The Seljuk Turks and Their Sultanate
Late in the afternoon, August 26, 1071, the Byzantine emperor Romanus Diogenes lost control over his infantry attempting to wheel about and return to the camp. In the morning, he had sought to force a decisive battle against the Seljuk Turks under their sultan Alp Arslan on the rolling plains just west of the fortress at Manzikert.1 The emperor Romanus IV, a leading general, had ascended to the throne three years earlier, pledging to end Turkish attacks. At Manzikert, Romanus fielded an army forty-five thousand strong, but it comprised Pecheneg and Norman mercenaries and ill-trained provincial infantry. Alp Arslan commanded twenty thousand expert Turkish horsemen, veterans of battles from Transoxiana to Anatolia. This time the Turks fought not as allies of the caliph but as the soldiers of jihad, holy war, against the unbeliever under their own sultan. The day before the battle, the Pechenegs learned they were kinsmen of the Seljuk Turks and deserted. In the morning, Romanus drew up his battle line in a classic formation to counter horse archers. He commanded the infantry in the center, while strong cavalry detachments guarded the infantry’s flanks and rear. Romanus sent word south of his position to a secondary column stationed north of Ahlat on Lake Van to force march and take the Turks in the flank or rear. Romanus conducted a measured advance, but failed to lure the Turks into charging his infantry. The secondary column never appeared. Late in the afternoon, Romanus ordered a halt and withdrawal. At that moment, the rear guard cavalry under the emperor’s brother-in-law Andronicus Ducas, and then the Norman knights, treacherously galloped off the field, while the panicked infantry cried out that the emperor had been slain. Alp Arslan saw his chance and led a furious charge into the disordered Byzantine ranks. Thousands of Byzantines were cut down in flight. The Turks captured the emperor and his camp. Today Manzikert is the sleepy Turkish town of Malazgirt, its Medieval fortress converted into an outside café. On an eastern rise overlooking the town stretches a long stadium.2 Its entrance is flanked by two monoliths that recall far more the monolith in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) than the Pillars of Asia. Signs greet visitors proclaiming fanciful historical myths. Each year Turkish nationalists descend on the site to celebrate the Seljuk victory. The jingoist slogans and rituals aside, the battle was decisive, for it signaled the collapse of Byzantine power in Asia Minor and its settlement by the Turks.
The Battle of Manzikert marked the climax of a long march of the Seljuk Turks westward from their original home on the steppes to the north and west of the Aral Sea to a new homeland in central Anatolia. The ancestors of the Seljuk Turks were members of a loose Oghuz confederation who had migrated from farther east to the arid steppes of Kazakhstan during the eighth and ninth centuries.3 Their rulers styled themselves as yabgu rather than kaghan, because they were resentful vassals of the Khazar kaghan. Oghuz Turks bred horses, sheep, and hybrid camels, which were a cross between the two-humped Bactrian camel and the single-humped dromedary of the Near East.4 These hybrid camels, sure-footed on the ice and inured to the winter cold on the steppes, were prized as the beast of burden on the Silk Road.
The Oghuz Turks also prospered off the slave trade. Each year, thousands of Slavic slaves (dubbed Saqaliba in Arabic sources) were herded from Atil or Bulgar on the River Volga across the steppes to the markets of Khwarazm, which straddled the rich valley of the lower River Oxus (Amu Darya) emptying its waters north into the Aral Sea. From the Khwarazmian cities of Jurianiya and Kath, the unfortunate souls were driven south to the markets of Bukhara, the Samanid capital and cultural center of Muslim Transoxiana.5 The Abbasid diplomat Ahmad ibn Fadlan marveled at the comeliness of these fair-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed Rus warrior merchants, Scandinavians from the far north who sold great numbers of Slavs destined for the Islamic slave markets.6 In early March of 922, Ahmad ibn Fadlan and his party traversed this route north to visit the court of the kaghan of the Bulgars on the middle Volga River. Years later, ibn Fadlan in his journal still felt exhausted from the bitter cold and deep snow as his party covered great distances from dawn to dusk for fifteen days until they reached winter settlements of Oghuz Turks, whom he called in Arabic Ghuzz Turks.7 Ibn Fadlan reports how he and his companions, sons of the sunny skies of Baghdad, had to bundle up in multiple layers of clothing, and wear the felt caps and jackets, sheepskin cloaks, and leather boots of nomads.8 The ever-perceptive ibn Fadlan gives our best report on the customs of the Oghuz Turks before they converted to Islam. The envoy’s Oghuz hosts, long familiar with Muslim merchants, greeted their guests in Arabic with the profession that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His prophet. Ibn Fadlan, however, realized that the greeting was uttered out of politeness rather than conviction. For Oghuz Turks happily invoked the Muslim God along with their traditional prayers to the lord of the universal sky, Tengri. The success and survival of ibn Fadlan’s company depended on the hospitality of the Oghuz Turks, who lent horses, camels, and money on the solemn word that the Arab visitors would repay in full once their mission was accomplished.9 Among the Turks, such gift exchanges sustained caravans crossing the steppes, and so assured the delivery of linens, cottons, dried fruits, grains, and well-wrought weapons and tools from the Islamic world that were vital to life on the steppes. Woe to any guest, Turk or foreign merchant, who failed to keep his word, for the malefactor was tied to the branches of two different trees, and then the branches were released to spring back to their original position, tearing the man asunder.10 One’s word was his bond, and any faithlessness endangered all and merited the harshest of punishments.
Ibn Fadlan’s Turkish hosts also expected rich gifts of silk and silver, and news about Baghdad, the fabled city of the caliph. Ahmad ibn Fadlan, piously fastidious about cleanliness, deplored the miserable lives of these nomads who were, in his opinion, little better than the animals they herded. He was also shocked by the immodesty of the women, who were unveiled and unashamed to relieve themselves in the presence of their menfolk and guests. Ibn Fadlan’s host laughed at his guest’s embarrassment, and replied through a translator that his wives allowed no other man near them, and they were more faithful than Muslim women, veiled and covered, who seduced other men.11 Brutal winters on the steppes permitted no privacy for families huddled together within their felt tents for months. In many ways, the lives of these Oghuz Turks resembled those of the Scythians described by the Greek historian Herodotus over thirteen centuries earlier. Ibn Fadlan reports the sacrifice of horses, which were propped up in the air on poles around the tomb of a deceased lord. Shamans, in dreams or trances, confirmed that the sacrificed horses carried the deceased to the ancestors.12 The Turks, just like the later Mongols, had taboos on washing, especially during the winter months, and often they allowed their clothes to rot and fall off.13 During his brief stay, ibn Fadlan was both fascinated and repelled by the habits of the Oghuz Turks. The polished Abbasid courtier could never have conceived that just three generations later, the descendants of these nomads, under their own sultan, would enter the city of Baghdad in triumph as the saviors of Islam.
Perhaps a generation after ibn Fadlan had visited, Dukak, leader of an obscure clan of the Oghuz Turks, led his people in a gradual trek from the northern shores of the Aral Sea east in the direction of the greener pastures around Lake Issyk.14 His followers merely numbered one hundred horsemen, one thousand five hundred camels, and fifty thousand sheep. Twenty years later, in ca. 985, Dukak’s son Seljuk settled his people around Jand or Yenikent, “new settlement,” on the lower Jaxartes (Syr Darya), with the permission of the Iranian-speaking shah of Khwarazm, who was a vassal of the Samanid emir of Bukhara.15 Seljuk and his followers were obligated to defend Khwarazm against Turkish marauders from the north. They also embraced en masse Islam, and Seljuk was revered thereafter for leading his nation into the community of believers (umma) so that his followers henceforth adopted the ethnic name of Seljuk Türkmen. He bestowed Muslim names on his three sons: Arslan Isra’il, Mika’il, and Musa.16 Seljuk, reportedly living over a century, proved a worthy nomadic ruler, increasing the prosperity and numbers of his people. Within a generation of Seljuk’s death, his heirs turned a tribe on the remote fringes of Transoxiana into the arbiters of the Muslim world.
In 1005, the exile Isma’il Muntasir, the last Samanid emir, was murdered by his Arab hosts near Merv. His death ended five years of pyrrhic victories to restore the Samanid emirate.17 In 999, the Bughra khan Ahmad Arslan had defeated and captured Isma’il Muntasir, who was compelled to relinquish Bukhara and Samarkand. Isma’il, however, soon escaped prison, recruited Oghuz Turkish horse archers, and raised abortive revolts in Khwarazm and Khurasan.18 The sudden collapse of Samanid power ignited petty wars across Transoxiana and eastern Iran, as local dynasts and civic elites settled by force long-standing quarrels with neighboring rivals.19 Two great rivals, the Karakhanids and the Ghaznavids, each claimed the Samanid legacy. The Bughra khan ruled from Kashgar the powerful Karakhanid confederacy of nine inner tribes that was the first Muslim Turkish state on the central Eurasian steppes.20 He also held sway over the western cities of the Tarim Basin, Kuchea and Khotan, home to many Turkish speakers who followed Buddhism or Islam. The most powerful of the Bughra khans, Ali Tigim (1020–1034), nearly realized his dream of claiming the Samanid political legacy, for he had secured the caravan cities of the Tarim Basin.21 But Ali Tigim faced rivals within his own family because the descendants of Khan Ahmad Arslan had parceled out appanages to all members of the royal family so that each Bughra khan invariably faced challengers from among his kinsmen. He also faced a deadly rival in the Ghaznavid sultan Mahmud.
The Ghaznavid sultans, descendants of Turkish slave soldiers or mamluks in Samanid employ, opposed the Karakhanids, whom they dismissed as nomadic interlopers. Ghaznavid sultans, although Turkish in origin, were Persian in speech and patrons of Muslim poets, artists, and architects.22 Persian Muslim jurists and bureaucrats administered the realm; the Ghaznavid sultans also received firmans, or edicts ruling on administrative or judicial matters, that designated them deputies of the Abbasid caliph.23 Foremost, the Ghaznavid sultans were zealous Sunni Muslims who waged jihad against the unbelievers in northern India. The emir Sebüktigin, who founded the Ghaznavid state, was born on the steppes around Lake Issyk. At age twelve, in ca. 965, he was captured and sold into slavery in Bukhara.24 His master, Alp Tigin, also a Samanid mamluk of Turkish origin, recognized the brilliance of Sebüktigin, to whom he married his daughter.25 In 977, Sebüktigin succeeded his father-in-law to the lordship of Ghazna, in central Afghanistan. Hailed as the lion of Ghazna, Sebüktigin gained control over the strategic passes across the Hindu Kush, and repeatedly raided the Punjab and Kashmir, sacking Buddhist monasteries and Hindu temples. His Turkish horse archers, either mamluks or mercenaries just off the steppes, perfected tactics to counter Indian infantry and war elephants. They also learned about the size and wealth of India—invaluable knowledge for all future Muslim conquerors of the subcontinent. During his reign of two decades, Sebüktigin turned his own realm, the ancient Bactria of diverse faiths since the Kushan era, into the Muslim land of Afghanistan today. His son and successor, Mahmud (997–1030), was even more ambitious, for he aspired to dominate all of Eastern Islam. Mahmud, the hammer of the infidels, waged seventeen campaigns against the Punjab and Kashmir, or one Indian campaign every second year for a generation.26 In his most daring raid, in 1024, Mahmud sacked the celebrated temple of Shiva at Somnath in Gujarat. The shrine was stripped of its gold and silver objects, and its great silver lingam of Shiva was smashed to bits. The silver was later melted down and recast to adorn the minbar of the sultan’s mosque in Ghaznva. Muslim chroniclers magnified the glorious feats of Mahmud, while Hindu writers deplored his iconoclastic atrocities, which Hindu nationalists still condemn today.
Simultaneously, Mahmud battled his Karakhanid rivals for supremacy over Khurasan, Khwarazm, and Transoxiana. The three sons of Seljuk fought as allies on both sides, repeatedly switching allegiances, and even backing the shah of Khwarazm’s brief bid for independence.27 The eldest brother, Arslan Isra’il, exercised supreme authority, but his younger brothers, Mika’il and Musa, each commanded his own warriors. All three brothers recruited many more Oghuz clans and tribes who migrated off the steppes into Transoxiana during the desultory fighting. The Seljuk Turks swelled from a modest tribe into a consortium of many tribes under independent leaders clamoring for fresh pastures, booty, and glory. Each of Seljuk’s sons was constantly taxed to discipline and direct his warriors toward a common goal. The sultan Mahmud grew alarmed over the rising numbers of Seljuk Turks. In 1029, he treacherously seized and imprisoned Arslan Isra’il, who soon died in captivity, and then Mahmud scattered the Seljuk Turks across Khurasan.28 Mahmud’s treachery backfired. By 1035, the brothers Chaghri and Tughrul Bey, sons of Seljuk’s second son, Mika’il, had rallied their followers and gained mastery of Khurasan, once the heartland of the Parthians.29 The new Ghaznavid sultan, Masud, was compelled to recognize the fait accompli in exchange for Seljuk promises of loyalty. The fraternal team of Chaghri and Tughrul Bey, just like previous ones among the Turkish nomads, worked in tandem to forge a Muslim Turkish state in Khurasan along Samanid lines.30 Professional Iranian bureaucrats governed the cities; councils of elders administered the villages. Any corrupt official was severely punished. The brothers imposed strict discipline over their tribal regiments, which protected caravans from the chaotic fighting between Ghaznavids and Karakhanids, much to the approval of merchant princes. The brothers piously patronized mosques and medresses, and so won praise from Islamic jurists (ulema).
In 1037, Tughrul Bey declared himself sultan at Nishapur, after audaciously raiding to the very walls to Ghaznva.31 An enraged Masud, campaigning in India, declared war on his unruly Seljuk vassals. On May 23, 1040, the armies of Sultan Masud and of the brothers Tughrul Bey and Chaghri clashed in a decisive battle at Dandanakan, to the west of Merv (today in Turkmenistan).32 The Seljuk army of twenty thousand horse archers encircled and annihilated the Ghaznavid army of fifty thousand, complete with sixty Indian war elephants. For weeks, the Seljuks had retreated west from Merv in the direction of Sarakhs, a caravansary on the eastern border of modern Iran. Masud’s army suffered from harassing attacks of Turkish horse archers, who laid waste the land and poisoned the wells. The Ghaznavid soldiers, dehydrated and demoralized, broke ranks and fled before the hail of Turkish arrows, while their own stampeding elephants, maddened by wounds, rampaged among the Ghaznavid infantry. Masud escaped across the Hindu Kush to Lahore, where he was to seek his political future in northern India.33 The Seljuk victory proved a decisive turning point.
In the next several years, Chaghri secured the lands of eastern Islam to the banks of the Jaxartes (Syr Darya) and the western slopes of the Hindu Kush. The Bughra khan in Kashgar acknowledged Seljuk overlordship and renounced his claims to Khwarazm.34 The fame of Tughrul Bey raced across the Eurasian steppes so that nomadic Turkish warriors flocked to Khurasan to take service with the legendary Turkish sultan. Just two years after the victory of Dandanakan, the first of these Türkmen bands raided into Armenia, recently annexed by the Byzantine Empire.35 Meanwhile, Tughrul Bey relentlessly marched west across northern Iran with the aim of liberating Baghdad from Buyid rule. For nearly a century, Buyid emirs, who were Shi’ite sectarians of Persian origin, exercised power over western Iran and Iraq.36 They reduced the Abbasid caliph to a pitiful figurehead so as to placate the large restive Sunni populations. After fifteen years of hard fighting, Tughrul Bey overthrew the three Buyid emirates. In December 1055, Tughrul Bey at the head of his army entered Baghdad to the cheers of the Sunni residents who detested the ignominious Buyid rule. A nervously grateful caliph, al-Ka’im, bestowed supreme command of his armies and a daughter in marriage on his Turkish sultan.37 Tughrul Bey quickly discovered ruling a great empire was far more daunting than winning it. Possession of Baghdad conferred legitimacy on Tughrul Bey and his heirs, but the city was nearly 1,800 miles from the strategic northeastern frontier on the Jaxartes River. Beyond the frontier, great Seljuk sultans in Baghdad had to cultivate alliances with the Turkish tribes of Kazakhstan and Zhetysu, who furnished fresh recruits to the sultan’s army.38 But Tughrul Bey, as the defender of the faithful, inherited an even more important priority, the war against the Fatimid caliphs of Cairo, who controlled the Levant and the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. In 909, the hidden imam, Abu Abdallah al-Shi’i, emerged out of the deserts of Maghreb, the far Muslim West, and announced that he was the true expected one and caliph, al-Mahdi.39 He claimed direct descent from Ali and Fatima, the only daughter of Muhammad, through their younger son, the martyred al-Husayn, and then from Isma’il ibn Jafar, the seventh and last visible imam on earth. Their rivals, the Twelver Shi’ites of Eastern Islam, instead followed the descent of Isma’il’s younger brother Musa, whose line ended with the twelfth visible imam, Hujjat Allah al-Mahdi, who went into hiding at Samara in 873/4.40 The Seveners or Isma’ilites professed a radical theology to bring about the Apocalypse through violent means. Isma’ilites often penetrated urban guilds as a cover to set up networks of secret societies that sent out hit squads targeting Sunni rulers and theologians. Abu Abdallah called for the cleansing of a decadent Islam that inspired puritanical Berber tribesmen to wage holy war. In the next sixty years, Berber armies in the name of their Fatimid caliph swept across North Africa, conquered the wealthy Nile valley, and occupied the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina.41 At their capital, Cairo, from 973 on, the later Fatimid caliphs aimed to take Baghdad and unite all Islam. Yet they also shifted from leaders of a revolutionary movement to monarchs of a bureaucratic state headed by viziers and professional officials.42 Fatimid armies comprised disciplined regiments of Berber cavalry, Armenian mercenaries, and slave soldiers of Slavic or black African origin.43
In 1055, Tughrul Bey, as defender of Sunni Islam, fought a pitiless war against the soldiers of the heretical Fatimid Caliph across the strategic grasslands of al-Jazirah, “the island,” today the borderlands straddling the frontiers of Syria, Turkey, and Iraq. In 1057–1058, Fatimid forces even occupied Baghdad, where for forty consecutive Fridays, muezzins from atop the city’s tiled minarets summoned the faithful to midday prayer in the name of the Fatimid caliph.44 Meanwhile, the rival Abbasid court desperately held out in the palace until Tughrul Bey’s warriors retook the city.
Sultan Tughrul Bey, and his nephew and successor Alp Arslan (1063–1072), the son of Chaghri, faced two additional threats. First, their unruly Seljuk tribesmen found the humid heat of Iraq debilitating. They also could not find pastures in southern Iraq, a land of sown fields and orchards crisscrossed with canals. Baghdad, the jewel of Islam, offered too many attractions and vices to tribesmen who inevitably haggled and clashed with residents in the marketplaces. Urban residents and peasants alike found their Turkish protectors hard masters, and both sultans feared seething resentment among the Arab populations could burst into rebellion.45 Therefore, the sultans stationed their tribal regiments in the al-Jazirah, where they found ample pastures and fresh water for their herds and flocks. Beyond, to the north, lay the high plateau of Armenia, and to the west of the Taurus Mountains the grasslands of central Anatolia, which were the provinces of the Byzantine Empire. The lure of raiding these Christian lands proved irresistible to Seljuk Turks, and both sultans encouraged these attacks to avert a second threat. In 1001, the warrior emperor Basil Bulgaroctonus signed a treaty with the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim recognizing the formal partition of Syria and Mesopotamia (northern Iraq).46 The Fatimid caliph pledged to protect Christian pilgrims leaving Antioch, in Byzantine territory, on their way to Bethlehem and Jerusalem. To Tughrul Bey and Alp Arslan, the emperor in Constantinople was still held in awe as the greatest of Christian monarchs, and equal to the caliph or the emperor of China. They feared the alliance of Constantinople and Cairo would prove too powerful. Little did they know that the Byzantine Empire had long passed its apex and was racked by succession crises, rival factions of bureaucratic and military elites, and widespread discontent in the countryside over oppressive taxes and buyouts of peasant lands by “powerful ones” (dynatoi).47 The Armenians settled along the empire’s eastern frontier were further alienated by the suppression of their national church in favor of the imperial Orthodox one. The inept heirs of Basil II, habitually short of money, debased the coinage and slashed military budgets, while corrupt officials raided the treasury and thwarted any reforms.48
Therefore, neither Tughrul Bey nor Alp Arslan ever planned to overthrow the Byzantine Empire, pace the claims made in the jingoistic signs that welcome visitors to the great stadium in modern Malazgirt today. At most, they directed Seljuk bands to distract the Byzantine army from assisting the Fatimid army in Syria. But these Turkish raiders found little effective resistance, and grasslands of central Anatolia and Armenia that were similar to their original homeland of the Eurasian steppes. At Manzikert, Alp Arslan had redeployed his army from Syria based on reports of possible Byzantine operations against Turkish bases near the Armenian cities Ani and Kars.49 He was stunned by the size and determination of Romanus’s army, and he offered to negotiate, but Romanus flatly refused. Romanus could not easily levy another such field army, and he needed a decisive victory if he were to intimidate scheming, corrupt bureaucrats of Constantinople into implementing much-needed reform. The battle should have ended in a draw. Romanus was instead betrayed, and his inexperienced infantry then panicked.
Alp Arslan survived his victory at Manzikert by just over a year, for on November 25, 1072, he was felled by an assassin’s dagger while campaigning on the Jaxartes River.50 His son and successor Malik Shah was preoccupied with battling the Fatimids for control of Damascus and Jerusalem, and checking the return of his Ghaznavid foes from India. He had no time for exploiting his father’s victory in Byzantine Asia Minor. Instead, independent bands of Seljuk Turks migrated with their families into Anatolia and carved out their own lordships.51 In northeastern Asia Minor, the ghazi warrior Malik Danishmend ruled his own emirate in the Iris valley (today Yes¸il Irmak) from the citadel of Niksar (Classical Neocaesarea).52 Suleiman ibn Qutalmish, a descendant of Seljuk’s oldest son, seized the cities of Nicaea (Iznik) and Iconium (Konya), declaring himself the sultan of Rum (Arabic for Rome).53 Suleiman’s capable heirs eventually united Muslim Asia Minor and laid the foundations of modern Turkey.
These Seljuk warlords succeeded because their followers found the rolling grasslands of Anatolia, called in Turkish ova, ideal for herding their animals. They were inured to the deep winter snows and blazing summer heat of Anatolia, whereas earlier Arab military colonists settled on the plateau’s southern edge by Abbasid caliphs abandoned their settlement after enduring a single winter.54 Seljuk Turks, in contrast, discovered in Anatolia a fragment of their ancestral home on the Eurasian steppes ringed by mountain ranges cutting it off from the warm waters of the surrounding seas. By their very way of life, they steadily turned Anatolia from a land of farming to one of stock raising over the next three centuries. It has only been put back under the plow in the last two generations. Christian agriculturalists, dwelling in the deep river valleys, quickly came to terms with the conquerors, selling their produce for the leather and woolens of the nomads, and rendering tribute to their Seljuk lords resident in cities.55 For three centuries, Byzantine, Crusader, and Seljuk armies waged desultory wars of attrition over the peninsula that tipped the ecological balance in favor of the nomadic way of life. The fighting ruined the irrigation systems and the Roman system of roads, bridges, and depots. Twenty-five years after the Battle of Manzikert, Byzantine guides were bewildered by how drastically conditions had changed. They could not locate highways and cisterns, and so the leaders of the First Crusade suspected them as perfidious Greeks in league with the Turks.56
The fighting also undermined imperial institutions and the Orthodox Church. Prelates, nobles, and their families fled to Constantinople. The imperial government compensated aristocratic refugees with hereditary titles and new lands in the Balkans, while prelates in the capital continued to collect tithes from their sees, which they never again visited.57 Seljuk Turks blockaded cities in Asia Minor so that Christian residents were compelled to surrender on terms. A Turkish court and its garrison, served by Persian and Apostate Christian officials, ruled from the citadel of each major city, while the cathedral was converted into the principal mosque (ulu camii). Many Christians fled to the cities on the Aegean and Euxine shores, to which the imperial fleet could bring supplies and reinforcements. To be sure, the Turks massacred populations that resisted, enslaved thousands, and targeted monasteries for destruction.58 Even so, most Christians bowed to their new masters. Over these three centuries, many Christians learned Turkish to communicate with their overlords and to bargain with their nomadic neighbors.59 Some Christians remained true to their faith but gave up the Hellenic tongue for Turkish written in the Greek alphabet.60 By the mid-thirteenth century, as hopes of deliverance by the emperor’s army faded, many Christians turned to Islam.
The sultans of Konya built medresses, minarets, and mosques, thereby transforming the urban skyline of Anatolia from a Christian to a Muslim one.61 Christian merchants and craftsmen learned Turkish and Arabic and embraced Islam so that they could compete with their Muslim competitors. Ambitious young men entering the army or bureaucracy had to become Muslims. On the countryside, impoverished, illiterate parish priests ministered to their demoralized peasant congregations.62 Christians adopted not just the Turkish language but many other Turkish manners and material culture. They added yogurt and spices to a Mediterranean grill diet, and they adapted nomadic styles to their jewelry, dress, ceramics, and carpets. In Anatolia of the early thirteenth century, many Christians were ready to seek spiritual solace in Islam if the new faith could be reconciled with their ancient traditions. Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207–1273), Persian poet and Sufi mystic, built the spiritual bridge whereby Anatolian Christians crossed over to Islam.63 He was the son of a theologian and jurist of a medresse in Balkh, and at age twelve, he and his family fled west to escape the Mongols, eventually settling in Konya. In 1244, at age thirty-seven, Jalal ad-Din experienced a mystical conversion upon an encounter with a celebrated ascetic. He promptly reorganized members of the Mawlawiyya order resident at his family’s medresse in Konya, who are today world-famous as the Whirling Dervishes. In his poetry, Jalal ad-Din stressed the oneness of God, and His universal love of humanity.64 Theological debates and nuances among faiths paled into insignificance in comparison to the joy of celebrating the love of God. His followers, in wide flowing white kaftans and tall turbans, danced in a circular movement with one outstretched hand pointing to the sky and the other to the earth, symbolizing the mystical union of God and worshipper. Jalal ad-Din and his followers codified a folk Islam of the Eurasian steppes for Anatolian Christian villagers. Tales abounded celebrating how the charismatic poet and spiritual mentor inspired entire villages of Christians to convert. Today this poetry, music, and dance, which I have witnessed, are still deeply moving. To Christians, long bereft of spiritual fulfillment, the performances and message were awesome, and easily reconciled to the music, festivals, and rules of hospitality of traditional Anatolian village life. In his lifetime, Jalal ad-Din was already acclaimed the Mevlana, “the master,” and his funerary memorial, Yes¸il Türbe in Konya, is the most revered shrine and the premier pilgrimage site of Muslim Turkey.65 Within a generation of the death of the Mevlana, Anatolia had become Turkey, the seat of a new civilization, Muslim in faith, Persian in aesthetics and letters, Turkish in speech, and forever linked by ethos and way of life to the ancestral Turkish homeland on the Eurasian steppes.
The Seljuk Turks achieved a remarkable success in assimilating the conquered. In 1071, Byzantine Anatolia comprised at least twelve million Greek-and Armenian-speaking Christians, whereas the newcomers, arriving in two waves, first in the eleventh and then in the thirteenth century, totaled at most five hundred thousand.66 Yet in three centuries, the Anatolian Christians acquired the language, faith, and identity of their conquerors. The Seljuk Turks’ achievement is all the more remarkable when compared to that of their distant kinsmen, the Turks who simultaneously crossed into India. Between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, successive Turkish conquerors built Muslim empires, centered on Lahore or Delhi and embracing the valleys of the Indus and Ganges Rivers. In power and wealth, Muslim rulers of India far surpassed their contemporaries in Anatolia, but they depended on immigrants of Turkish soldiers from the steppes, and Iranian officials and savants. Even though Islam gained many converts, the masses of India adhered to their ancestral faith and accommodated the newcomers as members of yet one more caste. The Hindu populations proved too numerous and too wedded to their ancestral cults. They ultimately accommodated the newcomers as a separate caste within a broader Hinduism so that they turned Islam into an Indian religion.67
Finally, the Battle of Manzikert profoundly altered the course of history for the Christian world. Romanus Diogenes too did not long survive his defeat at Manzikert. Once brought as a captive before Alp Arslan, Romanus was magnanimously released by the sultan not out of mercy for the defeated, as later Muslim legends claim, but on the promise of a ransom of 1.5 million gold nomismata and an annual tribute of three hundred sixty thousand.68 Alp Arslan shrewdly calculated an emperor returned in disgrace was far more useful than a captive. Romanus returned to his capital to find his stepson Michael Ducas enthroned and guided by his mentor, the historian philosopher Michael Psellus. Romanus had little support and abdicated on promise of a safe retirement into a monastery, but the new emperor’s uncle John Ducas reneged on the agreement. He ordered Romanus blinded.69 The torturers botched the blinding three times, to the horror of a crowd of onlookers who bewailed the pathetic fate of so brave an emperor. In prison, Romanus suffered a lingering death months later due to the inevitable infection. The self-proclaimed genius Michael Psellus, who recorded imperial events since the death of Basil II, had ruined his lazy, mediocre protégé Michael Ducas. Neither was up to the task of routine governing. Together, emperor and counselor, who repudiated Romanus’s treaty with Alp Arslan, were incapable of coping with the triple threat of Normans in southern Italy threatening to invade the Balkans, Pecheneg hordes restless to cross the Danube, and Seljuk Turks overrunning Asia Minor. In 1078, the parsimonious Michael VII Ducas, nicknamed Parapinaces (the “quarter pincher” for debasing the gold currency), was forced to abdicate as the empire plunged into a four-year civil war.70 In the opinion of Sir Steven Runciman, “The state of the Empire in 1081 was such that only a man of great courage or great stupidity would have undertaken its governance.”71 Fortunately, a man of great intelligence, the general Alexius Comnenus, seized the throne and rescued the empire on the brink of collapse. Alexius Comnenus was also most fortunate because his daughter the princess Anna Comnena penned a history narrating his thirty-seven-year reign. She lauds her father’s bravery, but she stresses even more his artful diplomacy. With a careful eye for detail, Anna Comnena rightly emphasizes the achievements of a father whom she idealized, but she also wrote out of frustration. She turned to history, because her retiring husband Bryennius Caesar thwarted her ambitions to ascend to the throne in her own right. He reported his wife’s plotting to his brother-in-law John Comnenus, and so Anna was forced into private life.72 Anna, of course, blamed her younger brother rather than her retiring husband. She followed the time-honored tradition of Greek historians, namely, those who fail to make history find solace in writing it.
During the first five years of his reign, Alexius drove back a Norman invasion of the Balkans, and granted trade concessions to the Venetian Republic in return for naval assistance.73 He then cleared the Aegean of Turkish pirates based at Smyrna (today Izmir), and courted the Cumans into an alliance to defeat Pecheneg invaders in 1091. The survivors among the Pechenegs were settled throughout the Balkans as colonists. Their young men were recruited into the mounted imperial police who patrolled the highways. The next year, Alexius conducted sweeping monetary and fiscal reforms.74 Yet for all his successes, Alexius knew that he still must expel the Seljuk Turks from Asia Minor. Alexius, desperate for mercenaries, remembered the appeal of his predecessor Theophilus 250 years earlier. He implored Pope Urban II and the leading Frankish princes to send him several thousand heavily armored knights.75 Even the haughty Anna Comnena, well-known for her disdain of the rude Westerners, grudgingly acknowledged that charging Frankish knights at full gallop and with leveled lances could sweep all before them on the battlefield and even burst through the walls of Baghdad.76 But at Clermont, on November 27, 1095, Pope Urban called for the liberation of Jerusalem. Tens of thousands, princes, knights, and commoners, across Western Europe assumed the cross, shouting, “God wills it.”77 Alp Arslan had unwittingly triggered a Christian holy war. Seljuk warlords in Anatolia and Syria could hardly restrain their Turkish warriors from attacking Christian pilgrims making their way to Jerusalem. In the next year, instead of mercenaries, Alexius received the First Crusade, and half the armed might of Latin Christendom that came first to save and then to destroy Byzantium.