Open up a world of Turkish inspiration with a Cornucopia digital subscription

Buy or gift a stand-alone digital subscription and get unlimited access to dozens of back issues for just £18.99 / $18.99 a year.

Please register at www.exacteditions.com/digital/cornucopia with your subscriber account number or contact subscriptions@cornucopia.net

Buy a digital subscription Go to the Digital Edition

Turkish Myth & Muslim Symbol

The Battle of Manzikert

By Carole Hillenbrand
Published by Edinburgh University press

£28.99 / $36.71 / €34.78
($/€ approx)



Paperback, 304pp, published 2007
Book Description

Turks ruled the Middle East for a millennium and eastern Europe for many centuries and it is an undoubted fact that they moulded the lands under their dominion. It is therefore something of a paradox that the history of Turkey and aspects of the identity and role of the Turks, both as Muslims and as an ethnic group, still remain little known in the west and undervalued in the Arabic and Persian-speaking worlds.

This book contributes to historical scholarship on Turkey by focusing on its key foundational myth, the battle of Manzikert in 1071 – the Turkish equivalent of the battle of Hastings. Manzikert destroyed the hold of Christian Byzantium on eastern Turkey and opened the whole country to the spread of Islam, a process completed with the fall of Constantinople and Trebizond some four centuries later.

Translations and a close analysis of all the extant Muslim sources – both Arabic and Persian – which deal with the battle of Manzikert are provided in the book. It also looks at these writings as literary works and vehicles of religious ideology and analyses the ongoing confrontation between the Muslim Turks and Christian Europe and the importance of Manzikert in the formation of the modern state of Turkey since 1923.

Cornucopia Bookshop

Books

Back Issues

Music

Subscriptions

Cornucopia Digital Subscription

The Digital Edition

Cornucopia works in partnership with the digital publishing platform Exact Editions to offer individual and institutional subscribers unlimited access to a searchable archive of fascinating back issues and every newly published issue. The digital edition of Cornucopia is available cross-platform on web, iOS and Android and offers a comprehensive search function, allowing the title’s cultural content to be delved into at the touch of a button.

Digital Subscription: £18.99 / $18.99 (1 year)

Subscribe now