ABSTRACT
During the centuries following the Battle of Manzigert, Asia Minor, heartland of Turkey, gradually became Turkified. Soon after this battle, a group of Seljuk Turks captured Jerusalem, leading to the Crusades. Constantinople was conquered by the successors to Seljuk Turks, the Ottomans, on 29 May 1453. Following the Greek War of Independence, the Greeks, heirs to Byzantium, remained “perennial mourners”, unable to resolve the loss of Constantinople. As generations passed, the fall of Constantinople evolved as their major chosen trauma, and this influenced the evolution of the Megali Idea, which crystallised in the nineteenth century. In order to create the Megali Idea and make it one of the emotionally charged societal motivations for Greek foreign policy, modern Greeks revived the fall of Constantinople. As Europeans began discovering new regions of the world and aggressively colonising them, preoccupation with Turks as conquerors of Jerusalem and Constantinople became globalised.
