A History of the Muslim World to 1405: The Making of a Civilization

by Vernon O Egger

  In 1028, Mahmud of Ghazna imposed a major defeat on a band of Saljuqs who were raiding along the Amu Darya, and the survivors began migrating to the west as far as Azerbaijan, where their depredations harried both the Byzantine and Buyid governments. Seven years later, a group of Saljuqs, led by the brothers Chaghri and Tughril, arrived in Khorasan from Transoxiana, starving and begging for some grazing land. When Mahmud’s son, Mas‘ud, treated them harshly, they struck back and surprised themselves by defeating him. He granted them a small territory for grazing purposes, but they were no longer supplicants. They allowed their sheep to graze unrestricted in the oases of the northern Khorasan, with the result that crops were damaged. They also intercepted caravans and harassed the villages and towns of the region.

  The inhabitants of the major cities of Merv and Nishapur had already been chafing under the heavy taxation of the Ghaznavids, and now their discontent increased, as it appeared that Mas‘ud was not going to deliver them from the uncouth and dangerous nomads who did what they pleased with impunity. Despairing of any help from the government in Ghazna, Merv surrendered to the Saljuqs in 1037, followed the next year by Nishapur. In 1040, Mas‘ud finally attacked the Saljuqs, only to be soundly defeated. The Ghaznavid empire lost Khorasan forever, and henceforth was to be centered on Ghazna and Lahore.

  MAP 6.1 The Eastern Muslim World, 950–1030

  As the new rulers of Khorasan, and with Mas‘ud’s successors barely able to keep them out of Afghanistan, the Saljuqs were in a position to carve out a large empire. They immediately conquered Khwarazm, on the lower Amu Darya, in 1042. The Saljuq leaders found much to admire in the Persian culture that permeated the new areas they ruled. Although they and their successors always remained proud of being Turks, they began to adopt certain features of the new culture for their own purposes. They saw the advantages of an efficient bureaucracy with a tax-gathering mechanism, and they admired the Persian literary tradition and architectural styles. They began recruiting Khorasani bureaucrats, the most talented of whom was Nizam alMulk, whose achievements we shall see later. They also began to incorporate into their army a unit of slave soldiers. Within two decades or so, mamluks would constitute the core of the Saljuq army, although the army would always contain larger numbers of Turkmen (nomadic Turks), accompanied by their families and herds.

  Soon after the conquest of Khwarazm, Tughril and Chaghri agreed on a division of labor. Leaving Chaghri in charge of Khorasan, Tughril began a campaign of conquest westward across Iran. He defeated the Buyid ruler at Rayy in 1043, and over the next seven years he also captured Hamadan and Esfahan. He discovered that he had to rely increasingly on his mamluks and less on his Turkmen. Typically fractious and independent, the Turkmen’s top priority was the acquisition of loot and of good grazing grounds for their herds. Tughril knew that he could not discipline them sufficiently to control their looting, but he did try to channel their looting into regions outside the provinces for which he had taken responsibility to protect. As a result, bands of Turkmen not directly under Tughril’s control raided into Armenia, eastern Anatolia, and northern Iraq. As long as they were not causing havoc in the areas in which Tughril wanted his authority recognized, they served a useful purpose in weakening the administrative authority of his enemies.

  From Esfahan, Tughril began negotiating for the surrender of Shiraz and Baghdad by their Buyid rulers. Baghdad, characteristically, was riven at the time by sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shi‘ites, bedouin depredations, and schisms within its own army. Now it was further afflicted by Turkmen raids. The faction aligned with the caliph invited Tughril to take over the city from its Buyid overlords. In December 1055, he did so, with little effort. Soon, however, he faced two serious challenges. The first was a revolt by one of his brothers, who managed to secure a large following of Turkmen by charging Tughril with having begun to associate too closely with urban Arab and Iranian elites.

  The second challenge was a threat from a Shi‘ite conspiracy. By the 1050s, Fa-timid missionaries had begun achieving considerable success in Iraq, as villagers and townspeople sought an alternative to their unbearable conditions. Fatimid agents pointed to the deteriorating conditions as evidence that the time was ripe for God to deliver the Iraqi people through the agency of his Imam. When Tughril took over the capital in 1055, many Iraqis were suspicious and even contemptuous of the Saljuq leader, whom they regarded as dangerous and uncivilized. Among the group that opposed Tughril was a Turkish mamluk military officer in the Buyid service called al-Basasiri. Al-Basasiri had become one of the most powerful members of the Buyid military establishment and was determined not to become subject to what he regarded as a bunch of sheep herders. He consulted with a Fatimid missionary as he planned to recapture Baghdad, only this time in the name of al-Mustansir, the Fatimid caliph-Imam.

  Taking advantage of Tughril’s absence when the Saljuq leader had to subdue the revolt by his brother, al-Basasiri inflicted a major defeat on the Saljuq army in 1057 and entered Baghdad in triumph the following year. He handed the Abbasid caliph over to Arab tribesmen for safe-keeping, instituted the Shi‘ite form of the call to prayer, and said the sermon in the name of al-Mustansir. Thus, for almost a year, Baghdad formally acknowledged the authority of the Fatimid caliph. For purposes that are now obscure, the Fatimid wazir abruptly cut off aid to al-Basasiri, and Tughril, having crushed his brother’s revolt, turned back to Baghdad. Upon defeating al-Basasiri, he carried out an intense persecution of the Iraqi Shi’ites, both Twelver and Isma‘ili. The attempted Shi’ite coup d’ètat left the Saljuq regime permanently hostile to any form of Shi’ism.

  Tughril’s recapture of Baghdad was a momentous occasion. For many Sunnis who had become concerned about the political dominance of Shi‘ism in Iraq, Egypt, and in scattered provincial dynasties, it was a ray of hope that the caliph’s authority would be restored. In fact, although the Sunni Saljuqs respected the caliph as the Shi‘ite Buyids could not, they had no intention of turning political or military control over to him. On the other hand, by destroying the Buyids, challenging the Fatimids, and in general persecuting Shi‘ites, the Saljuq administration did play a major role in the consolidation of Sunni dominance over Shi‘ism in most of southwestern Asia over the next century.

  Tughril’s consolidation of power was also a dramatic expansion of a process that had been underway since the beginning of the century: the growing importance of Turkish political and cultural power in the Muslim world. Tughril’s contemporaries would have viewed his achievement as little more than the seizure of power by yet another regime. It was not a particularly impressive regime, supported as it was by unruly nomads. In fact, however, his arrival marked the advent in southwestern Asia of Turks as creators of empires rather than just as soldiers. As empire builders, they would create some of the most powerful states in the world over the next several hundred years, controlling territory from the middle Danube in Europe to the mouth of the Ganges in South Asia.

  The Great Saljuqs and the Saljuqs of Rum

  With the recapture of Baghdad in 1058, Tughril secured control of Iraq and western Iran. A year or two later, his brother Chaghri died in Khorasan and was succeeded by his son Alp-Arslan. When Tughril died in 1063, a council of elders chose Alp-Arslan to inherit the entire empire, from Iraq to Khorasan. Although Baghdad remained important as the seat of the Abbasid caliphate, and hence of the legitimacy of Saljuq rule, Esfahan became the seat of most of the Saljuq bureaucratic apparatus. Alp-Arslan left most matters of civil administration to Nizam al-Mulk, his Khorasani vizier (the transliteration for the Turkish pronunciation of wazir).

  Alp-Arslan himself spent little time in Esfahan, for he was a tireless military campaigner. He secured regions that had been bypassed during the original campaign, disciplined renegade followers, and conducted campaigns in Armenia and Georgia designed to secure his borders against Byzantine threats. He also had to suppress a major revolt by one of Tughril’s cousins, Qutlumish, who challenged Alp-Arslan’s right t
o rule the entire empire. Alp-Arslan’s rapid rise to power had created a crisis. He had not acted illegitimately, but the Saljuqs had no regularized process of succession to power. Like their fellow Turks, they followed a tradition that every member of the ruling dynasty had an inherent right to rule. Influential elders could agree upon a successor to the dead ruler, but any member of the family could legitimately challenge the selection. As a result, most Turkish domains were frequently embroiled in struggles for leadership, but the system also prevented the accumulation of power in a single lineage.

  The Byzantine empire, for which the Saljuqs borrowed the Arabic name Rum (for Rome, pronounced “room”), now came under unrelenting Turkish pressure. The reason for this did not lie in policies of state: Alp-Arslan was not interested in conquering the Byzantine empire. In the wake of the Saljuq conquests, however, a constant stream of Turkmen flowed into western Iran, northern Iraq, and Azerbaijan. Bands of Turkmen, with their families and herds in tow, renewed the raiding of Azerbaijan and Byzantine Armenia and began extending their forays even into central Anatolia and northern Syria. Rarely were these raids authorized by Alp-Arslan. Many of the participants were even his enemies, including the sons of Qutlumish, who formed a cohesive group of raiders that grew steadily more powerful.

  Lashkari Bazar, a wealthy Ghaznavid city of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

  Nevertheless, the raids were rationalized as attacks on the infidel, in accordance with a long tradition of warfare on the frontiers of the Dar al-Islam. From the perspective of the Turkmen, Rum was a territory in which towns and villages could be raided, the dominance of Muslims could be asserted, and refuge could be sought from the hands of a central Saljuq authority that was becoming progressively alienated from its nomadic masses. From the perspective of Alp-Arslan himself, the more Turkmen who could be diverted into Rum, the fewer unruly nomads he had to worry about as he began laying the foundation for a powerful state. Thus began a tradition of Turkish gazis, or raiders, who harassed non-Muslim territories on the Muslim Turkish frontier.

  The Byzantine authorities became increasingly concerned about the rising level of raids, particularly when one campaign took raiders to the heart of Anatolia at Iconium (Konya). Negotiations between the emperor and the sultan took place sporadically, but Alp-Arslan had nothing to gain from antagonizing thousands of Turkmen by limiting their raiding. The Byzantines suspected that he was secretly encouraging the raids, and when, in 1071, he embarked on a military campaign to capture Syria, the Byzantines decided to take advantage of his absence by attacking Azerbaijan. The sultan, who had advanced to Aleppo, had to turn back to protect his empire and met the Byzantine army at Manzikert (Malazgirt), near Lake Van.

  The Byzantine emperor, Romanus IV Diogenes, had assembled almost the entire Byzantine army to confront the sultan, but the bulk of the army consisted now of foreign mercenaries, including the Norsemen of the Varangian Guard, Normans and Franks from western Europe, Slavs, and even Turks, including some from the Oghuz group itself. The various units were feuding among themselves, and key commanders even of the Greek units despised their emperor. The result was that up to one half of the army deserted on the eve of the battle, and the proud imperial military force was obliterated by the Saljuqs. The Battle of Manzikert, remembered thereafter by the Byzantines as “that terrible day,” ranks as one of history’s most decisive battles. The units of the vaunted Byzantine army either were destroyed in the battle or melted away into fragmentary and ineffective components.

  Rum now lay open to invasion, utterly undefended. Conquest of the area was the last thing on the mind of Alp-Arslan himself—confronted with a threat by the Qara-khanids on his Amu Darya frontier, he launched a campaign to invade Transoxiana. Turkmen on the Anatolian frontier, however, now encountered no effective resistance to their encroachments into Rum and found no reason to leave the area after raiding. More and more Turkmen entered the area in search of grazing areas and raiding opportunities, and still others were invited in by Byzantine factions who were clashing with each other in the wake of the disgrace of Romanus Diogenes at Manzikert.

  The Saljuq group led by the sons of Qutlumish were invited by the new Byzantine emperor all the way to Constantinople in 1078 in order to fight the emperor’s enemies, and then were enlisted to fight a European rival. In return, they were given access to the city of Nicaea (modern Iznik), sixty miles from Constantinople. They turned it into the capital city of what came to be known as the Sultanate of Rum. Thus, in a remarkable irony, the Byzantines themselves encouraged Turkish immigration into central and western Anatolia, even providing the Saljuqs with cities to use as their bases. It would be several centuries before Turks constituted the majority of the population of Anatolia. But with their rapid dominance of its cities, it is little wonder that, in little over a century, the Franks of the Third Crusade would be calling the area Turkey.

  Alp-Arslan met an untimely end during his campaign in Transoxiana. A prisoner was brought to his tent and, in a remarkable lapse of security, the man was able to stab the sultan, mortally wounding him. He was succeeded by his teenage son, Malik-Shah (1073–1092), for whom Nizam al-Mulk continued to serve as vizier. Like Alp-Arslan and Tughril, Malik-Shah was an able military leader. Early in his career he suppressed revolts by relatives who challenged his leadership, and he repulsed a Qara-khanid attack. Thereafter, however, he combined diplomacy and intrigue with his military skills and expanded Saljuq power into parts of Transoxiana, Syria, the Hijaz, Yemen, and the Persian Gulf. Only a few coastal towns of Palestine, including Ascalon, Acre (Akko), and Tyre, remained outside his control. The army that brought him victories and that made his diplomacy effective continued to evolve. Alp-Arslan had increased the number of slave soldiers in it, and at the height of Malik-Shah’s career, the nucleus of his army was slave. Almost all the rest were mercenaries, rather than Turkmen.

  The composition of the army was only one example of the assimilation of the Saljuq elite into the Perso–Islamic culture of the period. Malik-Shah’s name is another. Whereas Tughril and Alp-Arslan are Turkish names, the name Malik-Shah derives from the new environment: Malik is the Arabic word for “king,” and shah is Persian for “emperor.” The young ruler was a patron of literature, science, and art, and he ordered the construction of beautiful mosques in his capital at Esfahan. Nizam al-Mulk, the native of Tus, worked hard to impose traditional Iranian administrative practices within the Saljuq court, and partially succeeded. He, too, was instrumental in providing patronage for great works of architecture and in establishing colleges of higher learning in Iraq and Syria that emulated similar institutions in his home of Khorasan.

  Malik-Shah died in 1092, and with him died the unity of his empire. The Saljuq empire, with its ambiguous policy of succession, now faced a crisis. Contrary to Nizam al-Mulk’s conviction that an autocratic regime was the highest expression of good government, the Saljuq state had continued to be administered in a decentralized fashion in deference to the traditional Turkish conception that the family as a whole should participate in the wielding of power. The provinces were granted a considerable amount of autonomy under the leadership of close relatives of the sultan. When Malik-Shah died, the family could not agree on his successor, and various princes fought each other with the armies at their disposal. For over a decade, civil war raged, centered on the struggle for the sultanate between two of Malik-Shah’s sons. One of the sons died in 1105, worn out at the age of twenty-five, leaving Muhammad (1105– 1118) the sole ruler, but he relied on a surviving brother, Sanjar, to govern Khorasan for him. Muhammad’s dynasty came to be referred to as the Great Saljuqs, to be distinguished from the Saljuq Sultanate of Rum at Nicaea in Anatolia. Headquartered at Esfahan, Muhammad had hardly noticed that, during the civil war with his brother, Frankish warriors had taken control of his father’s Mediterranean coastline.

  The Fatimid Empire

  The secretive and underground Isma‘ili group surfaced in the ninth century and made a bid for poli
tical power as a group known to history as the Fatimids. In 910, the Fatimids seized power in Ifriqiya, and within a few decades they established their capital in Egypt. Fatimid Egypt quickly blossomed into one of the most advanced societies in the world, posing a serious threat to its Sunni rivals. Almost as quickly, however, it faded to second-rate status. By the end of the eleventh century, it occupied space, but was nearly irrelevant as a geopolitical factor.

  The Conquest of Egypt and Palestine

  When we last saw the Fatimids, their plans to attack Egypt were foiled yet again by the Berber revolt of 943. A revolt of this magnitude had not occurred in two centuries, since the Great Berber Revolt of 740 initiated the collapse of the Umayyad caliphate of Damascus. The Fatimid regime had to fight for its life at a time when it might have been able to take advantage of the Buyid seizure of power in Baghdad. The Sunni governors of Egypt, who also ruled Palestine (approximately the area occupied by modern Israel and Jordan), continued to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Abbasid caliph, but were on cool relations with the Buyid military leaders. Had the Fatimids been able to attack Egypt in the late 940s, the chance that they would not have confronted Buyid reinforcements was good.

  It took almost twenty years for the Fatimids to restore their control over the Maghrib. By the 960s, they were once again prepared to turn east. Having failed three times to capture Egypt, the regime prepared carefully for the campaign of 969. One step that was taken was ideological: The official genealogy for the Fatimids was changed in order to attract the support of the far-flung Isma‘ili community. The regime’s founder, ‘Abd Allah al-Mahdi, had claimed descent from Ja‘far al-Sadiq’s son ‘Abd Allah. Without great fanfare, his grandson al-Mu‘izz (953–976) consistently claimed descent from Isma‘il instead, making the Fatimids “Isma‘ilis” again.