Who are the Turks? This study spans Central Asia, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, & Europe, to explain the origins & the history of the Turkish people up until the present day.

Translating a collection of the most important descriptions of the Turks found in medieval Arabic texts into English, this book aims at delineating the coming of the Turkic people in the eleventh century, their military successes in Iran and Iraq, and the emergence of the sultanate. The book introduces the reader to the history of the Islamic Caliphate and the Turkic people. This introduction is followed by annotated translated sources which illuminate; the view of the Eurasian steppes in Muslim-Arabic geographical writing from the pre-Saljūq period, the self-image and ideology of the victorious Saljūqs and their fundamental claim to legitimacy, and the conventional narrative of the coming of the Saljūqs in later Arabic historiography. Illustrating the variety of sources available on the history of Turkic tribes in the Eurasian steppes and in central Islamic lands, ranging from geographical writing, to chronicles, to mythological legends, this book will be an essential resource for students and scholars with an interest in Turks and image, History, and Middle East Studies.

"Arresting … Stone’s Turkey breaks the popular mould and introduces its readers to a place beyond their presumptions" —The Sunday Times In Turkey: A Short History the celebrated historian Norman Stone deftly conducts the reader through the fascinating and complex story of Turkey’s past, from the arrival of the Seljuks in Anatolia in the eleventh century to the modern republic applying for EU membership in the twenty-first. It is an account of epic proportions, featuring rapacious leaders such as Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, the glories of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, and Kemal Atatürk, the reforming genius and founder of modern Turkey. For six hundred years Turkey was at the heart of the Ottoman Empire, a superpower that brought Islam to the gates of Vienna and stretched to North Africa, the Persian Gulf, and the river Volga. Stone examines the reasons for the astonishing rise and the long decline of this world empire and how for its last hundred years it became the center of the Eastern Question, as the Great Powers argued over a regime in its death throes. Then, as now, the position of Turkey—a country balanced between two continents—provoked passionate debate. Stone concludes the book with a trenchant examination of the Turkish republic created in the aftermath of the First World War, where East and West, religion and secularism, and tradition and modernization are vibrant and sometimes conflicting elements of national identity.

The only work available in English that treats the Türk Empire and the history of Sino-Türk relations in the Tang era authoritatively – and provides an excellent edition and translation of the runiform texts. An essential source book.

In The Byzantine Turks, 1204–1461 Rustam Shukurov offers an account of the Turkic minority in Late Byzantium including the Nicaean, Palaiologan, and Grand Komnenian empires. The demography of the Byzantine Turks and the legal and cultural aspects of their entrance into Greek society are discussed in detail. Greek and Turkish bilingualism of Byzantine Turks and Tourkophonia among Greeks were distinctive features of Byzantine society of the time. Basing his arguments upon linguistic, social, and cultural evidence found in a wide range of Greek, Latin, and Oriental sources, Rustam Shukurov convincingly demonstrates how Oriental influences on Byzantine life led to crucial transformations in Byzantine mentality, culture, and political life. The study is supplemented with an etymological lexicon of Oriental names and words in Byzantine Greek.

The first book-length study to examine Turko-Persian culture as an entity.