TURKISH ORIGINS

Mavi Boncuk |

TURKISH ORIGINS
Excerpted from "History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey"
by Stanford Shaw


The Ottomans were descended from the mass of nomads who roamed in the area of the Altai Mountains, east of the Eurasian steppes and south of the Yenisei river and Lake Baikal in lands that today are part of Outer Mongolia. These Altaic nomads had a primitive, mobile civilization based on tribal organization, customs, and social sanctions without the formal organs of government and laws characteristic of more advanced societies. Their livelihood came mainly from raising flocks and taking what they could from their weaker neighbors. Temporary leadership was entrusted to hans, but the scope of their authority was limited to searching for pastures and to military activities and did not extend to relations among individuals within the tribes or among the tribes themselves. Their Shamanistic beliefs involved worship of the elements of nature through a series of totems and spirits considered to have special powers that could affect man for both good and evil. Man himself was helpless in the face of their power but could secure protection through the intercession of shamans, priests with special power to control and use the spirits. It was a simple religion of fear in which the dark elements of nature as interpreted by the shamans rather than the moral considerations of higher religions were the accepted determinants of right and wrong, and the nomadic way was considered the ideal of human existance.

Beginning in the second century before Christ, changing political, military, and climatic conditions in the Altaic homeland sent successive nomadic waves against the settled civilizations located on the borders of the steppes. Those who moved to the south and west toward eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia came to be known as Oguz among themselves and, in general, as Turkomans or Turks to those who they attacked. They swept the settled peoples out of the way and destroyed towns and fields in the process of seeking out fodder and shelter for themselves and their flocks. Then they passed on, allowing the settled peoples who survived to restore their homes and former activities. Thus in most places such incursions left no permanent changes in ethnic or economic patterns. But in those lands where the Turkomans chose to establish their pastures and to remain more permanently, centuries-old systems of agriculture and trade were replaced by pastoral economies and the Turks largely supplanted the settled ethnic elements that preceeded them.

For the most part the great mountain ranges of the Hindu Kush, the Elborz, and the Caucasus provided the Middle East with a natural defense line against these incursions. But this line was broken in the northeast in the lands lying between the Hindu Kush and the Aral Sea, bounded in the north by the Jazartes river and in the south by the Oxus and generally known as Transoxiana, the land across the Oxus. Here a natural road led directly from the steppes to Iran. Transoxania was the staging area for the great nomadic invasions of the Middle East. Through here the nomadic ways were funneled, and it was where the states and empires that ruled the Middle East had to organize their defenses to protect civilization from disruption and destruction.

Up to the eleventh century the great Middle Eastern empires were largely successful in this endeavor. The Oguz nomads bounced off the northeastern defense tier of the Middle Eastern civilization and moved north and west into areas of less resistance in what is today Russia and Eastern Europe. The different waves of migration were exemplified by the Huns in the fifth century and later the Avars, the Magyars, the Bulgars, the Hazars, who ruled an empire that stretched well into the Caucasus and the Crimea between the seventh and tenth centuries, and the Pechenegs, who ruled east of the Caucasus as well as in Bessarabia and Moldavia and all the way to the eastern Carpathians in the ninth century.