ELEVEN

The Seljuqs, their Dependants and the Atabegs

91

The Seljuqs

431–590/1040–1194

Persia, Iraq and Syria

1. The Great Seljuqs in Persia and Iraq 431–590/1040–1194

2. The Seljuqs of Syria 471–511/1078–1117

3. The Seljuqs of Kirman 440–c. 584/1048–c. 1188

The Seljuqs were originally a family of chiefs of the Qïnïq clan of the Oghuz or Ghuzz Turkish people, whose home was in the steppes north of the Caspian and Arab Seas. Becoming Muslims towards the end of the tenth century, they entered the Islamic world in Khwārazm and Transoxania in the same fashion as so many barbarian peoples all over the Old World, namely as auxiliary troops in the service of warring powers, in this case, as participants in the struggles of the last Sāmānids, the Qarakhānids and the Ghaznawids. Deflected into Khurasan, the Seljuqs, their bands of nomadic followers and their herds, gradually took over that province from the Ghaznawids, seizing the capital Nishapur temporarily in 429/1038, where their leader Ṭoghrïl Beg proclaimed himself sultan. Leaving his brother Chaghrï Beg as ruler of Khurasan, Ṭoghrïl began deliberately to associate his authority with the cause of Sunnī orthodoxy and the freeing of the ‘Abbāsid caliphs from the Shī‘ī Būyids’ tutelage, a policy which enabled him to enlist orthodox sympathy as the Seljuqs advanced through Persia and swept aside the local Daylamī and Kurdish princes. In 447/1055, Ṭoghrïl entered Baghdad and had his title of sultan confirmed by the caliph; a few years later, the line of Būyids was finally extinguished in Fars (see above, no. 75).

The sultanate of the Great Seljuqs now evolved towards a hierarchically-organised state on the Perso-Islamic monarchic pattern, with the supreme sultan supported by a Persian and Arab bureaucracy and a multi-national army directed by Turkish slave commanders, this nucleus of professional soldiers being supplemented by the tribal contingents of the Türkmen begs or chiefs; but the continued importance within the sultanate of the Turkish elements was to mean that the Seljuq sultanate never developed into such a despotic, monolithic state as that of the Ghaznawids, much more completely cut off from the rulers’ original steppe background. During the reign of Alp Arslan and his son Malik Shāh, who both depended to a great extent on their supremely able Persian minister, Niẓām al-Mulk, the empire of the great Seljuqs reached its apogee. In the east, Khwārazm and what is now western Afghanistan had been wrested from the Ghaznawids, and towards the end of his reign Malik Shāh invaded Transoxania and humbled the Qarakhānids, receiving at Uzgend the homage of the Khān of the eastern branch in Kāshghar and Khotan. In the west, the offensive was taken against the Christian Armenian princes and Georgian kings in Transcaucasia. Fāṭimid influence was excluded from Syria and Jazīra, while minor, Shī‘ī-tinged dynasties like the ‘Uqaylids of northern Iraq and Jazīra (see above, no. 38) were overthrown and reliable Turkish governors installed in Syria. Alp Arslan’s victory over the Byzantine emperor Romanus Diogenes at Mantzikert (Malāzgird) in 463/1071 further opened up Anatolia to Turkmen incursions, and these intensified raids laid the foundations for various Turkish principalities in Asia Minor, including that of a branch of the Seljuqs in Konya (Qūnya) (see further below, Chapter Twelve). Malik Shāh’s brother Tutush and the latter’s sons and grandsons founded a short-lived, minor Seljuq line in Aleppo and Damascus. Seljuq arms even penetrated into the Arabian peninsula as far as Yemen and Baḥrayn. In Kirman in south-eastern Persia, Chaghrï Beg’s son Qāwurd established a local Seljuq dynasty which endured for nearly a century and a half until Oghuz tribesmen from Khurasan took over the province in c. 584/c. 1188. On the cultural and intellectual plane, notable was an acceleration in the programme of the foundation of orthodox Sunnī madrasas or colleges in Iraq and the Persian lands, and the encouragement of the sultans and their servants of a synthesis of traditional theological and legal studies with the more free-ranging spirit of Ṣūfism, exemplified in the life and work of scholars like ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072) and Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111).

Centrifugal tendencies were always likely to appear within an empire like that of the Great Seljuqs, in which old Turkish patrimonial ideas about rulership and the division of territories among various members of the ruling family were still strong, once firm control from the centre was relaxed. After Malik Shāh’s death, the Seljuq lands of Iraq and western Persia were racked by dissension and civil strife, although an element of continuity and stability continued in Khurasan, where Malik Shāh’s son Sanjar was first governor and then, after the death in 511/1118 of his brother the supreme sultan Muḥammad, was acknowledged as senior member of the dynasty and supreme sultan. In Iraq, Seljuq authority was adversely affected by the reviving political and military power there of the ‘Abbāsid caliphs, and after 547/1152 this authority was permanently excluded from Baghdad. In the Persian lands, Transcaucasia, Jazīra and Syria, the rise of local lines of Atabegs reduced the sultans’ freedom of action and their revenues which they needed for paying their troops. The Atabegs were slave commanders of the Seljuq army, who were in the first place appointed as tutor-guardians (Turkish Atabeg ‘father-commander’) to young Seljuq princes sent out as provincial governors; but in many instances they soon managed to arrogate effective power to themselves and to found hereditary lines in the provinces (see, for example, below: the Börids, Zangids, Eldigüzids, Salghurids, etc., nos 92ff.).

The entry of the Seljuqs and their nomadic followers began a long process of profound social, economic and ethnic changes to the ‘northern tier’ of the Middle East, namely the zone of lands extending from Afghanistan in the east through Persia and Kurdistan to Anatolia in the west; these changes included a certain increase in pastoralisation and a definitely increased degree of Turkicisation. Within the Seljuq lands there remained significant numbers of Turkish nomads, largely unassimilated to settled life and resentful of central control and, especially, of taxation. The problem of integrating such elements into the fabric of state was never solved by the Seljuq sultans; when Sanjar’s reign ended disastrously in an uprising of Oghuz tribesmen whose interests had, they, felt, been neglected by the central administration, the Oghuz captured the Sultan, and, on his death soon afterwards, Khurasan slipped definitively from Seljuq control. The last Seljuq sultan in the west, Ṭoghrïl III, struggled to free himself from control by the Eldigüzid Atabegs, but unwisely provoked a war with the powerful and ambitious Khwārazm Shāh Tekish (see above, no. 89, 3) and was killed in 590/1194. Only in central Anatolia did a Seljuq line, that of the sultans of Rūm with their capital at Konya, survive for a further century or so (see below, no. 107).

Justi, 452–3; Lane-Poole, 149–54; Zambaur, 221–2 and Table R_; Album, 22, 37–8.

EI² ‘Kirmān. History’ (A. K. S. Lambton), ‘Saldjūḳids. I–IV. 1’ (C. E. Bosworth), ‘VIII. 1. Numismatics’ (R. Darley-Doran).

Cl. Cahen, ‘The Turkish invasion: the Selchükids’, in K. M. Setton and M. W. Baldwin (eds), A History of the Crusades. I. The First Hundred Years, Philadelphia 1955, 135–76.

C. E. Bosworth, in The Cambridge History of Iran, V, 11–184.

Ç. Alptekin, ‘Selçuklu paralari’, SAD, 3 (1971), 435–591.

Gary Leiser (ed. and tr.), A History of the Seljuks. İbrahim Kafesoğlu’s Interpretation and the Resulting Controversy, Carbondale and Edwardsville IL 1988.