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Distinctive Facts About The Mighty Ottoman Empire

Khalid Elhassan August 13, 2020 35 min

Battle of Ankara - Timurid Empire — Tamerlane gloating over the captured Bayezid I. Wikimedia

33. The Turks Take Over From the Arabs

With the Arab Abbasid Caliphate in decline, the hitherto subjugated Turks began to take over and fill vacuum of power. In the eleventh century, a branch of the Oghuz Turks established the Seljuk Empire. Reducing the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad to a figurehead puppet, Seljuk Turk sultans ruled a vast Islamic state that absorbed other Turkic principalities and dominated the heart of the Muslim Middle East.

With the bow and arrow as their symbol of authority, the Seljuks extended their rule over Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, and after crushing the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, much of Anatolia. At its greatest extent, Seljuk dominion stretched from western Anatolia and the Levant to the Hindu Kush in the east, and from Central Asia in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south. The Turks were thus established in the Middle East, and began their transition from Steppe nomads to a settled state.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.