Anyone with a little background in European history knows that the Sultanate of Granada was a Muslim regime in Spain in the Middle Ages, and its rulers were Arab-Berbers. It is said that Yin and Yang are separated.

However, this did not prevent Hugo from referring to the Sultan of Granada as a "Turk" in his poem "Oriental Collection".

Please enjoy the poem "Sultan Ahmed" written by Victor Hugo, a great French writer in the 19th century——

Juana the girl from Granada

was always joking and singing and

Sultan Ahmed said to her one day:

- I would give my kingdom forever

- for Medina

- and Medina for your love

- you gotta be a Christian High King

- because in the arms of a frivolous Turk

- pleasure is not lawful

- I am afraid of committing a sin

- that is a great sin!

We don't know if Hugo really didn't understand or did it on purpose. But no matter what the reason is, this poem shows the fact that Turkic is an otherized name.

In other words, the title of Turkic was put on by others, not self-proclaimed.

The beginning of the matter has to be traced back to the Middle Ages, starting with the rise and demise of the Turkic Khanate.

Like the Khanates of all dynasties on the grassland, the Turkic Khanate is called Turkic only because the tribes in the ruling position of the regime are Turkic people, and the majority of people ruled by the Turkic people are not Turkic people, nor do they think they are Turkic people.

Therefore, after the disintegration of the successive Khanates on the grassland, the "former identity" as a political identity will disappear. After the Xiongnu, there was no more Xiongnu, and after Xianbei, there was no more Xianbei. After the Turks replaced Rouran, Rouran was also annihilated in the long river of history.

The Turks seemed to have no reason to escape this inertia, and things did develop in this way.

After the Turkic Khanate perished under the attack of the Tang Dynasty and the Uyghurs, the people on the Mongolian Plateau abandoned the Turks with peace of mind just like abandoning the Huns, Xianbei, and Rouran, and accepted the new name of the Uyghur Khanate and its successors.

The Central Plains, which emerged from the troubled times of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, also left the Turks behind. The Chinese are familiar with the rules of the game in East Asia. Among the population of the Central Plains, the new overlords from the north are named Khitan, Jurchen, and Mongolia, and no one uses the ancient term Turkic anymore.

But the Turkic exception is that it is composed of two parts. After the demise of the Eastern Turkic Khanate, the "Turkic" identity ceased to exist in the Mongolian plateau. But after the demise of the Western Turkic Khanate that ruled Central Asia, the title of Turkic was preserved in a special form.

This form is called "other".

In terms of "composition", the "Turk content" of the Western Turkic Khanate is extremely low, and most of its subjects come from Central Asian nomadic tribes that belonged to the Turks, which is more mixed than the Eastern Turkic Khanate. However, this does not prevent the settled peoples around the West Turks from calling them "Turks".

More importantly, after the demise of Western Turks, its former neighbors, and rivals—Iranians, Indians, Slavs, Greeks, Arabs—still insisted on referring to the Central Asian nomads as “Turks. ” One point is completely different from East Asia, and it persists for thousands of years.

After the Western Turks left, the Eastern Romans continued to refer to the Pechenegs, Seljuks, and Ottomans as Turks. The opponents in front of the empire changed one after another, but the name Turkic was retained, and eventually passed from the Eastern Romans to the Slavs and Western Europeans.

Iranians and Arabs are also accustomed to calling Turkic people. As their Islamic brothers, the people of Central Asia also accept the name Turkic people, and even take pride in this identity, such as "Turkic Dictionary" Kashgari, the author of the book, praised the glory of the Turks in the book.

However, throughout the Middle Ages, Turkic was not a famous name. Needless to say, the opponents of the "Turks", the Slavs and the Crusaders, but even the Iranians and Arabs, who are the "Turks"'s religious compatriots, look down on them.

In the cultural traditions of the Islamic world, "Turk" is synonymous with slaves, barbarians, illiterates, nomads, and warlords. It was not until the 15th century that literature written in the Chagatai Turkic language emerged, but its status was still far below that of Persian and Arabic.

The Ottomans, who are called "Turks" by modern people and European contemporaries, also looked down on Turks, and in the eyes of the Ottoman elite, the word Turks seemed like an insult. It was the traditional policy of the empire to exile Turkmen nomads from the east to Cyprus and other places. To the noble "Ottomans" the "Turks" seemed to be some kind of creature from the lower world.

In the western half of Eurasia, although the name Turkic has been preserved, it has no exact meaning and is just a tool used by those in power to scorn the "other". Europeans used it to refer to Muslims, and settlers used it to refer to nomads.

This tool is as simple as the "Franks (Francois)" that Asians called at that time. As long as they are Christians in Western Europe, they can be called Franks, regardless of whether they come from the Latin word or the Germanic world, and believe in Catholicism or Protestantism.

As a label, "Turk" is a concept whose boundaries have never been clear, from the Middle Ages to modern times.

But this crude tool eventually became a spark, and the meaning of "Turkic" was reinvented in the 19th century when colonialism was rampant and nationalism were rampant.

The intellectuals from the Russian colonies were the first to find this grip. They need a common identity to unite the scattered colonial people in Imperial Russia, and the only identity label that can cover most of them is Turkic.

Crimeans, Kazanians, Nogais, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Turkmens, Kyrgyzs, Yakuts... Their biggest and almost only commonality is that they are all called Turks.

The intellectuals in the colonies took active steps, spared no efforts in inventing various myths, and promoted the national cause of the "Turks". They established schools, called for reform, and wrote books, just as fanatical as all the savers of their time.

At the same time, the European archaeological enterprise and the knowledge structure of Orientalism became the second fulcrum for reinventing the meaning of "Turkic". Western European scholars, represented by German and Austro-Hungarian archaeologists, combined the prevailing romanticism and orientalism prejudices of that era, named the collection of many languages in Inland Asia as the "Turkic language family", and even a larger "Altaic language family" (note that the Altai Mountains are the birthplace of the ancient Turks).

From the perspective of art history, Romanticism is a reaction against rationalism and a return to the "New Middle Ages". The term "Turk" in the Middle Ages has completely changed its appearance so far.

Under the dual effects of the "othering" of the colonizers and the "self-othering" of the colonized, the conceptual extension of the term "Turkic" expanded rapidly. "Turkic" intellectuals from Ottoman and Imperial Russia began to discuss and even concluded that the Huns were a "Turkic-speaking people" and therefore the ancestors of the Turkic people. Such a thing would be inconceivable in the Middle Ages, or in East Asian traditions.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the reformers of the Ottoman Empire created the "Young Turk Party", and the concept of the Ottoman elite's exclusion and contempt for the Turks is quickly becoming history. In 1923, the Republic of Turkey was established. In 1933, at the meeting commemorating the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Republic, Kemal uttered the famous saying that was widely circulated in Turkey: "How happy it is to say that I am a Turkic." (Ne Mutlu Türküm diyene)

By the end of the first half of the 20th century, the transformation and generalization of the concept of "Turk" had become an irreversible fact. Since the 19th century, this new concept has been accompanied by extremely exaggerated national myths and complicated identities.

It may be as absurd for the Turks to call themselves descendants of the Turks, as for the Scots to call themselves descendants of the "Franks." It’s just that in our time and space, it is the Middle East and Central Asia, not Western Europe, that is colonized, marginalized, and otherized. So the former has become a reality, while the latter is just a strange imagination of ours.

The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, told such a story through the mouths of the characters in his masterpiece "My Name Is Red":

Once upon a time, there were two Franks walking on a Frankish grassland...

Isn't the beginning of this story a satire on Orientalism? In some parallel world, will there be a poet who calls the Polish king a despicable Frank, and will someone ask why the residents of the British Isles mistakenly recognize the Franks and Greeks as their ancestors?

Power and knowledge create each other, and the results may be absurd, but they are not ridiculous.