Early Seljuq History

A New Interpretation

A.C.S. Peacock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135153694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This book investigates the early history of the Seljuq Turks, founders of one of the most important empires of the mediaeval Islamic world, from their origins in the Eurasian steppe to their conquest of Iran, Iraq and Anatolia. The first work available in a western language on this important episode in Turkish and Islamic history, this book offers a new understanding of the emergence of this major nomadic empire

Focusing on perhaps the most important and least understood phase, the transformation of the Seljuqs from tribesmen in Central Asia to rulers of a great Muslim Empire, the author examines previously neglected sources to demonstrate the central role of tribalism in the evolution of their state. The book also seeks to understand the impact of the invasions on the settled peoples of the Middle East and the beginnings of Turkish settlement in the region, which was to transform it demographically forever. Arguing that the nomadic, steppe origins of the Seljuqs were of much greater importance in determining the early development of the empire than is usually believed, this book sheds new light on the arrival of the Turks in the Islamic world.

A significant contribution to our understanding of the history of the Middle East, this book will be of interest to scholars of Byzantium as well as Islamic history, as well as Islamic studies and anthropology.

1 The origins and early history
of the Seljūqs

Western Eurasia and Transoxiana,
c. 900–1025

The history of the Middle East is intertwined with that of the Eurasian steppe. Long before the emergence of the Seljūqs, the ‘Abbāsids had sought to exploit Turkish manpower for their armies. Byzantium, too, relied on its Turkish allies, the Khazar empire, to guard its frontiers to the north of the Black Sea. Geographers, travellers and historians from Byzantium and the Islamic Middle East preserve valuable fragments of information regarding the steppe. At the other extremity of Eurasia, Chinese sources recount the Middle Kingdom’s efforts to deal with its difficult – and often powerful – nomadic neighbours. These sources allow us to discern the broad outlines of the great migratory movements of the late first millenium from which the Seljūqs emerged.

The Seljūqs were by no means the first group of Turks to come to Islamic Central Asia and Khurāsān;¹ nor were they the first nomadic invaders to reach the borders of Byzantium, which had been penetrated by Huns as early as the fourth century, by Sabirs, Avars, Khazars, Bulgars, Pechenegs and other Altaic or Turkish groups.² Indeed, the Seljūqs were not even the first to reach Anatolia, where Huns and Sabirs had preceded them,³ although they had not stayed. Compared to other Altaic peoples, the Seljūqs’ migration was on a fairly small scale, at least initially, and even their success at seizing political power was not unique, for the Ghaznavids and Qarakhānids were also Muslim, Turkish dynasties who took over the Central Asian lands of the Sāmānid state, heir to ‘Abbāsid and Iranian traditions of rulership, which collapsed at the end of the tenth century. The historical significance of the Seljūqs lies in their success at dominating the central lands of the Islamic world – the majority of the Nile to Oxus region described by Marshall Hodgson as the Islamic oikumene⁴ – in contrast to the Ghaznavids and Qarakhānids who held sway over remote, recently converted frontier regions. However, the heritage of the steppe was to play a decisive role in early Seljūq politics and society. In this chapter, we shall review the evidence for the origins of the Seljūqs and their early migrations. The term Seljūqs refers here to the immediate family of the dynasty’s ancestor Duqāq, his son Seljūq, and the latter’s children and grandchildren, of whom the most prominent were Ṭughril and Chaghrī.

Seljūq origins: the Oghuz connection

The meaning and pronunciation of the word Seljūq is obscure,⁵ and it first occurs as the name of an individual, not a people or tribe. Seljūq is said to have been the son of a chief named Duqāq or Tuqāq,⁶ who was probably based in the steppes lying between the Aral Sea and the Volga in the tenth century. Seljūq and his family are said to have belonged to the Qiniq tribe of the Oghuz, hence the common description of the Seljuqs and their supporters as al-ghuzz or al-atrāk al-ghuzzīya (ghuzz being the Arabic version of Oghuz).⁷ The Oghuz are encountered in the eighth-century Orkhon River inscriptions in early Turkic from Mongolia.⁸ However, the term Oghuz did not originally denote a people, but was rather a political term meaning a ‘tribal union’.⁹ Groupings called Oghuz played an important role in an earlier Central Asian Turkish empire, the Second Gök Türk Khanate, but we cannot be sure that these necessarily had any ethnic connection with the Seljūqs or even with the Oghuz we encounter in the tenth century around the Aral Sea.¹⁰ A report by an unnamed Khurāsānī historian cited by Ibn al-Athīr discussing the Oghuz of twelfth-century Transoxiana who kidnapped the Seljūq sultan Sanjar provides one of the few pieces of evidence for their origins: ‘ These Ghuzz are a people who migrated from the border region of the furthest lands of the Turks to Transoxiana in the days of al-Mahdī and converted to Islam. ’ ¹¹

The original lands of this Oghuz grouping were thus probably in Mongolia, home to several Turkish empires. A migration into Transoxiana (or more probably the Syr Darya steppe to its north) around 158/775–169/785, the dates of the ‘Abbāsid Caliph al-Mahdī’s reign, is supported by some circumstantial evidence.¹² At any rate, the eighth and early ninth centuries witnessed a chain of migrations across Eurasia; with the collapse of the Second Gök Türk Khanate in 744, a power struggle among the Turks ensued, and the movement of the Oghuz and other confederations like the Qarluqs into western Central Asia forced out the existing Turkish population, the Pechenegs, into the Ural-Itil region.¹³

According to Sharaf al-Dīn Marvazī, a physician who served at the Seljūq court, a second major wave of migrations was precipitated by events in southern Manchuria:

To [the Turks] belong the Qūn; they came from the land of Qitāy, fearing the Qitākhān. They (were) Nestorian Christians, and they had migrated from their habitat, being pressed for pastures … The Qūn were pursued by a people called the Qāy, who being more numerous and stronger than they drove them out of these [new] pasture lands. They then moved on to the territory of the Shārī, and the Shārī migrated to the land of the Türkmäns who in their turn shifted to the eastern parts of the Ghuzz country. The Ghuzz Turks then moved to the territory of the Bajanāk [Pechenegs], near the shores of the [Black]¹⁴ Sea.¹⁵

This valuable but problematic report has provoked much scholarly debate about the identity of the tribes and the date of the migrations.¹⁶ The Qitākhān is clearly the Khitan ruler and the Qāy are generally accepted to be the people called Hsi in Chinese. The date for the Khitan attack on the Qāy has been put as early as 870,¹⁷ but the Khitans – also known by their Chinese dynastic name of Liao – are generally agreed to have emerged as a major power in the first decade of tenth century.¹⁸ On the other hand, the movement of the Pechenegs into the region of the Black Sea is attested by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, a well-informed tenth-century Byzantine source;¹⁹ his account cannot refer to events any later than c. 900, and it has been argued that they should be placed around 825–865.²⁰ It is difficult to imagine that the rise of the Khitans could have more or less simultaneously precipitated a chain reaction thousands of miles away at the other extremity of Eurasia, let alone one which may have preceded their appearance by more than 50 years.

Pritsak attempted to solve the chronological difficulties by suggesting that Marvazī’s report conflates two separate but connected migratory movements westwards, the first occuring in the late ninth century, the second precipitated by the rise of the Tanguts on the eastern borders of Tibet, around 1000–1050.²¹ The evidence for this is complex and not wholly satisfactory, but the core of Marvazī’s information, that the rise of the Khitan dynasty set off a chain of westward migrations, is likely to be true,²² even if they cannot be held responsible for the Oghuz move into the Black Sea steppe. However, the extent and nature of these migrations is debatable, and other factors may have been at work. Evidence discussed below indicates increased aridity in Central Asia from c. 900 onwards. This may also have contributed to these migrations as sources of pasture, essential for feeding the animals on which a nomadic lifestyle relies, dried up. Chinese sources record that some tribes in the tenth century starved due to drought.²³ However, it is not possible to reconcile the precise details given by Marvazī with other historical facts.

Thus over the eighth to tenth centuries there were probably several migrations of groups known as Oghuz who were gradually pushed westwards from Mongolia into Central Asia, and then towards the Volga. This series of migrations lies behind the confusion in the sources about the original homeland of the Oghuz groups, which is placed by some not in Mongolia but in the area approximating the south of modern Kazakhstan and northern Kyrghyzstan, stretching from Lake Issyk Kul to Yangikant on the western extremity of the Syr Darya River, near the Aral Sea,²⁴ and by oth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• A note on transliteration
• Introduction: the early Seljūqs in mediaeval and modern historiography
• 1 The origins and early history of the Seljuqs: Western Eurasia and Transoxiana, c. 900–1025
• 2 The tribes and the Seljūq dynasty
• 3 Warfare, conquest and migration: the Seljūqs in Central Asia, Iran and Iraq to 1055
• 4 The Seljūqs and Islam
• 5 The nature and impact of the Turkish invasions: Anatolia and the Middle East, 1029–71
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index