Turkish Myth and Muslim Symbol

Abstract

Although the Turks ruled the Middle East for a millennium, their history is still insufficiently known both in the West and in the Arabic and Persian-speaking lands. This book focuses on Turkey's key foundational myth, the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, in which the Byzantine army was defeated by the Seljuq Turks under Sultan Alp Arslan, and the Byzantine emperor, Romanus IV Diogenes, was taken prisoner and then honourably released by the sultan. This battle destroyed the hold of the Christian Byzantine empire on eastern Anatolia and began the Islamisation of what is now called Turkey. This book translates, often for the first time, practically all of the surviving medieval Arabic and Persian accounts of the battle, and analyses their contents. The book also examines these texts as literary works and as vehicles of religious ideology, and looks at the ongoing confrontation between the Muslim Turks and Christian Europe from the crusading period to more recent times. The final part of the book highlights the importance of Manzikert for modern Turks as a myth of the founding of their nation. It shows how the historic memory of Manzikert has remained vibrant as a symbol of the arrival of the Turks in Turkey since its creation as a modern secular state by Atatürk in 1923.