TURNING POINTS IN MIDDLE EASTERN HISTORY
This research paper examines the proposition that the first decades of the 16th century and the First World War might be considered turning points that defined the course of modern Middle Eastern history. Although another 200 years would pass before the decline of the Ottoman Empire would become apparent, Ottoman power clearly peaked in the first half of the 16th century; thereafter the power of Western economies, political ideas and technology would clearly be dominant, a state of affairs with which the Middle East is still coping. The First World War effectively destroyed the Ottoman Empire and weakened the power of the European colonial powers, thus setting the stage for the emergence during the interwar period and after World War II of new nations and constellations of forces in the Middle East.
After taking Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Turks expanded their control of Western Asia to include Southern Anatolia, Syria, Egypt (1517) and Mesopotamia and North Africa as far west as Algiers. Under Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent (1520-1560), they conquered the Balkans and Hungary and stood at the gates of Vienna. They wrested control from the Venetians of most of the Eastern Mediterranean. According to Cleveland, "it was not only the leading Islamic state of the sixteenth century, it was a world empire of vast influence and territorial extent" (43).
By the first half of the 16th century, Western Europe had already begun to leave the medieval period and had experienced the liberating effects of the Italian Renaissance. The rise of the Ottoman Empire in the East blocked ready European access to the fabled riches of the East, inducing first the Portuguese and then the Spanish to take advantage of advances in mathematics, navigation and shipbuilding to explore new routes via the African coast to India (1498) and to the Western Hemisphere. New nation states, many of them seafaring s...