Seljuk Turks

12 Key excerpts on "Seljuk Turks"

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  eBook - ePub

  Early Seljuq History

  A New Interpretation

  • A.C.S. Peacock(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Introduction The early Seljūqs in mediaeval and modern historiography The subject of this book is the rise of a group of Turks from their origins as an obscure tribe living in the west Eurasian steppes to rulers of an empire that dominated the Middle East and Central Asia. Led by the descendants of the chief Seljūq b. Duqāq, in the first half of the eleventh century the Turks captured the established centres of civilisation of the Islamic world – the great cities of Transoxiana, Iran and Iraq – and reached far into Anatolia and the Caucasus. The Ghaznavid, Būyid and Byzantine Empires that dominated Central Asia, Iran and Iraq, and Anatolia all met defeat at the hands of the armies of Turkish nomads. 1 This book examines how this sudden transformation from tribe to empire came about, concentrating on the little-known but formative period up to the death of the second sultan, Alp Arslān, in 465/1072. The period of Seljūq rule, the eleventh and twelfth centuries, marks a turning point in demography, religion and administration in the Middle East. The demography of the region changed permanently, for the invasions of the Seljūqs were accompanied by – indeed were part of – significant migrations. Ultimately these led to the formation of Turkish populations in Anatolia, Azerbaijan and the Caucasus that exist there today. The Seljūq period also marks the reassertion of Sunni domination in the Middle East, which had been eclipsed by the rise of the Shi’ite Būyid dynasty in Iran and Iraq and the Ismā’īlī Fāṭimid Empire in Syria, Egypt and North Africa in the tenth century. It was under Seljūq rule that scholars like al-Ghazālī reconciled Sufism with orthodox Islam, and it was then that the madrasa or religious school came to prominence. Both developments were to shape the subsequent religious and intellectual history of the Middle East

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  A History Of Persia (Volume 2)

  • Sir Percy Sykes(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  OGHRIL BEG .

  CHAPTER LII THE COMING OF THE Seljuk Turks

  While Apulia and Sicily were subdued by the Norman lance, a swarm of northern shepherds overspread the kingdoms of Persia; their princes of the race of Seljuk erected a splendid and solid empire from Samarcand to the confines of Greece and Egypt.—GIBBON .

  The Importance of the Seljuks

  .—The previous chapter is little more than a medley, dealing as it does with numerous short-lived dynasties which seized upon various provinces of the decrepit Caliphate and then tumbled to pieces mainly from internal dissensions. The advent of a new power, the Seljuk Turks, constitutes a notable epoch in the history of the Middle and Near East, if only because it swept away these insignificant and divided dynasties and once again united Islam under a single powerful sway, stretching from Turkestan to the Mediterranean Sea. More than this, the Seljuks, with the fervour of recent converts, revitalized Islam, just as the Norsemen revitalized Christendom, and when Europe under Norman leaders attacked the East under the impulse of the Crusades it was the light horse of the Seljuks which met the heavy horse of the Crusaders.1

  Their Origin

  .—The Seljuks were a branch of the Ghuzz Turks, from whom, however, they kept distinct. Their founder was Tukák (signifying a bow), the father of Seljuk, who with his tribe crossed from Turkestan into Transoxiana and embraced Islam with deep fervour. He and his descendants took part in the wars of the period, and speedily came into collision with Mahmud. The story runs that the great Conqueror asked Israil, the son of Seljuk, how many men followed him to battle, to which the nomad chief replied that if he despatched an arrow to his tents one hundred thousand men would prepare for war, but that if his bow were seen two hundred thousand men would join the former force. Sultan Mahmud, alarmed at this new power, imprisoned Israil, and, hoping probably to weaken the tribe by moving it away from its habitat, settled it in the district of Nisa,1

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  The Turkic Peoples in World History

  • Joo-Yup Lee(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Rum Seljuqs: Evolution of a Dynasty . London; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.
• Peacock, Andrew Charles Spencer. Early Seljuq History: A New Interpretation . Abingdon: Routledge, 2010.
• Vásáry, István. “Two Patterns of Acculturation to Islam: The Qarakhanids versus the Ghaznavids and Seljuqs.” In The Age of the Seljuqs , edited by Edmund Herzig and Sarah Stewart, 9–28. London: I. B. Tauris, 2015.

The Ottomans: The Founders of a World Empire

The Ottomans were the Oghuz Turkic and Turkicized people of the Ottoman empire (1299–1922), which was one of the largest and most powerful empires in history. The Ottomans originated as a band of followers of Osman I (r. c. 1299–1324), a Turkmen ruler of a small principality in northwestern Anatolia, in the last decades of the thirteenth century. During its heyday in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman empire conquered much of southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. In the process of conquest, the Ottomans mixed with and Turkicized the various indigenous elements who had long lived in Anatolia and the Balkans and developed a separate Ottoman or Rum identity, distinct from Central Eurasian Turkic peoples.

The Origins and Formation of the Ottomans

The Ottomans originated as a band of the Turkmen followers of Osman I (r. c. 1299–1324), a ruler of a small principality in northwestern Anatolia, in the late thirteenth century. Osman’s ancestors, whom the fifteenth-century Ottoman chroniclers claimed to belong to the Qayi branch of the Oghuz, had come to Anatolia from Central Asia during the Seljuk or Mongol period. The warriors who coalesced around Osman included new converts made up of various elements living in the northwestern corner of Anatolia.23 In mid-thirteenth-century Anatolia, it was the non-Turkic elements who formed the majority. William of Rubruck, the Franciscan missionary who visited Anatolia on his way back from the Mongol empire in 1255, writes in his travelogue as follows: “As for Turkey, I can inform you that not one man in ten there is a Saracen; rather are they all Armenians and Greeks … ”24 Ibn Baṭūṭah (d. 1377), the Moroccan traveler who made an extensive tour around the Asian continent in the fourteenth century, also visited Anatolia in 1332, and wrote: “There are now many Christians under the protection of the Muslim Turkmens.”25 Over time, throughout their long rule, the expanding Ottomans mixed with and Turkicized the various indigenous peoples who had long resided in Anatolia and the Balkans. The Ottomans also absorbed non-Turkic elements, in part, through the recruitment system known as the devshirme. Every year, the Ottoman state collected “healthy, well-built, intelligent, and honest looking boys” mainly from the Balkans. These boys were converted to Islam, taught Turkish, and trained to serve the Ottoman empire as soldiers and administrators. They became “non-Muslim-turned-Turks.”26 In short, the modern Ottomans emerged from the mixing of ethnic Turkmens and non-Turkic elements, such as Greeks, Bulgharians, and Serbians, among others.27 As a matter of fact, the mixed ethnic nature of the Ottomans was noted by the sixteenth-century Ottoman historian Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī (1541–1600). In his Künhüʾl-aḫbār, a history of the Arab caliphates, the Turkic and Chinggisid dynasties, and the Ottoman empire, Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī remarks that the Ottoman elite of the sixteenth century were mostly of non-Turkic origin: “Most of the inhabitants of Rum are of confused ethnic origin. Among its notables there are few whose lineage does not go back to a convert to Islam … ”28