After having signed a treaty of peace and friendship with the Kingdom of Prussia in 1790, the Ottoman Empire intensified its military ties with Germany, especially during the reign of Abdülhamid II. The relationship between Germany and the Ottoman Empire was not restricted to being allies in World War I, the two countries also cooperated on several large scale investment projects, such as the construction of the Baghdad Railway.

German–Turkish relations have their beginnings in the times of the Ottoman Empire and have culminated in the development of strong bonds with many facets that include economic, military, cultural and social relations. With the possible accession of Turkey to the European Union, of which Germany is the biggest member, and the existence of a huge Turkish diaspora in Germany, these relations have become more and more intertwined over the decades.
World War II

A long history of mutual enmity is exacerbating tension between Turkey and Russia. Leaders in both countries are apt to view their current hostilities through the prism of a bitterly contested imperial past.
“There is a good old, nasty feeling between those countries,” observed Turkish historian Ayhan Aktar of Istanbul’s Bilgi University. “There have been over the centuries several military encounters, [and] Turkey lost all of them. And then there was the Cold War against [the] Soviet Union, but for Turks it was always the Russians.”

Over the past 500 years, Russians and Turks have fought 12 wars, the first in 1568 over the Astrakhan khanate, located where the Volga River flows into the Caspian Sea. The last was during World War I, a conflict that hastened the collapse of both empires.

Until a few days ago there were no hopes that Turkey and Russia would see eye to eye for years as many critics wrote obituary to Russo-Turkish relations thanks to which the NATO got a shot in its terror arms. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered the shooting of Russian plane angering the Kremlin.
Russian President Vladimir Putin issued sanctions against Turkey following the downing of a Russian Su-24 bomber by the Turkish air force on Nov. 24. The document, signed on Nov. 28, envisages restrictions on the import of certain types of products from Turkey. Russia suspended the visa-free travel regime for Turkish citizens, Russian employers will not be allowed to hire Turkish nationals, and charter flights will be banned.

A long history of tension underlies Turkey's downing of Russian jet
The downing of an SU-24 jet by Turkey will go down as the first time since the start of the Cold War that a Nato member has shot down a Russian military aircraft. Yet it is but the latest twist in centuries of tangled, and frequently tense, relations between two countries which geography, history and religion have made rivals.

That rivalry took concrete shape from the 16th century with the emergence of two great empires. Moscow saw itself as the third Rome, bulwark of Eastern Christianity after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks. The Ottomans in turn were expanding their own empire into the Middle East and the Balkans, populated by Orthodox Slavs of whom Orthodox Russia was a protector.

Relations between Turkey and Russia have been fraught ever since the Turkish air force downed a Russian bomber that briefly violated its air space in November. But the tensions between the two countries had been escalating for months before that, first over Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and then over Syria. As a result, in the span of two years, the two countries have largely undone the entente they had built over the past 15.

Built on economic cooperation, shared discomfort with a Western-dominated international order, and the personal chemistry of their semi-autocratic leaders, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Russo-Turkish entente was, in many ways, a historical anomaly. The drivers of the latest confrontation are far deeper than the loss of a single warplane, and likely herald a return to the geopolitical rivalry that has been the norm for Russo-Turkish relations throughout history.

In locking horns over Syria, Russia and Turkey are playing out the latest chapter in a rivalry that has spanned centuries.
Since the 1600s the two have lurched between conflict and uneasy friendship. But the war of words that has erupted since Turkey shot down a Russian jet it claims entered its airspace this month has notched tensions up to levels not seen for some time.
Russia and Turkey emerged as independent powers almost simultaneously – in 1380 and 1389. There followed a spectacular rise for the Ottoman empire, which expanded rapidly and had become a superpower by the 16th century.
Russia was relatively under resourced and surrounded by more powerful neighbours. Only in the late 16th century did it emerge as a major European power.
A direct rivalry with the Ottoman empire began in the 17th century when Russia joined the Holy League alliance with Poland and the Habsburg Empire, taking some territory from the Ottomans – although importantly not Crimea.
Changing roles

History
Early cooperation with Turkish revolutionaries[edit]
The Ottoman government was party to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed between the Bolshevik government of Russia and the Central Powers on March 3, 1918; the treaty became obsolete later the same year. Russian Bolsheviks and the Soviet government headed by Vladimir Lenin, who emerged victorious from the Russian Civil War by 1921, viewed the Turkish revolutionary (national) movement under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal as congenial to their ideological and geopolitical aspirations. The Lenin government abdicated the traditional claims of the Russian Empire to the territories of Western Armenia and the Turkish Straits.
The Soviet supply of gold and armaments to the Kemalists in 1920–1922 was a key factor in the latter's successful grab of power in an Ottoman Empire defeated by the Triple Entente and their victory in the Armenian campaign and the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922).[1]

The Russo-Turkish wars (or Ottoman-Russian Wars) were a series of wars fought between the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 20th centuries. It was one of the longest series of military conflicts in European history.[1]
List of conflicts
Name Result
1 Russo-Turkish War (1568–70)
Russian military victory[2]
Ottoman commercial victory[3]

2 Russo-Turkish War (1676–81)
Indecisive[4]
Treaty of Bakhchisarai[5]

3 Russo-Turkish War (1686–1700)
Russia gains possession of Azov
fortress of Taganrog,
Pavlovsk and Mius[6]

4 Russo-Turkish War (1710–11)
Ottoman victory[7]

5 Austro-Russian–Turkish War (1735–39)

Russia–Turkey relations (Russian: Российско–турецкие отношения, Turkish: Rusya–Türkiye ilişkileri) is the bilateral relationshipbetween the Russian Federation and the Republic of Turkey and their predecessor states.

The disappearance of the Ottoman Empire had been foretold since the end of the eighteenth century. But, since it was not finally abolished by Mustafa Kemal until 1924, in fact it survived its traditional enemies, the Russian and Habsburg Empires, and its disastrous ally, the German Empire, by six or seven years. Moreover, during the First World War, at Gallipoli and Kut, the Ottoman Empire was able to inflict some impressive defeats on its former ally, after 1914 its most ambitious and dangerous enemy, the British Empire.

Today, many people tend to think of 'Europe' as more or less synonymous with the EU, plus a few non-EU countries such as Switzerland and Norway. But there is an argumentOpens in a new tab or window. that this wasn't always how people understood 'Europe'. In the Age of EmpireOpens in a new tab or window., the argument goes, none of the other ‘great’ European powers -- e.g., the British, French, Russian or Austro-Hungarian empires -- would have taken issue with counting the Ottoman EmpireOpens in a new tab or window. as one among them, both in positive and negative terms; regarding alliances and rivalries.
The Ottoman Empire’s entry into the First World War, as a result of a complex web of secret alliances between the European powers, can be characterised as part of the European origins of the war. But, just like the involvement of all other European empires, it meant that parts of the world well beyond Europe were drawn into the conflict.

The Ottoman entry into World War I began on 29 October 1914 when it attacked Russia's Black Sea Coast in a surprise naval action. Following the attack, Russia and its allies, Britain and France, declared war on the Ottomans in November 1914. The Ottoman commencement of military action came after three months of formal neutrality, although it had signed a secret alliance with the Central Powers in August 1914.

The political reasons for the Ottoman Sultan's entry into the war are disputed.[1] The Ottoman Empire was an agricultural state in an age of industrialized warfare.[2] The economic resources of the empire were depleted by the cost of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913.

The Anglo-Turkish War was a conflict took place during the Napoleonic Wars between 1807 and 1809.
In the summer of 1806, during the War of the Third Coalition (of Britain, Russia, Prussia, Sweden), Napoleon's ambassador General Count Sebastiani managed to convince the Porte to cancel all special privileges granted to Russia in 1805 and to open the Turkish straits (Dardanelles) exclusively to French warships. In return, Napoleon promised to help the Sultan suppress a rebellion in Serbia and to recover lost Ottoman territories. When the Russian army marched into Moldavia and Wallachia in 1806, the Ottomans declared war on Russia.

Our readings of history has tended to a Eurocentric direction that has failed to give attention to the rich heritage of engagement with non-western European lands, many of them more powerful than Europe, that has existed for centuries. This is particularly true with western European colonialism so fresh in our minds. It was only in 1947, less than 70 years ago, that Britain finally left India, the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the British Empire. However, in the early modern period, between the late fifteenth century to the late eighteenth century, when western Europe was just beginning to increase travel around the world and long before a meaningful western European colonialism had come into being, the case was quite the reverse.