Sons of the Conquerors

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Wall Street Journal correspondent Hugh Pope provides a vivid picture of the descendants of the nomad armies who once conquered China and the Byzantine Empire. He shows the myriad connections that live on between Turks in the Xinjiang province of western China (one of that country's few remaining bastions of rebellion), through Central Asia, Iran, Iraq, the Netherlands, Germany (where Turkish can be heard on every other street corner of Berlin), and all the way to the Appalachian Mountains of the United States. Along the way he reassesses a history in which Islamic lands were ruled by Turkic dynasties - before their ascendancy was broken by the rising power of Europe, Russia, and China - among them the Moguls, who conquered India, the Safavids, who laid the foundations of modern Iran, and the Ottomans, whose five-century-long empire encompassed Turkey, the Balkans, and the Middle East.