As was the case of many empires, many problems arose due to the conflicts between nomadic rulers and a sedentary population. By this time, the Caliph had ceased to exercise any political role while the Seljuk sultans held the reigns of power. The Sunni Caliph in Baghdad was their puppet. The Fatimids were Ismaili Shia and ruled over Jerusalem and Mecca at that time while the Turks upheld Sunni Islam. The main strategic threat to the Turks was the Fatimid Caliphate based in Egypt. It should be noted that the Turks were a minority, ruling a Persian, Arab, and Kurdish majority. By the 1060s, the Seljuk Empire bordered Byzantine Asia Minor. In 1037, the Seljuk Empire, a Turkic state, was founded northeast of Iran in Central Asia and quickly overran much of Persia, Iraq, and the Levant. Many of the Turks were mercenaries in the employ of local Arab and Persian rulers to the east of the Byzantine Empire and Armenia, the dominant states in Asia Minor. In the 11th century, Turks began appearing at the edges of Asia Minor (Anatolia), which was then controlled by the Greeks. But how did they get all the way to Turkey, which has the largest concentration of Turkic peoples today? They gradually displaced or assimilated both the settled and nomadic Iranian-speaking people. In the second half of the first millennium CE, Turkic peoples were gradually streaming into most of Central Asia from their original homeland in the Altai mountains of western Mongolia. After the conquests of Alexander the Great, Asia Minor was mostly Hellenized and remained solidly Greek until the 11th century, with Armenians forming the majority in the eastern parts of the region, as they had since antiquity. Most of these people spoke Indo-European languages and included the Hittites, Phrygians, and Luwians (Troy was probably a Luwian city). Lovers of antiquity and the classical world know very well that Asia MinorвЂ“modern TurkeyвЂ“was formerly inhabited by a variety of non-Turkic peoples.

Age of empires 2 turks