“Turks” was the collective name given by Arab authors to the members of the nomad tribes who roamed the great steppes and wastes between the northeastern frontiers of the Muslim world and the borders of China. From these areas, they occasionally expanded and threatened the peace of their neighbours. The Huns, whose attacks did so much to destroy the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, came from this group, as did the Mongols who were later to cause such havoc in the Near East. The Turks were almost entirely nomad in lifestyle, dependent on their horses, flocks and their hardy Bactrian camels. Only in a few areas along the fringes of the Muslim world, in towns like Jand on the lower reaches of the Syr Darya (Jaxartes) river had any of them settled down; most of them, however, remained as nomads, jealous of their traditional ways and suspicious of the culture of the urban and settled folk they came into contact with. The nomad Turks were essentially pagan, although those who encountered settled peoples tended to convert to Islam. Like all nomad peoples, they had a very decentralized “political” system; prestige and some power lay in the hands of families who established themselves as ruling clans and sometimes took the title of jabghū or khāqān, but their power remained dependent on their acceptability to their followers; only when Turks came to rule settled communities were the rulers able to acquire any effective authority over their tribesmen, and even then it was often bitterly resented.
The Arabs had come into contact with the Turks from the earliest days of the conquest of Khurāsān, and the Muslims of the area always had to struggle to contain them and defend the settled territories. But, despite setbacks, they had always been successful, until the beginning of the fifth/eleventh century. That is not to say, of course, that there were no Turks within the Muslim world. We have seen how large a part Turks played in the armies of both ‘Abbasid caliphs and the amīrs of the successor states. These were almost all working as professional soldiers; there do not seem to have been any Turks living as nomads or transhumants in the Near East. Nor were there any Turks living a tribal life; they owed their loyalties and their social organization to the military framework in which they operated and their allegiance to the commander of the group of ghilmān in which they served, rather than to a clan or kinship group. The Turks who swept through the eastern Islamic world in the fifth/eleventh century were, by contrast, whole people on the move; they came with their animals and their tents, groups of poor, often desperate pastoralists, seeking booty if they could find it but more important, grazing for the precious beasts on which they depended for their survival. These were the people the Muslim sources came to call Türkmen, to distinguish them from other Turks, already established in the Near East or serving in the retinue of the Seljuk sultans. The Seljuk family did not lead this movement but rather followed in its wake and attempted, with some success, to forge a traditional Muslim state out of this unpromising material.
The Türkmen who flooded into the Near East came from a group known as the Ghuzz or Oghuz. They were supposedly divided into nine tribes, so were known in Turkish as the Dokuz (nine) Oghuz, or, as the Muslim sources chose to write it, Taghuzzghuzz. It seems that they had moved into the area of the lower Syr Darya, to the southeast of the Aral Sea, at the beginning of the fifth/eleventh century when one of their leading families, the Seljuks, became Muslim. In this position, they became involved as allies and mercenaries in the complex struggles for control of Muslim Transoxania between the last representatives of the Iranian Samanid dynasty, the Turkish Karakhanids and the great Maḥmūd of Ghazna, Turkish by origin but thoroughly assimilated into the Muslim world. The eponymous Seljuk seems to have died before his family began their march west. One of his sons Arslan (Lion) Isrā’īl entered Transoxania with his followers, but in about 418/1027, he was arrested by Maḥmūd – and his followers, under the leadership of his son Qutlumush, were driven out of Maḥmūd’s domains, not eastwards whence they had come, but towards the west. Destitute and without any territory to call their own, they fled along the southern flanks of the mountains of Ṭabaristān and Daylam, the congenial upland pastures of Āzarbayjān, which thus became the first area of central Islamic lands to suffer their onslaught. Here, they plundered and attempted to establish themselves without great success, since they were consistently opposed by the local Kurdish population. Many of them were forced to flee to the wild mountains of the Hakkāri Kurds to the southeast of Lake Van, while others went to Iraq, where they briefly occupied Mosul before being defeated by Qirwāsh b. al-Muqallad al-‘Uqaylī with his Arab and Kurdish army in 475/1044. It was only when more Turks joined them from the east that these Türkmen were able to establish themselves as a dominant population and transform the ethnic map of the Near East.
Arslan Isrā’īl had two nephews, cousins of Qutlumush, called Tughrïl Beg and Chagrï Beg, who remained in the traditional lands of the tribe on the Syr Darya. But during the 420s/1030s, they were driven out by their local rivals and were obliged to attack the Ghaznavid towns in Transoxania. Here, they were received with caution but not complete hostility by the local notables. The rule of the Ghaznavids was oppressive, in that taxes were heavy and, by this time, not very efficient. The Ghaznavid Sultan Mas‘ūd naturally marched to defend his lands, but in 431/1040, he met the Seljuk army at Dandānqān near Marv and was decisively and totally defeated. It is interesting to note that the Seljuks are said to have had 16,000 horsemen in this battle, as well as another 2,000 they had left to guard the camp. While this was smaller than the Ghaznavid army, it was probably very much greater than the armies normally employed by the Buyids and their rivals in Iraq and western Iran.
After Dandānqān, the Ghuzz Turks of Tughrïl’s army followed in the traces of their predecessors, with whom they soon joined up while Chaghrï remained in Khurāsān. The lead was taken by the Türkmen, under the nominal leadership of Ibrāhīm Ïnal, a member of the Seljuk family; by 433/1041–1042, he had established himself in Rayy before moving on the next year to Hamadhān. Tughrïl himself followed more slowly, trying to establish a rudimentary administration as he did. By 442/1050–1051, he was in Iṣfahān, where he seems to have paused. He diverted the restless Türkmen, under Ibrāhīm Ïnāl and Qutlumush, towards the eastern territories of the Byzantine Empire, while he himself made a treaty with Abū Kālījār, the Buyid ruler of Fārs, and entered into negotiations with the Caliph al-Qā’im in Baghdad. In Baghdad, all was chaos. The Buyid sovereign al-Malik al-Raḥīm was quite unable to establish any sort of government. An ambitious Turkish ghulām commander, al-Basāsīrī, was scheming to bring Iraq over to the Fatimid cause. In these circumstances, it was natural that the caliph’s wazīr, Ibn al-Muslima, looked for support to the new power in the east, especially as Tughrïl made clear his devotion to the Sunnī cause and his hatred for the “heretic” Buyids. Tughrïl’s position grew stronger as each year passed. In 440/1048, Abū Kālījār died and Fārs was open to Türkmen raids; Shīrāz was raided in 444/1052–1053, and even Ahwāz, in torrid Khūzistān, was attacked. In 447/1055, Tughrïl announced his intention of making the Ḥajj and of attacking the Fatimids. He assembled his followers in the Zagros Mountains, and in Ramaḍān 447/December 1055, he entered Baghdad. Al-Basāsīrī fled; al-Malik al-Raḥīm was deposed. The era of the Great Seljuks had begun.