99

The Eldigüzids or Ildegizids

c. 540–622/c. 1145–1225

Azerbaijan, Arrān and northern Jibāl

The Elgigüzids or Ildegizids were a Turkish Atabeg dynasty who controlled most of Azerbaijan (apart from the region round Marāgha held by another Atabeg line, the Aḥmadīlīs: see above, no. 98), Arrān and northern Jibāl during the second half of the twelfth century when the Great Seljuq sultanate of western Persia and Iraq was in full decay and unable to prevent the growth of virtually independent powers in the provinces.

Eldigüz (the Arabic-Persian sources write ’y.l.d.k.z, but Armenian and Georgian transcriptions of the name seem to indicate a rendering like this) was originally a Qïpchaq military slave of the Seljuq vizier Simirumī, and then passed to Sultan Mas‘ūd b. Muḥammad, who made him governor of Arrān. An adroit marriage to the widow of the Seljuq Sultan Ṭoghrïl II b. Muḥammad enabled him to champion the accession to the throne in 556/1161 of her son Arslan (Shāh), of whom he had been de facto Atabeg, and during Arslan’s reign the Eldigüzids were the power behind the throne and effectively controlled the Great Seljuq sultanate. Their territories now stretched as far south as Iṣfahān, in the west to Akhlāṭ and in the north to the borders of Sharwān and Georgia. Sultan Ṭoghrïl III b. Arslan was for many years held in close tutelage by the Eldigüzids, who at one point claimed the sultanate for themselves, until in 587/1191 he turned the tables on Qutlugh Inanch and was able to pursue an independent policy for the last three years of his life.

In their last phase, the Eldigüzids were once more local rulers in Azerbaijan and eastern Transcaucasia, hard pressed by the aggressive Georgians, and they did not survive the troubled early decades of the thirteenth century. They continued for a while to rule in Azerbaijan, and managed to overthrow their rivals the Aḥmadīlīs, but could not withstand the superior élan of the Khwārazm Shāhs, and in 622/1225 Jalāl al-Dīn Mengübirti finally deposed Özbeg b. Jahān Pahlawān Muḥammad. The historical significance of these Atabegs thus lies in their firm control over most of north-western Persia during the later Seljuq period and also in their role in Transcaucasia as champions of Islam against the resurgent Bagratid Georgian kings.

Justi, 461; Lane-Poole, 171; Zambaur, 231; Album, 41–2.

EI² ‘Ildeñizids or Eldigüzids’ (C. E. Bosworth); EIr ‘Atābakān-e Ādarbayjān’ (K. A. Luther).

Bosworth, in The Cambridge History of Iran, V, 169–71, 176–83.

D. K. Kouymjian, A Numismatic History of Southeastern Caucasia and Adharbayjān, 56–60, 288–368, with a genealogical table at p. 368.