with Ankara as capital and Mustafa Kemal as president.

In fifteen years Kemal transformed the state. The caliphate was abolished in 1924, religious courts and orders were closed, Swiss, Italian and German legal codes replaced Islamic law, the fez was banned, the Latin alphabet replaced Arabic script in 1928, and women gained the vote in national elections in 1934. A Surname Law that year gave him the name Atatürk, "father of the Turks". His Republican People's Party ruled as the only party, secularism and Turkish nationalism became official doctrine, and the state promoted a single Turkish identity. Kurdish revolts, notably that of Sheikh Said in 1925 and the uprising in Dersim in 1937 and 1938, were crushed with great loss of life, and Kurdish language and culture were suppressed for decades. Atatürk died on 10 November 1938 and was succeeded by İsmet İnönü.

Turkey annexed Hatay from French-ruled Syria in 1939 and remained neutral for almost all of World War II, declaring war on Germany only in February 1945. A wartime wealth tax in 1942 fell most heavily on non-Muslim citizens, many of whom lost their businesses. Faced with Soviet demands on the Straits, Turkey turned to the West in the Cold War: it received American aid, sent troops to the Korean War and joined NATO in 1952.

Multi-party politics arrived in 1946, and in 1950 Adnan Menderes's Democrat Party won a landslide. His government brought rural development and a relaxation of strict secularism, but also growing authoritarianism, and in 1955 a pogrom in Istanbul devastated the city's Greek community. In 1960 the army overthrew Menderes, who was hanged in 1961. The military intervened again by memorandum in 1971 and by a full coup in 1980, after years of violence between left and right that had killed thousands. The 1980 junta under Kenan Evren detained hundreds of thousands of people and imposed the constitution of 1982. Prime minister and later president Turgut Özal opened the economy to markets in the 1980s.

On Cyprus, intercommunal fighting between Greek and Turkish Cypriots led to a Greek-backed coup in July 1974, after which Turkey invaded and occupied the north of the island. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, declared in 1983, is recognised only by Turkey, and the island remains divided. From 1984 the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK, led by Abdullah Öcalan, waged an armed insurgency in the south-east; the conflict killed more than 40,000 people, many of them civilians, and thousands of Kurdish villages were emptied. Öcalan was captured in 1999. In 1997 the army forced the resignation of an Islamist-led government without taking power, and in 1999 an earthquake at İzmit killed some 17,000 people.

The Justice and Development Party, the AKP, founded by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, won the 2002 election, and Erdoğan became prime minister in 2003. Its early years brought strong economic growth, reforms that loosened restrictions on Kurdish language and religious expression, and the opening of membership talks with the European Union in 2005, which later stalled. The government curbed the political power of the army through trials and constitutional changes. Mass protests that began over Gezi Park in Istanbul in 2013 were met with force, and critics increasingly accused the government of authoritarianism. Turkey also took in more refugees than any other country, mainly about 3.6 million Syrians fleeing the civil war in Syria, and its forces have fought Kurdish militias in northern Syria and Iraq.

Erdoğan became the first directly elected president in 2014. On 15 July 2016 a faction of the army attempted a coup, which was defeated within hours after clashes that left more than 250 people dead. The government blamed the movement of the exiled preacher Fethullah Gülen and detained or dismissed tens of thousands of soldiers, judges, teachers and civil servants. A referendum in 2017 narrowly approved an executive presidency and abolished the post of prime minister. On 6 February 2023 two powerful earthquakes struck the south-east, killing 53,537 people in Turkey and thousands more in Syria. Erdoğan won re-election in May 2023, but the opposition Republican People's Party won the mayoralties of the five largest cities in local elections in 2024. In March 2025 the arrest of Istanbul's mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the opposition's presidential candidate, set off the largest protests in more than a decade, and in May 2026 an appeals court annulled the party's leadership election and removed its chairman. Following a call by Öcalan, the PKK declared a ceasefire in March 2025, announced its own dissolution in May 2025 and began handing over weapons that July, and in 2026 parliament passed a law offering conditional pardons to its fighters.