For more details on this topic, see History of ethnic Turks of Turkey.
Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern Turkish RepublicThe war of liberation began in protest to the Mondros Armistice and the Treaty of Sevres, under the command of Mustafa Kemal Pasha. The war mobilised every available part of Turkish society -- this would become the foundation of the Turkish nation. This national movement against the victorious Allies of World War I revoked the terms of the treaty which sought to carve up the Ottoman Empire. By September 18th, 1922 the invading Entente armies were repelled and the country was liberated. This was followed by the abolition of the Sultans office by the Turkish Grand National Assembly on November 1, 1922, thus ending 631 years of Ottoman rule. In 1923 the Treaty of Lausanne recognised the sovereignty of a new Turkish Republic, Kemal was granted the name Atatürk (meaning father of Turks) by the National Assembly and would become the republic's first President. There are many different ways of classifying the history of Turkey. The least disputed classification is based on three global periods: the war of independence, the single-party period, and the multi-party period. Even if these periods have distinct characteristics, some issues do repeat in every period with subtle differences.

The war of independence had three distinct phases. In the first period, tens of small regional resistance organisations came to gather to build a national force. The second one was a jurisdictional conflict to decide whether the Grand National Assembly or Ottoman Empire was the true source of power. The conflict ended with the abolishment of the Empire by the Grand National Parliament. The Third one is the active fight against the Allies and the newly established Armenian Republic. The results of this war created the conditions of the peace granted through the Treaty of Lausanne.

The single-party period covers the initial reforms during the Atatürk's presidency, World War II and Milli Sef, while the multi-party period describes the three coups and social changes that occurred within the last 45 years.

In the approximately 1,000 years of the existence of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople had been besieged many times; it had been captured only once, during the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The crusaders, however, had not originally set out to conquer the Empire, and the Byzantines re-established themselves in the city in 1261. In the following two centuries, the much-weakened empire was gradually taken piece by piece by a new threat, the Ottoman Empire. In 1453 the "empire" consisted of little more than the city of Constantinople itself and a portion of the Peloponnese (centered on the fortress of Mystras); the Empire of Trebizond, a completely independent successor state formed in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade also survived on the coast of the Black Sea.

Mehmed planned to attack the Theodosian Walls, the intricate series of walls and ditches protecting Constantinople from an attack from the west, the only part of the city not surrounded by water. His army encamped outside the city on Easter Monday, April 2, 1453. For weeks Mehmed's massive cannon fired on the walls, but it was unable to sufficiently penetrate them, and due to its extremely slow rate of reloading the Byzantines were able to repair most of the damage after each shot. Meanwhile, Mehmed's fleet could not enter the Golden Horn due to the boom the Byzantines had laid across the entrance. To circumvent this he built a road of greased logs across Galata on the north side of the Golden Horn, and rolled his ships across. This succeeded in stopping the flow of supplies from Genoan ships and demoralizing the Byzantine defenders, but did not help in breaching the land walls.

The Turks then sought to break through the walls by constructing underground tunnels in an effort to sap them. Many of sappers were Serbians sent from Novo Brdo by the Serbian Despot. They were placed under the rule of Zaganos Pasha. However, the Byzantines employed an engineer named Johannes Grant (who was said to be German but was probably Scottish), who had countertunnels dug, allowing Byzantine troops to enter the tunnels and kill the Turkish workers. Other Turkish tunnels were flooded with water. Eventually, the Byzantines captured and tortured an important Turkish engineer, who revealed the location of all the Turkish tunnels, which were then destroyed.

Mehmed offered to raise the siege for an astronomical tribute that he knew the city would be unable to pay. When this was declined, Mehmed planned to overpower the walls by sheer force, knowing that the Byzantine defenders would be worn out before he ran out of troops.

Constantine XI: the last emperor.On the night of May 22 there was a lunar eclipse, which must have seemed a bad omen to the defenders of the city. On the morning of May 29 the attack began. The first wave of attackers, the bashi-bazouks, were poorly trained and equipped, and were meant only to kill as many Byzantine defenders as possible. The second assault, consisting largely of Anatolians, focused on a section of the Blachernae walls in the northwest part of the city, which had been partially damaged by the cannon. This section of the walls had been built much more recently, in the eleventh century, and was much weaker; the crusaders in 1204 had broken through the walls there. The Ottoman attackers also managed to break through, but were just as quickly pushed back out by the Byzantine defenders. The Byzantines also managed to hold off a third attack by the Sultan's elite Janissaries (ironically, most of the Janissaries had been Christian children who were captured by the Ottomans at an early age and trained as warriors), but the Genoan general in charge of the defense, Giovanni Giustiniani, was minorly wounded in the attack, and as he left the battlefield seeking a physician, the Greeks began to panic. Some historians suggest that the Kerkoporta gate in the Blachernae section had been left unlocked, and the Ottomans soon discovered this mistake (there was no question of bribery or deceit by the Ottomans; the gate had simply been overlooked, probably because rubble from a cannon attack had obscured or blocked the door). The Ottomans rushed in. Constantine XI himself led the last defense of the city, dying in the ensuing battle in the streets.