Let’s read a section from Decisive Victories: Gallipoli, Sakarya, Dumlupınar to find out.

EXTRACT:
1. History, Disasters, and Decisive Victories

In 1402, following the crushing of the Ottomans, the same euphoria that resulted from the Greek victories in 1920-1921, also overwhelmed the West. Returning from the site of battle, which they had watched as the guests of Timur, the Christian ambassadors brought to Europe the great news that the power of the Ottomans had just been ended, and that Timur had avenged all previous defeats suffered by Christendom.^[1] It was jubilation of the first order; not just that the power of the Ottomans had been crushed, but also that the long, patient work of plotting the Turkish downfall had been fulfilled.^[2] Needless to go into this too long, but from the 13^th century, Western Christendom had been building links with the eastern Mongols in order to defeat Islam, and the Turks in particular.^[3] Mongol power had been crushed in the 13^th century by the Mamluks of Egypt, and as a result the early Byzantine-Mongol alliances against the Ottomans dating from early in the 14^thcentury did not succeed.^[4] With great perseverance, though, the Papacy continued the work of gaining the alliance of the Mongol East until Timur came forth. Although Muslim in appearance, he loathed Muslims in general, the Ottoman Turks in particular, and felt great affinities and sentiments for the Christian West.^[5] His devastation of the Muslim world (Muslim India-Southern Russia Khanate-Syria-Iraq) and the Ottoman realm, amply justify his record as possibly the greatest ever mass slayer of Muslims and destroyer of the Muslim world.^[6] The Christians of the East of Europe, Wylie points out, were swift to recognise a welcome ally ‘in the infidel Timur,’ and the Greeks in Constantinople and the Genoese in Pera had already offered to work with him against their common enemy, the Ottomans.^[7] The Western Christians were keen to court ‘the friendship of the blood-stained and savage conqueror.’^[8] The role of mediator or ambassador between the West and Timur was played by an Englishman, John Greenlaw, a Dominican friar, who had for some time made himself prominent in the East by his zeal in stirring the Christian sections of the population against the Turks.^[9] The strong alliance with Timur bore its fruit with his defeat of Bayazid at Angora in 1402. It also brought the even greater news that just as he did in Muslim India, Iraq, Syria, and other parts of the Muslim world, he had left little, if anything, standing in the Ottoman realm.^[10] In the brief interval between his victory at Angora and his death in 1405, Timur utterly devastated the Ottoman dominions in Asia Minor, slaying Turks en masse, and carrying away into slavery countless numbers of women and children.^[11] Timur thus earned himself the adulation of Christendom, Henry IV of England writing to him expressing the hope that he would be converted and become ‘the champion of Christianity.’^[12] What increased the Western-Byzantine euphoria even more was the news that the surviving sons of Bayazid were at war with each other over whatever remained of Ottoman territories.^[13]

Remarkably, one of the sons, Mehmet I, in anticipation of what Mustafa Kemal would do centuries later, dragged himself from the devastated field of Angora, with barely anything, and retired to Amasya.^[14] There he began to set the foundations of power for the eventual rebuilding of the Ottoman state, which gradually, in a phase which lasted over a decade, and despite all the enemies, wars, rebellions, and catastrophes, he was proclaimed sultan of a new, and powerful again Ottoman realm — Ottoman Turkey emerging like a phoenix out of the ashes.^[15] The scale of the accomplishment can only be measured by the fact that most places elsewhere in Asia never recovered from Timur’s passage to this day. 

Five hundred years later, in June 1919, Mustafa Kemal would, by an exceptional concourse of history, find himself in Amasya, whose inhabitants had sent him a deputation declaring their loyalty.^[16] ‘This was a place well fitted to become the cradle of a Nationalist Revolution.’^[17] In Amasya, Mustafa Kemal, together with the early leaders of the War of Independence, Ali Fuat (Cebesoy), Rauf Orbay, Kâzim Karabekir, found themselves with the same task as Mehmet I, in more or less the same conditions, to bring back to life a realm that was all but gone. How could Turkey recover? How could it even survive? It had nothing; it had been devastated not just by the First World War but also by more than eleven years of endless wars. It had ben attacked from the south by the British and French, from the west by the Greeks; Russians and Armenians from the north and east; Bulgars, Serbs and others in Europe, the Italians elsewhere, and hostile internal forces from the interior. There were refugees from all parts in their hundreds of thousands; the economy was in ruins; the treasury inexistent; the army disbanded; the casualties and wounded in their millions; a hostile government under the clutches of the Western Allies in Istanbul; hostile Western forces everywhere in control; invaders streaming from all sides; the Greeks in İzmir, and preparing to move in. Simply, it was a mammoth task that would have defeated any mortal, however optimistic and resilient he was. Mustafa Kemal, assisted by those named and others who were to come forth, led towards some of the most decisive victories in Turkish history, the most decisive of recent times: Sakarya and Dumlupınar. These came in the wake of yet another crucial victory: at Gallipoli. As will be seen in the following chapter, had the Turks lost these, or even any one of these three battles, there would be no Turkey today.

What is even more remarkable, looking back at history, the disaster of Angora (1402), just as the disastrous situation of 1920, found the same sort of characters in leadership: both patriots, for whom the sanctity of the Turkish realm meant everything; both extremely able, both determined, fearless of death, and great leaders of men, able to obtain the best out of most. The latter is a rare quality only found amongst such towering figures of world history as Othman or Napoleon. What Mehmet I and Mustafa Kemal also had in common was the undaunted belief in Turkey and its people, and the belief that they could, against all the odds, rebuild the nation from the disastrous state it was in. Another person would have never assumed what Mustafa Kemal did under the circumstances Turkey was in. None then gave Turkey a chance of survival; all only spoke of the phasing out, dismemberment/partitioning of the country, not just as an aim, but also a certainty. 

If one pushed the analogy further, one would discover that on both occasions, in 1402 and in 1920, the two disastrous situations were sandwiched between two sets of decisive victories that somehow contributed also to the preservation of Turkey.…

(Note: The footnotes of the extract have been deleted in the blog version. Please refer to the book.)

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