Anatolia
The Asian peninsula of modern Turkey
Also known as: Anatolia
The Asian peninsula of modern Turkey — Anatolia bridges Europe and the Near East and hosts a series of civilizational layers from Hittite through Byzantine to Ottoman and Republican (T&H 19).
Quigley's Framing
Anatolia is one of Quigley's standard pivot zones in The Evolution of Civilizations: a single geographic peninsula that has served as core territory for Hittite, Phrygian-Lydian, Hellenistic, Roman-Byzantine, Seljuk, and Ottoman civilizations in succession. Its function in his theory is to illustrate how the same geography can host serial civilizations as the instruments of expansion are renewed and exhausted.
Strategic Role
In the modern narrative Anatolia is the residual core of the Ottoman Empire after 1918 — the territory from which Kemal's Republican Turkey was constructed — and the southeastern anchor of the post-1949 NATO system. Quigley treats the Republican experiment as one of the more successful cases of forced modernization outside the West, and Turkish NATO membership as a strategic linchpin of the southern Cold War flank.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 19 Quigley
Anatolia, the Asian peninsula of modern Turkey, has served as core territory for successive civilizations from Hittite through Ottoman.