‘Asia Minor’ in this book refers to what today is roughly the western half of Turkey-in-Asia, or ‘Anatolia’ (Fig. 1.1). Asia Minor consists of a peninsula surrounded by the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara to the north, the Aegean to the west, and the Mediterranean to the south, and does not include what is presently the easternmost mountainous part of Turkey.

The term ‘Asia Minor’ developed as a variant of the word ‘Asia’. Over the course of millennia, Asia has expanded from a designation for a region in Aegean Turkey to the designation of a significant part of the globe. The word Asia is first documented in Hittite texts, which mention a coalition of small states called ‘Assuwa’ in western Turkey. Subsequently, a Roman province with the name Asia existed in the same region. Later, Asia was used to refer to all of the Near East, and subsequently expanded to include the entire Asian continent as presently defined. The term Asia Minor came into use to identify the western half of Asiatic Turkey more specifically from about 400 AD, and was mainly used by the Byzantines to describe the part of Asia under their control.