Byzantium and the Ottomans
Anatolia has been settled for millennia — Catalhoyuk is among the oldest known towns. The city on the Bosphorus became Constantinople, capital of the Christian Byzantine Empire for over a thousand years, until the Ottoman Turks took it in 1453 and made it the seat of an empire that would last until 1922.
At its height the Ottoman Empire controlled south-eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and the sultan claimed the title of caliph, leader of Sunni Islam. Its slow decline through the nineteenth century earned it the label the sick man of Europe, and defeat in the First World War brought it down.
Ataturk's republic
From the wreckage, Mustafa Kemal — later called Ataturk, father of the Turks — led a war of independence and proclaimed a republic in 1923. He abolished the caliphate, adopted the Latin alphabet, separated mosque and state and imposed a top-down modernisation that still defines the country's secular tradition.
That tradition has been contested ever since, most sharply since 2003 under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose governing party draws on political Islam and has concentrated power, curbed the press and survived a 2016 coup attempt. Turkey is a NATO member and long a candidate for the European Union, though that bid has stalled.
The turn to Africa
In the past two decades Turkey has expanded into Africa faster than almost any other outside power. Its network of embassies on the continent grew from around a dozen in 2009 to more than forty, one of the fastest diplomatic expansions anywhere. Turkish Airlines now flies to more African cities than any other carrier, knitting the continent to its Istanbul hub.
The clearest expression of the strategy is Somalia. Turkey stepped in during the 2011 famine — Erdogan visited Mogadishu at its height, when few foreign leaders would — and stayed, building a hospital, rebuilding the airport and, in 2017, opening its largest overseas military base to train Somali soldiers. Turkish construction firms, schools and drones now operate across the continent, and Ankara markets itself as a partner without a colonial past.