Seljuk dynasty explained

The Seljuk dynasty, or Seljukids[1] [2] (; Persian: سلجوقیان Saljuqian,[3] alternatively spelled as Seljuqs or Saljuqs), Seljuqs, also known as Seljuk Turks,[4] Seljuk Turkomans[5] or the Saljuqids,[6] was an Oghuz Turkic, Sunni Muslim dynasty that gradually became Persianate and contributed to Turco-Persian culture[7] [8] in West Asia and Central Asia. The Seljuks established the Seljuk Empire (1037–1194), the Sultanate of Kermân (1041–1186) and the Sultanate of Rum (1074–1308), which stretched from Iran to Anatolia and were the prime targets of the First Crusade.

Early history

The Seljuks originated from the Kinik branch of the Oghuz Turks,[9] [10] [11] [12] who in the 8th century lived on the periphery of the Muslim world; north of the Caspian Sea and Aral Sea in their Oghuz Yabgu State[13] in the Kazakh Steppe of Turkestan.[14] During the 10th century, Oghuz had come into close contact with Muslim cities. When Seljuk, the leader of the Seljuk clan, had a falling out with Yabghu, the supreme chieftain of the Oghuz, he split his clan from the bulk of the Oghuz Turks and set up camp on the west bank of the lower Syr Darya. Around 985, Seljuk converted to Islam.[15]

In the 11th century, the Seljuks migrated from their ancestral homelands into mainland Persia, in the province of Khurasan, where they encountered the Ghaznavids. The Seljuks defeated the Ghaznavids at the Battle of Nasa Plains in 1035. Seljuk's grandsons, Tughril and Chaghri, received the insignias of governor, grants of land, and were given the title of dehqan.[16] At the Battle of Dandanaqan, they defeated a Ghaznavid army, and after a successful siege of Isfahan by Tughril in 1050/51,[17] established the Great Seljuk Empire. The Seljuks mixed with the local population and adopted the Persian culture and Persian language in the following decades.[18] [19]

Later period

After arriving in Persia, the Seljuks adopted the Persian culture and used the Persian language as the official language of the government,[20] [21] [22] and played an important role in the development of the Turko-Persian tradition which features "Persian culture patronized by Turkic rulers".[23] Today, they are remembered as great patrons of Persian culture, art, literature, and language.[24] [25] [26]

Seljuk rulers

Rulers of the Seljuk Dynasty

The "Great Seljuks" were heads of the family; in theory their authority extended over all the other Seljuk lines, although in practice this often was not the case. Turkic custom called for the senior member of the family to be the Great Seljuk, although usually the position was associated with the ruler of western Persia.

Titular name(s)Personal nameReign
Bey
Tughril I
1037–1063
Bey
Suleiman
1063
Sultan
Alp Arslan (Arslan I)
1063–1072
Sultan

Jalāl al-Dawlah
Malik Shah I
1072–1092
Sultan

Nasir al-Duniya wa al-Din
Mahmud I
1092–1094
Sultan

Abul Muzaffar Rukn al-Duniya wa al-Din
Barkiyaruq
1094–1105
Sultan

Muizz al-Din
Malik Shah II
1104–1105
Sultan

Ghiyath al-Duniya wa al-Din
Muhammad I Tapar
1105–1118
Sultan

Muizz al-Din
 1118–1153
Khwarazmian dynasty replaces the Seljuk dynasty. From 1157, the Oghuz took control of much of Khurasan, with the remainder in the hands of former Seljuk emirs.

Seljuk sultans of Hamadan

The rulers of western Persia, who maintained a very loose grip on the Abbasids of Baghdad. Several Turkic emirs gained a strong level of influence in the region, such as the Eldiguzids.

In 1194, Toghrul III was killed in battle with the Khwarezm Shah, who annexed Hamadan.

Seljuk rulers of Kerman

See main article: Kerman Seljuk Sultanate. Kerman was a province in southern Persia. Between 1053 and 1154, the territory also included Umman.

or 1074 (before Sultan Shah)

Muhammad abandoned Kerman, which fell into the hands of the Oghuz chief Malik Dinar. Kerman was eventually annexed by the Khwarezmid Empire in 1196.

Seljuk rulers in Syria

To the Artuqids

Sultans/Emirs of Damascus:

Damascus seized by the Burid Toghtekin

Seljuk sultans of Rum (Anatolia)

See main article: Sultanate of Rûm. The Seljuk line, already having been deprived of any significant power, effectively ended in the early 14th century.

See also

Further reading

Notes and References

  1. Book: Neiberg. Michael S.. Michael S. Neiberg. Warfare in World History. 2002. Routledge. 978-1-134-58342-3. 19–20.
  2. Book: Harris. Jonathan. Byzantium and the Crusades. 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing. 978-1-78093-736-6. 39–45.
  3. Book: Rāvandī, Muḥammad. Rāḥat al-ṣudūr va āyat al-surūr dar tārīkh-i āl-i saljūq. Intishārāt-i Asāṭīr. 1385. 978-964-331-366-1. Tihrān.
  4. Book: Tetley . G.E . Hillenbrand . Carole . The Ghaznavid and Seljuk Turks: Poetry as a Source for Iranian History . 2009 . Routledge . London and New York . 1–16 . 978-0-415-43119-4.
  5. Book: Fleet . Kate . The Cambridge History of Turkey: Byzantium to Turkey, 1071–1453: Volume 1 . 2009 . Cambridge University Press . 1 . "The defeat in August 1071 of the Byzantine emperor Romanos Diogenes by the Turkomans at the battle of Malazgirt (Manzikert) is taken as a turning point in the history of Anatolia and the Byzantine Empire."
  6. Web site: The Saljuqids. Encyclopædia Iranica.
  7. Grousset, Rene, The Empire of the Steppes, (Rutgers University Press, 1991), 161, 164; "renewed the Seljuk attempt to found a great Turko-Persian empire in eastern Iran…", "It is to be noted that the Seljuks, those Turkomans who became sultans of Persia, did not Turkify Persia-no doubt because they did not wish to do so. On the contrary, it was they who voluntarily became Persians and who, in the manner of the great old Sassanid kings, strove to protect the Iranian populations from the plundering of Ghuzz bands and save Iranian culture from the Turkoman menace."
  8. Nishapuri, Zahir al-Din Nishapuri (2001), "The History of the Seljuq Turks from the Jami’ al-Tawarikh: An Ilkhanid Adaptation of the Saljuq-nama of Zahir al-Din Nishapuri," Partial tr. K.A. Luther, ed. C.E. Bosworth, Richmond, UK. K.A. Luther, p. 9: "[T]he Turks were illiterate and uncultivated when they arrived in Khurasan and had to depend on Iranian scribes, poets, jurists and theologians to man the institution of the Empire")
  9. Concise Britannica Online Seljuq Dynasty article
  10. The History of the Seljuq Turks: From the Jami Al-Tawarikh (LINK)
  11. Shaw, Stanford. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (LINK)
  12. Golden, Peter B. (1992). An Introduction to the History of the Turkic People. Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden. p. 209
  13. Wink, Andre, Al Hind: the Making of the Indo-Islamic World Brill Academic Publishers, 1996, p. 9
  14. Islam: An Illustrated History, p. 51
  15. Michael Adas, Agricultural and Pastoral Societies in Ancient and Classical History, (Temple University Press, 2001), 99.
  16. Bosworth, C.E. The Ghaznavids: 994–1040, Edinburgh University Press, 1963, 242.
  17. Tony Jaques, Dictionary of Battles and Sieges: F–O, (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007), 476.
  18. M.A. Amir-Moezzi, "Shahrbanu", Encyclopaedia Iranica, Online Edition, (LINK): "... here one might bear in mind that Turco-Persian dynasties such as the Ghaznavids, Seljuqs and Ilkhanids were rapidly to adopt the Persian language and have their origins traced back to the ancient kings of Persia rather than to Turkish heroes or Muslim saints ..."
  19. F. Daftary, "Sectarian and National Movements in Iran, Khorasan, and Trasoxania during Umayyad and Early Abbasid Times", in History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Vol 4, pt. 1; edited by M.S. Asimov and C.E. Bosworth; UNESCO Publishing, Institute of Ismaili Studies: "... Not only did the inhabitants of Khurasan not succumb to the language of the nomadic invaders, but they imposed their own tongue on them. The region could even assimilate the Turkic Ghaznavids and Seljuks (eleventh and twelfth centuries), the Timurids (fourteenth–fifteenth centuries), and the Qajars (nineteenth–twentieth centuries) ..."
  20. Bosworth, C.E.; Hillenbrand, R.; Rogers, J.M.; Blois, F.C. de; Bosworth, C.E.; Darley-Doran, R.E., "Saldjukids," Encyclopaedia of Islam. Edited by: P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W.P. Heinrichs. Brill, 2009: "Culturally, the consisting of the Seljuq Empire marked a further step in the dethronement of Arabic from being the sole lingua franca of educated and polite society in the Middle East. Coming as they did through a Transoxania which was still substantially Iranian and into Persia proper, the Seljuqs with no high-level Turkish cultural or literary heritage of their own – took over that of Persia, so that the Persian language became the administration and culture in their land of Persia and Anatolia. The Persian culture of the Rum Seljuqs was particularly splendid, and it was only gradually that Turkish emerged there as a parallel language in the field of government and adab; the Persian imprint in Ottoman civilization was to remain strong until the 19th century.
  21. Ehsan Yarshater, "Iran" in Encyclopedia Iranica: "The ascent of the Saljuqids also put an end to a period which Minorsky has called "the Persian intermezzo" (see Minorsky, 1932, p. 21), when Iranian dynasties, consisting mainly of the Saffarids, the Samanids, the Ziyarids, the Buyids, the Kakuyids, and the Bavandids of Tabarestan and Gilan, ruled most of Iran. By all accounts, weary of the miseries and devastations of never-ending conflicts and wars, Persians seemed to have sighed with relief and to have welcomed the stability of the Saljuqid rule, all the more so since the Saljuqids mitigated the effect of their foreignness, quickly adopting the Persian culture and court customs and procedures and leaving the civil administration in the hand of Persian personnel, headed by such capable and learned viziers as ‘Amid-al-Molk Kondori and Nezam-al-Molk."
  22. [Clifford Edmund Bosworth|C.E. Bosworth]
  23. Daniel Pipes: "The Event of Our Era: Former Soviet Muslim Republics Change the Middle East" in Michael Mandelbaum, "Central Asia and the World: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkemenistan and the World", Council on Foreign Relations, p. 79. Exact statement: "In Short, the Turko-Persian tradition featured Persian culture patronized by Turcophone rulers."
  24. O. Özgündenli, "Persian Manuscripts in Ottoman and Modern Turkish Libraries", Encyclopaedia Iranica, Online Edition, (LINK)
  25. Encyclopædia Britannica, "Seljuq", Online Edition, (LINK): "... Because the Turkish Seljuqs had no Islamic tradition or strong literary heritage of their own, they adopted the cultural language of their Persian instructors in Islam. Literary Persian thus spread to the whole of Iran, and the Arabic language disappeared in that country except in works of religious scholarship ..."
  26. M. Ravandi, "The Seljuq court at Konya and the Persianisation of Anatolian Cities", in Mesogeios (Mediterranean Studies), vol. 25–26 (2005), pp. 157–169

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