The Turkish family of nations first emerged into the light of history in the mid-sixth century,when they built up a short-lived nomad empire in the heart of Asia, the steppes which have eversince borne the name Turkestan, the land of the Turks. When it broke in pieces, in the mannerof such confederacies, fragments of the Turkish race, under a bewildering variety of names,were scattered over a vast area, from the Uighurs, who once dwelt in Mongolia, to thePolovtsians of the Russian steppes, familiar to us from Borodin's opera Pnnce Igor. Despite thewide differences between them -- some came under Chinese, others under Persian influence -- some were pure nomads, others were settled agriculturists -- they all spoke dialects of thesame tongue; they possessed common folk memories and legends; in religion they wereshamanists, and they reckoned time according to a twelve-year cycle named after animals,events being placed in the Year of the Panther, the Year of the Hare, the Year of the Horse,and so on.
The Oxus was the traditional boundary between civilization and barbarism in Western Asia,between Iran and Turan, and Persian legend, versified in Firdawsi's great epic, theShah-namah, told of the heroic battles of the Iranians against the Turanian king Afrasi- yab,who was at last hunted down and killed in Azerbaijan. When the Arabs crossed the Oxus afterthe fall of the Sassanids, they took over the defence of kan against the barbarian nomads andpushed them back beyond the Jaxartes. The Turkish tribes were in political disarray, and werenever able to oppose a unified resistance to the Arabs, who carried their advance as far as theTalas river. For nearly three centuries Transoxiana, or as the Arabs called it, Ma Wara al-Nahr,'that which is beyond the river', was a flourishing land, free from serious nomadic incursions,and cities like Samarkand and Bukhara rose to fame and wealth.
From the ninth century onwards the Turks began to enter the Caliphate, not in mass, but asslaves or adventurers serving as soldiers. They thus infiltrated the world of Islam as theGermans did the Roman Empire. The Caliph Mu'tasim (833-842) was the first Muslim ruler tosurround himself with a Turkish guard. Turkish officers rose to high rank, commanding armies,governing provinces, sometimes ruling as independent princes: thus Ahmad b.Tulun seizedpower in Egypt in 868, and a second Turkish family, that of the Ikhshidids (from an Iranian titleikkshid, meaning 'prince'), ran the same country from 933 until the Fatimid conquest in 969. Thedisintegration of the Abbasid Empire afforded ample scope for such political adventurism, butso long as Transoxiana was held for civilization, the heart of Islam was safe from a massivebarbarian break-through. When the Caliphs ceased to exercise authority on the distant easternfrontier, the task was shouldered by the Samanids, perhaps the most brilliant of the dynastieswhich took over from the enfeebled Abbasids. In the end it proved too heavy a burden, and theSamanid collapse at the end of the tenth century opened the floodgates to Turkish nomadtribes, who poured across both Jaxartes and Oxus into the lands of the Persians and Arabs.
Despite their brief rule of little more than a hundred years, the Samanids had much to theircredit. Of Persian origin, they set up a strong centralized government in Khurasan andTransoxiana, with its capital at Bukhara; they encouraged trade and manufactures; theypatronized learning, and they sponsored the spread of Islam by peaceful conversion among thebarbarians to the north and east of their realm. It was during their time that the vigorous andcommercially-minded Vikings gained possession of Russia, and traded their furs and wax andslaves in the markets of the south in exchange for textiles and metal goods, evidence of thistrafflc being provided by the hoards of Arabic coins dug up in Sweden, Finland and NorthRussia. One of the main international trade routes of the age ran through the territory of theBulghars, a Turkish race living in the region of the middle Volga, who accepted Islam before921, in which year a mission from the Caliph Muktadir visited them and reported on life amongthis most northerly of Muslim peoples. The Bulghars in turn tried to convert the Russians, butVladimir of Kiev decided in 988 in favour of Christianity, thereby barring Islam's advance intoEastern Europe. Most probably the Bulghars were converted by merchants from the Samanidkingdom, who also brought the faith to the Turks beyond the Jaxartes, nomads who did a brisktrade in sheep and cattle with the frontier towns. About 956 the Seljuks, destined to so gloriousa future, embraced Islam, and in 960 the conversion of a Turkish tribe of 200,000 tents isrecorded: their precise identity is unspecified. Thus the tenth century witnessed theislamization, under Samanid auspices, of a large section of the Western Turks, an event ofgreat significance.
Notwithstanding the prosperity of their kingdom, the Samanids failed to keep the loyalty of theirsubjects. Their heavily bureaucratized despotism was expensive to maintain, and the burdenof taxation alienated the dihkans, on whose support the regime depended. One of their rulers,Nasr al-Sa'id, who reigned from 914 to 943, favoured the Isma'ilis and corresponded with theFatimid Caliph Ka'im, thereby forfeiting the sympathy of the orthodox. Following the exampleof the Abbasids, they surrounded themselves with Turkish guards, whose fidelity was far fromassured. In 962 one of their Turkish officers, Alp-tagin ('hero prince'), seized the town andfortress of Ghazna, in what is now Afghanistan, a wealthy co mercial centre whose inhabitantshad grown rich on the Indian trade and set up a semi-independent principality. He died in the following year, and after an interval another Turkish general, Sabuk-tagin, won control ofGhazna in 977 and founded a dynasty which gained immortal lustre from his son Mahmud. TheSamanid kingdom fell into anarchy; the Kara-Khanids, a Turkish people of unknownantecedents (they may have been the tribe converted to Islam in 960), crossed the Jaxartesand captured Bukhara in 999, while Mahmud of Ghazna, who had succeeded his fatherSabuktagin two years earlier, annexed the large and flourishing province of Khurasan. ThusPersian rule disappeared along the eastern marches of Islam, and Turkish princes reigned inKhurasan and Transoxiana. Barbarians though they might be, they found a certain favour withtheir subjects: they stood for order, they allowed Persian officials to run the government, theyprotected trade, they were orthodox Sunnite Muslims, and they professed themselves ardentchampions of the faith against heretics and unbelievers.
The fame of Mahmud of Ghazna rests upon his expeditions into India. In the thirty yearsbetween 1000 and his death in 1030 he led some seventeen massive raids into the Indus valleyand the Punjab. Ghazna was an admirable base for such attacks; the vast Indian sub-continentwas a mosaic of principalities great and small; no strong state existed capable of throwing backthe invader, and there was no trace of national consciousness. Mahmud's motives were amixture of cupidity and religious zeal: when he was looting Hindu shrines he could claim to bedestroying idolatry in the name of God and his Prophet, and he received congratulations andhonours from the Caliph for his services to the faith. He fought not only against the unbelieversof Hindustan but against the Isma'ili heretics among them the Muslim ruler of Multan. His mostcelebrated expioit was the capture of Somnath in Gujarat in 1025, where he stormed the templeof Shiva, one of the most richly endowed in India, and levelled it to the ground amid frightfulcarnage. Ghazna was flooded with Indian plunder, and the multitude of prisoners was such thatthey were sold as slaves for two or three dirhams apiece. Some of the wealth was used topromote art and learning, and the court of Mahmud was adorned by such notabilities asFirdawsi, Persia's greatest epic poet, Biruni, the most distinguished scientist of the age, andUtbi, the historian of the reign.
Two consequences of immense importance flowed from Mahmud's repeated incursions intoIndia. First, the collapse of Hindu resistance in the Punjab turned this province into an area ofMuslim settlement and exposed the whole Gangetic plain to invasion from the north-west. Theearly raids up and down the Indus in the days d Muhammad b.Kasim had only touched thefringe of a vast country but Mahmud's expeditions penetrated deep into Hindustan, disoganizedits defences, and opened the way to later Muslim invaders, fom the Ghurids to the Moguls, whogradually brought all nortbern and central India within the domain of Islam. Secondly, thepreoccupation of Mahmud and his son and successor Mas'ud with their Indian campaigns leftthem little time or opporunity to observe and check the steadily mounting pressure of Turkishnomads along the Oxus. While their backs were turned, so to speak, the Seljuks rose toprorninence and power in their rear and bcame the masters of all Western Asia.
The pasture-lands to the north of the Caspian and Aral Seas had long been the home of agroup of Turkish tribes known as the Ghuzz or Oghuz, later styled Turkomans. About 950 anumber of clans withdrew from the Ghuzz confederacy, and settled in and around Jand, alongthe lower reaches of the Jaxartes, under a chief named Seljuk. A few years later theyabandoned their ancestral shamanism for Islam, a change of faith as momentous for the futureof Aia as the conversion of Clovis and his Franks to Catholicism in 496 was to ChristianEurope. Seljuk is a semi-legendary figure who is said to have lived to the patriarchal age of107, but he seems to have been an able leader, who welded his people into a first-class fightingforce and by adroit diplomacy played off one neighbouring prince against another. Hesupported the Samanids against the Kara- Khanids; his son Arslan ran into trouble withMahmud of Ghazna, to whom he boasted that he had 100,000 bowmen under his command,whereupon Mahmud's minister advised his master to have these men's thumbs cut off, so thatthey could no longer draw the bow ! However, Mahmud contented himself with holding Arslanas a hostage for the good behaviour of his people, some of whom he brought into Khurasanand settled in widely-separated areas in the hope that they could thus be kept under control.The hope was vain: the tribesmen began raiding all over northern Persia and holding towns toransom. After Mahmud's death in 1030, the rest of the tribe, led by Arslan's nephewsTughril-Beg and Chaghri-Beg, after encamping for a time in Khwarazm, along the lower Oxus,pushed their way into Khurasan and in 1036 seize Merv and Nishapur. Mahmud's son Mas'ud,attempting to bar their path, was routed with heavy loss at Dandankan near Merv in 1040, andretreated on Ghazna. From this battle dates the foundation of the Seljuk Empire.
The Seljuks now moved westwards into the disintegrating realm of the Buyids. Conditions inPersia and Iraq favoured their intervention. Political power had been split up among the variousmembers of the Buyid family. The semi-feudal practice had grown up of paying high officialsout of the taxes of certain fiscal districts: hence there was a serious loss of control by thecentral government. The Fatimid policy of diverting trade with the East from the Persian Gulfto the Red Sea had impoverished the Buyid State. Isma'ilian propaganda helped to undermineits authority. It had no outlet to the Mediterranean since the Byzantines and the Fatimids haddivided Syria between them. The urban merchant class resented the loss of trade and thearrogance of the military aristocracy. Local dynasties, some Arab, some Kurdish, sprang up anddrained the strength of the regime. Orthodox Muslims chafed under the rule of Shi'ites,especially those unable to maintain peace and order. The Abbasids, humiliated by theirimpotence, yearned for deliverance from their heretic masters, and entered into negotiationswith Tughril. One by one the towns of Persia fell into Seljuk hands. In Iraq power was held bythe Buyid general Basasiri, who asked for help from Cairo in order to stop the advance of theSeljuks by declaring for the Fatimids. An extraordinary struggle ensued, with Tughril defendingthe Abbasid Caliph Ka'im and Basasiri striving to get the Fatimid Caliph Mustansir recognizedin Baghdad. The Seljuks occupied Baghdad in 1055, but the excesses and indiscipline of thetribesmen provoked a reaction among the populace, and Wasit, Mosul and other places wentover to the Fatimids. Tughril recaptured Mosul, and returning to Baghdad in 1058 was solemnlyre- ceived by Ka'im and given the title of 'King of the East and West'. Called away by a rebellionof his younger brother Ibrahim, he was unable to prevnt Basasiri recovering control of Iraq andproclaiming the Fatimid Imam in Baghdad itself. For forty Fridays the khutba was recited in theAbbasid capital in the name of Mustansir of Cairo. Finally in 1060 the Seljuks fought their wayback into Baghdad; Basasiri was killed, and Tughril replaced the Abbasid on his throne.
Many things were decided by this episode. First, the Fatimids bst their last chance ofrepeating the success of the Abbasids in 750: the failure of Basasiri's coup in Baghdad meantthat the Alid Caliph would be restricted to Egypt and the neighbouring lands and would neveracquire universal dominion in Islam. Secondly, the fall of the Buyids and the coming of theSeljuks registered a great triumph for Sunnite orthodoxy: the power of the State could now beemployed to put down Shi'ism of all kinds and Isma'ilism in particular. Thirdly, the AbbasidCaliphate was restored to some sort of life and independence, but its character was changed,and a new institution -- the Sultanate -- was created in an endeavour to reestablish the politicalunity of Islam. For the Caliphate, as a centralized monarchy ruling all Muslim peoples, hadwoefully failed. It could not even preserve the religious and spiritual unity of the umma: halfIslam had fallen to the Fatimids. It never developed into a Papacy, for the interpretation of thelaw and the faith had long passed to the ulama, the canonists and judges. Yet even in itsweakness it was still reverered by the new Turkish converts as the symbol of religiouslegitimacy: the Vicar of the Prophet alone could confer lawful authority on Muslim kings andprinces to whom in theory he delegated his powers. Mahmud of Ghazna had been glad to winrecognition from the Caliph, and his court poets had hailed him as 'Sultan', a word meaningoriginally 'governmental power' but henceforth used as a personal title. The Seljuks were evenmore anxious to have their rule legitimized: as aliens and barbarians they were unpopular withthe civilized townsfolk of Persia and Iraq, and Tughril's investiture by the Caliph in 1058, in amagnificent ceremony during which two crowns were held over his head as symbols of his regalauthority over East and West, informed the people that the Commander of the Faithful haddelegated his sultanate to his Turkish lieutenant. It was now the Sultan's duty to act as the earlyCaliphs had done, to defend the umma, to extirpate schism and heresy, and to resume thejihad against the nations who rejected God and his Prophet. Politically, the Seljuks were to playShoguns to the Caliph's Mikado.
Two enemies were obviously marked out for attack by the new protectors of Sunnite Islam: theByzantines and the Fatimids. In the previous age the former had thrust deep into the heart ofIslam, had conquered a good deal of Syria and annexed Armenia to the Empire. But theByzantine revival had now spent itself: the vigorous Macedonian dynasty was no more; thecentral government was in conflict with the great landed families of Asia Minor and in order toreduce their power, had cut down the military establishment, thereby rendering the Empiredefensively weak against the new assault from the East. The Turks drove towards theByzantine frontiers, partly by design, partly by accident. Their coming had produced somethingof a social crisis in the Persian and Arab lands. In a society where the fundamental distinctionwas between believer and unbeliever, the fact that the Turks were Muslims counted for much;but even so, the educated city-dweller could scarcely avoid a feeling of disgust at the presenceof these coarse and uncouth sons of the steppes. The chroniclers of the time draw a sharpcontrast between the Sultans and their people: 'Their princes are warlike, provident, firm, justand distinguished by excellent qualities: the nation is cruel, wild, coarse and ignorant.' To makematters worse, once the barrier of the Oxus was down, the regular Seljuk forces, cavalrymenof slave origin, were followed by swarms of Turkomans', free and undisciplined nomads seekingpasture and plunder, who raided estates, destroyed crops, robbed merchant caravans, andfought other nomads, such as Kurds and Bedouin Arabs, for the possession of wells andgrazing-lands. Many of them poured into Azerbaijan, a fertile province of orchards and pastureswhich in a few generations became mainly Turkish-speaking, and from there began raidingByzantine territory. When Tughril died childless in 1063, the Sultanate passed to his nephewAlp Arslan ('hero lion'), Chagri's son, who was probably anxious to divert the stream of nomadicviolence away from the lands of Islam towards Christendom and at the same time to win gloryas a ghazi, or champion of the faith. His armies pushed into the valleys of Armenia andGeorgia, while the Turkomans plunged deeper and deeper into Anatolia. An appeal from theenemies of the Fatimids then diverted him into southern Syria, but his plans for an invasion ofEgypt were abandoned at the news of an impending massive Byzantine counter-stroke.
The Emperor Romanus Diogenes had resolved on a desperate effort to clear the Turkishraiders out of his dominions, and at the head of a motley army of mercenaries, includingNormans from the west and Pechenegs and Uzes (Turkish tribes) from southern Russia, hemarched eastwards into Armenia. Alp Arslan, hurriedly returning, met him at Manzikert, nearthe shores of Lake Van. The Normans started a quarrel and refused to fight for the Emperor;his Turkish mercenaries, perhaps unwilling to face their kinsmen, deserted, and this, combinedwith Romanus's bad generalship, produced (August 1071) a catastrophic Byzantine defeat. Forthe first time in history, a Christian Emperor fell a prisoner into Muslim hands.
Alp Arslan stands out a not unattractive figure, his name indissolubly connected with themomentous battle which turned Asia Minor into a Turkish land. We picture him as animpressive soldier in his thirties, his long moustaches tied over his tall Persian cap to preventthem interfering with his shooting. In his humanity and generosity he anticipates Saladin. Hetreated the captive Emperor with courtesy, and when the ransom money was paid sent himhome with a Turkish escort. Perhaps he hardly grasped the significance of his victory. He hadno plans to conquer Asia Minor and destroy the Byzantine State; he was soon called away todeal with a Kara-Khanid invasion from Transoxiana, and in 1073, while interrogating a rebelchief, the man suddenly sprang at him and stabbed him dead. In fact, Manzikert struck a fatalblow at Christian and imperial power in Anatolia. With the Byzantine field-army gone, the Turksspread over the central plateau, so well adapted for pastoral settlement; in the struggles for thethrone which now ensued, rival pretenders hired Turkish troops, and in this way the nomadsgot possession of towns and fortresses they could never have taken otherwise. The Greeklandlords and offlcials fled; the peasants, deprived of their natural leaders, in time adopted thereligion of their new masters, and the faith of Muhammad was taught in the lands where St.Paul had proclaimed the gospel of Christ. With Asia Minor, its principal source of soldiers andrevenue, lost, menaced by the aggression of the Normans from Italy and the Pechenegs fromacross the Danube, the Byzantine Empire faced total ruin, and appeals for help to the Pope andthe Latin world went out from Constantinople which produced twenty-five years after Manzikertthe preaching of the First Crusade.
On the murder of Alp Arslan, he was succeeded as Sultan by his son Malik-Shah, a youth ofeighteen whose twenty years' reign (1073-1092) marked the fullest ezpansion of Seljuk power.Malik-Shah was a more cultivated man than his father and great-uncle, who were essentiallyrough tribal chiefs, and he wisely entrusted the civil administration to the great Persian ministerusually known by his title Nizam al-Mulk, 'order of the kingdom'. A just and humane ruler, hereceived the praise of Christian and Muslim historians alike. His suzerainty was recognizedfrom Kashgar to the Yemen, but risings and disturbances were not uncommon in his vastdominions, and he was obliged to leave to others the conduct of operations against theByzantines and the Fatimids. A cadet of the Seljuk family, Sulaiman b.Kutulmish, founded adurable State in Asia Minor, the so-called Sultanate of Rum; he captured Nicaea in 1081 andthreatened Constantinople itself. The war on the Fatimids was inaugurated, not by the Seljuks,but by a Turkoman chief named Atsiz, who in 1070 marched into Palestine and drove theEgyptians out of Jerusalem. Malik-Shah could not tolerate this, and gave his brother Tutushcharge of the Syrian front. The Fatimids proved tougher opponents than might have beenexpected: the Seljuks were not destined to heal the schism that had rent the Muslim world fornearly two centuries.
The Fatimid regime had, in fact made a surprising recovery from what had seemed certainruin. A dreadful six years' famine had paralysed Egypt from 1067 to 1072; the civil governmentvirtually broke down; thousands fled from the country, and the misery of those who remainedwas heightened by the brutal lawlessness of the Turkish, Berber and Sudanese slave soldierywho killed and robbed in quest of food and plunder. The Fatimid Empire all but vanished. TheMaghrib had long been lost; Sicily was conquered by the Normans from South Italy, Atsizseized Palestine, and the Abbasid Caliph was once more prayed for in the Holy Cities. But in1073 Mustansir called in the governor of Acre, Badr al-Jamali, a brilliant general of Armenianbirth, to restore order; the mutinous troops were disciplined, the defences of Cairo werestrengthened, trade revived, the revenues rose, and prosperity returned. The price paid wasthe creation of a military dictatorship, Badr, with the title of Amir al-Juyush, 'Commander of theArmies,' replacing the civilian wazir, and the Caliph being reduced almost to the level of theAbbasids under Buyid rule. Badr then set out to recover Syria, and though he failed to regainDamascus, which fell to the Seljuks in 1076, he succeeded in checking Tutush's advance tothe Egyptian frontier and in re-establishing Fatimid authority along the Levantine coast as faras Tyre and Sidon. The Alid Caliphate, though shorn of much of its glory, was put on its feetagain and enabled to survive for another century. When Badr died in 1094, a few monthsbefore the aged Caliph, Seljuk hopes of restoring Egypt to orthodoxy had been frustrated, andthe rival parties were still struggling for the control of Syria, a situation highly advantageous tothe Latin Crusaders who broke into the Levant three or four years later.
The Seljuks rendered notable service to Islam, but their successes were balanced by manyfailures. They brought a new vigour and unity into Western Asia and put an end to the decadentregime of the Buyids. They dealt a staggering blow to Byzantine power by winning Asia Minorfor Islam, a feat the Arabs had never been able to achieve, thereby breaking down the lastdefences of Christendom on the Asiatic continent, and opening up this ancient land to Turkishcolonial settlement. Their vehement orthodoxy checked the spread of Isma'ilism, which was infuture able to operate only as an underground terrorist movement whose agents becamenotorious as the Assassins. Under Seljuk protection the champions of Sunnite Islam launcheda strong propaganda drive against heretics and deviators from the true faith: madrasas or'college-mosques' were founded in the principal cities for the instruction of students in fikh(Islamic jurisprudence), according to the teaching of the four orthodox schools. The best knownof these institutions was the Nizamiya Madrasa in Baghdad, named after Nizam al-Mulk anddedicated by him in 1067. Orthodoxy produced at this time its ablest defender in al-Ghazali,who died in 1111, and whose massive and comprehensive system of theology has won him thetitle of 'the Aquinas of Islam'.
On the other hand, the Seljuks proved unable to create a strong, durable and centralizedEmpire or to destroy the Fatimid Anti-Caliphate in Egypt. Their conceptions of government wereprimitive, and despite the efforts of Nizam al-Mulk to instruct them in the principles of ancientPersian despotism, which he regarded as the only satisfactory form of rule, they treated theirrealm as family property to be divided up among sons and nephews, who if minors wereentrusted to the care of atabegs ('father-chiefs'), usually generals of servile origin who governedtheir appanages until their wards came of age and who often became hereditary princes in theirown right. Until the death of Malik-Shah in 1092 some degree of unity was preserved, but underthe fourth Seljuk Sultan Berkyaruk (1095-1114) the Empire was changed into a kind offederation of autonomous princes, not all of them Turks, for in certain localities Buyid andKurdish chiefs held sway while admitting only a vague Seljuk suzerainty. Incessant strugglesfor the succession further weakened the Empire and gave the Abbasid Caliphs a chance torecover some of their power by playing off one candidate for the Sultanate against another.Political disintegration was hastened by the spread of the ikta system, by which military officerswere paid out of the revenues of certain landed estates, ikta meaning literally a 'section' orportion of land 'cut off' for that purpose, and in some respects resembling the knight's fee ofWestern feudalism. Ikta holding tended to become hereditary and the 'fief thus escaped fromthe jurisdiction of the central government. By 1100 the best days of the Seljuks were over, andit was precisely at this Juncture that the Franks chose to launch against Islam the strangeChristian counter-offensive which we know as the Crusades.