Pivot Cities in the Rise and Fall of Civilizations by Ahmet Davutoğlu

Author:Ahmet Davutoğlu [Davutoğlu, Ahmet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781000458787
Google: AdZAEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 57932741
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

became a dominant area of settlement and a center of gravity. Abraham Marcus states that very few cities in the region were able to reach the scale of Aleppo and that those that could were far away by the standards of the time.

For example, we can grasp the economic centrality attained by the city over a wide area when we consider that the caravan journey to Damascus took more than a week, Baghdad and Izmir were a month away, the larger cities of Cairo and Istanbul even farther.9 The fact that, in a sense, Aleppo opened onto Europe to the west through Iskenderun and to the depths of Asia and India via roads extending to Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra, gave the city a central location on a transmission line of intensive intercontinental commercial and trading activity. A highly dynamic, Aleppo-centered commercial relationship developed between these cities, where goods from Arabia, Iran, and India were collected on their way to Europe via Anatolia. The city was linked to Palestine, Egypt, and Arabia via the road that extended southwards through Damascus.10

With its commercial network heavily reliant on Anatolian markets, Aleppo’s location made it not just a commercial and economic, but also a cultural, center of attraction for the surrounding area. Turkish was widely spoken in the city, the result of migration from rural areas, especially from Turkish-speaking territories. This was not the case in other Arab vilayets, for example Damascus to the south.11

There is a direct correlation between the cultural and economic vitality along this line and the political order. When a political order conjoining these cities was formed, they rose; when this line was divided between the jurisdictions of different political orders, or at times of chaos, city life lost its vitality. The entirety of the line enjoyed periods of revival in the Alexandrian, Umayyad, Abbasid, Seljuk, Ayyubid, and Ottoman periods that unified the region; on a city-by-city basis, Harran rose to prominence after Alexander the Great, Damascus in the Umayyad era, Mardin under the Artuqids,12 Diyarbakır and Aleppo in the Ottoman period.

Looked at from another viewpoint, this basin of tribal blending was a historical testing ground in terms of the inclusive and internalizing capacities of the states and political structures that were to establish political order on the Mesopotamia–Anatolia–Levant axis, and where they transformed into a mature order. The final successful example of this process of testing occurred in the Ottoman period, when the multicultural Ottoman political order achieved an uninterrupted, border-free integrative conjoining of these cities in a common basin that lasted more than four centuries.

Conversely, the cities on this line suffered major destruction at the hands of the Mongols, who shook the very foundations of political order in the region; in the periods of Sassanid–Byzantine and Ottoman–Safavid tension when the line fragmented politically, the weakening of cities’ internal connections prevented them from maintaining their economic vitality. The final example of this phenomenon is the process by which this ancient geoeconomic and geocultural belt of cities as a whole,

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