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God most High has appointed that to strike fear into men’s hearts and as a token to renew that striking of fear again and again, so that a terror may be manifest in the hearts of men because of the desolation of the tomb and of the dark earth.
Discourse of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, a thirteenth-century poet of Khurasan.
In 1097, as the armed pilgrims of the Crusade first breached its borders, the Turkish Saljuq Empire stretched from Anatolia in the west to the River Jaxartes in the east, in what is today Kyrgyzstan. It was also capable of bringing armies of immense size into the field. According to Ibn al-Qalanasi 400,000 Saljuq troopers took to the field to meet the Byzantine emperor in battle at Manzikert in 1071, and it took an entire month to transport the sultan’s army across the Oxus in 1072. Even in 1141, while the state was waning as a great power, Sultan Sanjar fielded an army of 100,000 cavalrymen against the Khitai in Central Asia.
As we will see later, the First Crusade never had to face even a fraction of the full power of the Saljuq Empire, and the story of the destruction of the dynasty lies entirely in the East. Sultan Sanjar was totally defeated by the Khitai on the Qatwan Steppe near Samarqand. He bravely rode into the Khitai lines at the head of his personal bodyguard of 300 men and emerged with only 15 remaining; a similar rate of attrition was applied to the rest of his army by the Khitai archers. It was to be only the first taste of the disasters that would come to Islam from Central Asia and which would eventually reach as far as the Levant.
Even after the Crusaders had descended into Syria and Palestine there was no effective response from the Saljuq sultans, and whilst this can, to a large extent, be explained by the fratricidal chaos that had descended upon the empire from 1092 until 1111, it must also be noted that Persia, Khurasan and the lands that reached towards China were always considered to be far more valuable to the Saljuqs than those that lay to the west of Baghdad. Furthermore, the threat from the East was always larger than anything the West could muster. The long-suffering Sultan Sanjar went to war with the Ghuzz Turks in 1153 for these lands. His great cities of Marv and Nishapur were sacked and worse still, he was captured. The Ghuzz held him for three years in a cage, although oddly enough they still recognised him as their sultan and placed him on a throne during the day, and then returned him to his coop at night. He did eventually manage to escape his royal captivity, but died soon after, broken by his experiences.
