centerpiece is the Ataturk Dam, twenty-five miles north of Sanliurfa near the Syrian border. Almost two thousand square miles of arable land in the Harran plateau is being irrigated via gravity-flow water diverted from this dam. The whole Euphrates River dam system,planned in the 1970s and built in the 1980s and 1990s, which actually has the capacity to pump water as far as the water-starved West Bank in Palestine, will make Turkey a greater power in the Arab Middle East in the twenty-first century than it was in the twentieth. The heightened political profile that Turkey has adopted of late should be seen in the context of this new geographical reality.
While recent headlines show Turkey turning its attention to the Middle East, this was not always the case. From the rise of the Ottoman Turkish Empire in the thirteenth century, the Ottomans were mainly focused on their northwest, toward Europe, where the wealth and lucrative trade routes were. This was a pattern that had begun in the late Middle Ages, when the ascent of Central Europe and of the Carolingian Empire acted like a magnet for Turkish tribes, who themselves had gravitated westward across Anatolia to the Balkans, to the most fertile agricultural lands in Asia Minor’s immediate vicinity. Turkey may be synonymous with the entire Anatolian land bridge, but (as with Russia) the nation’s demographic and industrial heft has for centuries been clustered in the west, adjacent to the Balkans, and relatively far from the Middle East. But though the Ottomans were clustered near Europe, Anatolia’s exceedingly high and rugged terrain, with each mountain valley separated from the next, hindered the creation of tribal alliances that might have challenged Ottoman control in the areas closer to the Caucasus and the Middle East. Indeed, because geography made for social “disruption” in eastern Anatolia, organized dynasties like the Seljuks and Ottomans could rule for hundreds of years at a time from their base in faraway western Anatolia, i.e., European Turkey, without worrying about unrest in the east. 2 Just as the dizzying topography of eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East made it hard to organize a challenge to the European-based Russians, the same with Anatolia and the Ottoman Turks—except that because Anatolia had long borders with seas, the rulers in Constantinople were much less paranoid about incursions on their peripheries than were the Russians. Anatolia is compact; Russia sprawling.
Thus, Turkish demography has accentuated Turkish geography.Anatolia is further removed from the Middle Eastern heartland than the Iranian plateau, and the northwestern spatial arrangement of the Turkish population in recent centuries has only made it more so. Ottoman military forays into Central Europe, which had the flavor of nomadic wanderings and culminated in 1683 with the siege of Vienna, were eased by Europe’s own political fragmentation. France, Great Britain, and Spain were focused on outmaneuvering one another, and on their colonies in the New World across the Atlantic. Venice was involved in a long struggle with Genoa. The Papacy was entangled in other crises. And the Slavs of the southern Balkans were divided against themselves, another case of a mountainous geography encouraging social and political division. Finally, as the early-twentieth-century foreign correspondent Herbert Adams Gibbons writes, “From Europe, Asia Minor and more could be conquered: from Asia, no portion of Europe could be conquered.” 3 He meant that in order to truly consolidate the barren stretches of Anatolia and expand into the Middle East, the Ottoman Turks first required the wealth that only the conquest of the Balkans could provide. Facilitating this fluid arrangement between Europe and the Middle East was the location of the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, a safe harbor granting access to the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and North Africa, while also the terminus of caravan
While recent headlines show Turkey turning its attention to the Middle East, this was not always the case. From the rise of the Ottoman Turkish Empire in the thirteenth century, the Ottomans were mainly focused on their northwest, toward Europe, where the wealth and lucrative trade routes were. This was a pattern that had begun in the late Middle Ages, when the ascent of Central Europe and of the Carolingian Empire acted like a magnet for Turkish tribes, who themselves had gravitated westward across Anatolia to the Balkans, to the most fertile agricultural lands in Asia Minor’s immediate vicinity. Turkey may be synonymous with the entire Anatolian land bridge, but (as with Russia) the nation’s demographic and industrial heft has for centuries been clustered in the west, adjacent to the Balkans, and relatively far from the Middle East. But though the Ottomans were clustered near Europe, Anatolia’s exceedingly high and rugged terrain, with each mountain valley separated from the next, hindered the creation of tribal alliances that might have challenged Ottoman control in the areas closer to the Caucasus and the Middle East. Indeed, because geography made for social “disruption” in eastern Anatolia, organized dynasties like the Seljuks and Ottomans could rule for hundreds of years at a time from their base in faraway western Anatolia, i.e., European Turkey, without worrying about unrest in the east. 2 Just as the dizzying topography of eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East made it hard to organize a challenge to the European-based Russians, the same with Anatolia and the Ottoman Turks—except that because Anatolia had long borders with seas, the rulers in Constantinople were much less paranoid about incursions on their peripheries than were the Russians. Anatolia is compact; Russia sprawling.
Thus, Turkish demography has accentuated Turkish geography.Anatolia is further removed from the Middle Eastern heartland than the Iranian plateau, and the northwestern spatial arrangement of the Turkish population in recent centuries has only made it more so. Ottoman military forays into Central Europe, which had the flavor of nomadic wanderings and culminated in 1683 with the siege of Vienna, were eased by Europe’s own political fragmentation. France, Great Britain, and Spain were focused on outmaneuvering one another, and on their colonies in the New World across the Atlantic. Venice was involved in a long struggle with Genoa. The Papacy was entangled in other crises. And the Slavs of the southern Balkans were divided against themselves, another case of a mountainous geography encouraging social and political division. Finally, as the early-twentieth-century foreign correspondent Herbert Adams Gibbons writes, “From Europe, Asia Minor and more could be conquered: from Asia, no portion of Europe could be conquered.” 3 He meant that in order to truly consolidate the barren stretches of Anatolia and expand into the Middle East, the Ottoman Turks first required the wealth that only the conquest of the Balkans could provide. Facilitating this fluid arrangement between Europe and the Middle East was the location of the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, a safe harbor granting access to the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and North Africa, while also the terminus of caravan
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