Anatolia

In the centuries following, new groups moved into Anatolia, such as the Phrygians (whose wealthy king Midas entered into Greek myth), Carians, Leleges. Among these new groups were, on the west coast, the Ionian Greeks, who set up city-states in the 700s which soon grew quite wealthy. In the interior, another group, the Lydians, set up a strong kingdom in the 600s, which soon gobbled up the city-states. The wealthy Lydian state, among other things, was responsible for the invention of coinage - an innovation which rapidly spread west into Greece, and east as far as China. The Lydian state was very powerful, but in 547 BC it became involved in a conflict with the rising power of Persia and was conquered.

For Persia, Anatolia was a very distant province, and its hold was loose. In 499 BC, the Ionian Greeks attempted to secede altogether, with help from the Greeks of the Mainland. The result was total defeat, and the famous Persian invasion of Greece itself. This proved a bridge too far - the Persians were defeated, and the resurgent Greeks pushed back, removing the western coast from Persian control. Conflicts and intrigues simmered between Persia and Greece until 334 BC, when Alexander the Great passed through in the process of invading Persia. In the period after his death, the Hellenistic Age, the region was fiercely contested. The great powers all staked claims to the fringes of Anatolia, while the centre came under the control of small independent kingdoms, such as Cappadocia, Bithynia, Pontos, and Pergamon. After 189 BC, the region was broadly within the Roman sphere, and it was fully incorporated into their empire in 133 BC.

There it remained for the next thousand years. Gradually the nature of the Roman empire changed - after AD 330 the empire's capital was at Constantinople (modern Istanbul), which straddled the Bosphoros Straits in northwest Anatolia. The territories in western Europe were lost in the 400s, those in Egypt, Africa, and Syria in the 600s; from being an empire which ruled over Anatolia, Rome had become an empire based in Anatolia. Thereafter, the Roman empire is known to historians as the Byzantine empire. It maintained its hold over Anatolia and the Balkans for centuries, expanding and contracting, facing regular incursions from the Islamic Caliphates to the southeast.

Finally, however, in 1071, the Seljuk Turks defeated the Byzantine army at Manzikert and brought most of Anatolia under Turkish control. Their empire, which stretched all the way to India, was soon divided into separate sultanates - that in Anatolia was the Sultanate of Rum (Turkish for "Rome"), with its capital at Konya. The Sultanate successfully maintained itself against the remaining Byzantines, the Crusaders, other branches of the Seljuk family, until it was defeated and vassalised by the Mongols in 1243. Under their overlordship it lost its vitality and dissolved into dozens of tiny kingdoms, called Beyliks.

Slowly, these Beyliks consolidated, until one of them, the Ottoman Beylik, was able to unify all Anatolia under its control - and then went further by conquering Constantinople and finally putting an end to the Byzantines. The Ottoman Empire which resulted claimed to have inherited the mantles of the ancient Roman empire and the Islamic caliphate. It rapidly spread, conquering Iraq, Syria, all North Africa to the south, as well as Greece, the Balkans, and the Crimea in the north. In 1529, Ottoman armies beseiged Vienna in Austria - but this proved to be as far as her armies would go. Defeated, the empire began to retract, though it held on as best it could - each territory taken by the Austrians, Russians, Egyptians, and others had to be prised from its grasp.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the Empire was a basketcase, famously called "the Sick man of Europe." It entered World War I on the side of the Germans and Austrians, enjoyed limited success at Gallipoli, before completely collapsing under British assault at Baghdad and Armageddon. The exactions placed upon the Empire after the war were so severe that the people, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, rose up and overthrew the government, in 1923. The new Republic of Turkey was (and is) avowedly democratic, western, secular, and modern - whether the populus liked it or not. Today, is one of the strongest states in the Middle East, leveraging its position at the crossroads between West and East - just as it has since the beginning of history.