Society & Politics
3 d

Are you proud of your history?

Are you proud of your history?

The Turks... They were warriors riding horses across the endless steppes. Despite their small population, they subdued agricultural China, a great civilization, so much so that the Great Wall was built to protect against their attacks. Yet Turkish philosophy was fundamentally based on warfare and raiding. When they began searching for a new spirit and organized religion, Islam emerged.

The caliphs, seeking to use the Turks' military power, formed armies from them and even built them a city: Samarra. Over time, Islamized Turks became deeply involved with Persian civilization and adopted its bureaucracy as a model. They rescued the caliph from Shiite domination.

Soon, Anatolia had become a Turkish homeland, and days of fear began for Europeans. Byzantium therefore sought help from the Crusaders, contributing to the beginning of the Crusades.

Then, in Bithynia, a principality was rising: the Ottomans. They crushed the Bulgarians and Serbs, then brought the Eastern Roman Empire to an end. When conquered, the city had around 40,000 people; a century later, it had reached 400,000.

The Ottomans could not stay still. Within two years, they conquered Aleppo, Damascus, the Hejaz and all of Egypt. Then came Belgrade, Rhodes, and Mohács, where the Hungarian army was shattered in just two hours.

The backbone of our army, the Janissaries, were the children of the infidels. Yet they became an elite force serving the very state that had conquered their lands. Voltaire called this an idea the Devil himself could not have conceived.

We saved the French king from the Germans, the Swedish king from the Russians, and kept France outside the anti-Ottoman crusading coalitions. At Preveza, we became masters of the Mediterranean.

But then the sun over the Mediterranean began to shift toward the Atlantic, and history finally began to smile upon you.

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