The History of the Middle East

The Middle East opens this millennium as a center of world learning, its scholars in Baghdad and Cairo keeping science and philosophy alive and moving. This timeline follows the Seljuk arrival, two centuries of Crusader states carved out and reclaimed, and the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 that ended the Abbasid age. From the ruins rise the Ottomans, who take Constantinople in 1453 and rule from the Danube to the Red Sea for four hundred years. Their long retreat ends in the First World War, when new borders are drawn by outside powers, and the discovery of oil turns the region into the strategic center of the modern world. The events below run era by era, each linked to its full page.