Representation of the Middle ages in history coursebooks in Turkey: Focus on the Mediterranean

The primary purpose of this thesis is to analyze the written and visual representations of the Middle Ages in History textbooks in Turkey and to explain the relationship between the concept of Mediterraneanness and the historical consciousness intended to be imparted to students through textbooks by highlighting the parts related to the Mediterranean basin. The document analysis technique, a part of the contemporary qualitative research methods, was used in the study. By examining the visual and linguistic elements in the textbooks, the qualities with which the Middle Ages were presented in the selected History textbooks used throughout the history of the Republic of Turkey are conveyed to the reader with the political, military, commercial, social, and cultural contexts of the Middle Ages. A total of 10 textbooks published between 1941 and 2024 were examined in the study, which are books published in 1941, 1976, 1987, 1990 (2 pieces), 1994, 1995, 2009, 2017, and 2024. As a result of the evaluations made with the checklist, the differences between the textbooks' content and the content's presentation were examined. The findings obtained revealed the effects of ideological judgments on the content of history textbooks from the past to the present, the most important of which are ignoring the significant technological and scientific developments experienced in the period and the acceptance of the Middle Ages as a dark period and the ethnocentric approaches to the medieval tribes. The most important outcome of this study, in which the textbooks are evaluated on a historical level, is that the content is rearranged in the light of developing technologies while integrating the textbooks into the learning processes, without forgetting that Mediterranean geography was an important area of the Middle Ages.