The Kingdoms of Anatolia (Asia Minor)

Not one dynasty but a peninsula. Anatolia (modern Turkey) is history's great crossroads, the land bridge between Europe and Asia, and it has been a kingdom-factory for more than three millennia. This entry walks the succession of powers that held the bridge rather than a single bloodline.

Every age had its Anatolian power. The Hittites rivaled Egypt and Babylon in the Bronze Age; Lydia under Croesus was a byword for wealth; Byzantine Anatolia was the recruiting and tax heartland of the medieval Roman Empire; and the peninsula finally became the launch-base of the Ottoman world empire.

Territory in the record

The Anatolian peninsula and its coasts and highlands, the contested hinge between the Aegean/Balkans to the west and Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, and Iran to the east.

Each holder was in turn displaced by the next wave from a different direction, until the Turks arrived after Manzikert (1071) and never left. The Seljuk Sultanate of Rum Turkified the interior; out of its wreckage the Ottomans rose to hold the bridge for six centuries, succeeded by the Republic of Turkey.

The lesson of the crossroads itself: whoever holds Anatolia holds the passage between two continents, the chokepoint of the Straits, and one of the richest recruiting grounds in the world. It made the fortune of every power that took it and doomed every empire (Byzantium above all) that lost it.