Mongol yoke in A.D. 552, when
Turkish history begins.

At the dawn of Islam (A.D. 632) Turks and Mongols were harrying each
other all over the Caspian countries like rival wolf-packs, sometimes
combining for a raid on their neighbours and then fighting over the
loot. That is why you find racial Turks in such outlandish places as
Merv, Khiva, Samarcand, Bokhara and Cabul, for the Turkish race is not
confined to Asia Minor and Turkey in Europe, but is scattered over parts
of Russia and China and Afghanistan.

Now to consider the Ottoman Turks, with whom we are chiefly concerned.
They were superior to their Mongol fellow-wolves in that they could
smelt iron and had some idea of constructive enterprise. They had also
adopted Islam, which was a great advance from the Shamanistic wizardry
and totem-worship they used to practise, and their contact with the
Arabs who raided them and afterwards accepted their military service to
the Caliphate had civilised them considerably. Their Seljouk cousins
were already ruling in Asia Minor, whither they had been driven by the
Mongols when a wandering Turkish band sought similar asylum there in the
earlier part of the thirteenth century and intervened most opportunely
to help the Seljouks repulse a Mongol raid; in return, the Seljouk
Emperor gave them a grant of land in Bithynia.

In 1300 the Seljouk Empire was finally smashed by the Mongols, who
withdrew eastward without occupying the country, for they were merely
predatory and destructive and had no gift or desire for permanent
colonisation. So it came about that the Ottoman Empire began in 1326
under Othman I in Bithynia and grew by absorption and lack of effective
opposition until, in 1517, we find it spreading under Selim I (the
Magnificent) to the gates of Vienna and extending from Germany to Persia
and from Arabia to the Atlantic.

The benign sun of the Arabian Caliphate, under which learning and
industry flourished securely, had long since set in blood under
circumstances of treachery and murder which have hardly been surpassed
even in the late war.

Under the later Abbasides, when the glories of the Caliphate were
waning, there were bitter dissensions between Sunnis and Shiahs (the
main orthodox and schismatic sects of Islam) which culminated in fierce
rioting at Baghdad in 1258. The then Caliph was foolish enough to appeal
for assistance against the schismatic seditionists to his Mongol
neighbours. It had been done before