FROM THE ARAL TO THE MEDITERRANEAN

The broadest term of all, though, is ‘Turks’. Sometimes it can refer specifically to the Seljuks, but it can also denote any Turkic-speaking group, or even any nomadic group, or a group connected in some way with the steppe world.

By the thirteenth century, the term 'Turk' had become so broad that in some contexts, it was even used to mean 'Mongol'.

Thus, the meaning of these terms is rather complicated. To understand them, we have to read the context of a work carefully and look at how the author uses these words elsewhere in the same text. It is very hard to generalize.

Where was the homeland of the Seljuks?

We have a source that seems to derive from Turkic oral traditions. It was later written down in both Arabic and Persian versions and circulated at the court of the early Seljuk rulers. This text is called the Maliknāma, or the Book of the King. It says that the Seljuks were originally associated with the Khazar Khaganate, the great Turkic state that dominated the southern Russian steppes and western Eurasia between the eighth and ninth centuries.

The accounts in the Maliknāma seem to indicate that around the time when the Khazar state collapsed, a conflict arose between the Khazar ruler and the ancestor of the Seljuks. The details are somewhat unclear, but there seems to have been some kind of rebellion led by the Seljuk ancestor, as a result of which they broke away from the Khazar Khaganate.

Perhaps this was one of the key factors to the collapse of the Khazar Khaganate. Here, we face the problem of the lack of sources for what was happening on the steppe. But it is probably not a coincidence that all this roughly coincides with the period of Khazar decline. So Seljuk and his followers, according to the sources, went into exile in JandiJand was a medieval city on the Syr Darya, the original center of Seljuk power before being sacked and ruined by the Mongols., which today lies in Kazakhstan. And it was there that Seljuk converted to Islam.

Could you tell us more about Seljuk Beg?

This is a difficult problem because we depend almost entirely on the traditions preserved in and conveyed by the Maliknāma, which has survived only in part. He seems to have been a steppe leader of a nomadic Oghuz group who were somehow associated with the Khazars. The Maliknāma account clearly emphasizes his nomadic origins.

It says that when Seljuk left the Khazars and set out for Jand, he was accompanied by his livestock, the basis of nomadic life, as well as by his followers. Another thing we do know about him is that he was clearly venerated in the early Seljuk period. For example, we have an account of Alp Arslan, the sultan of the second half of the eleventh century, visiting the tomb of his ancestor in Jand.

But for later periods we have no further references to this. It seems that the further we move into Seljuk history, the more distant the ruling dynasty became from its nomadic roots.

At what point did the Seljuks actually become an empire? Was there a turning point that transformed them into one?

This is an interesting question. One of the Seljuks’ contemporaries, the historian Bayhaqi, reports that after the conquest of NishapuriNishapur was a major city in northeastern Iran, founded in the third century CE. It thrived as a key Silk Road hub. in 1041, the descendants of Seljuk drew lots to divide the lands among themselves.

Importantly, they were not dividing only the territories they had already conquered. They were also dividing lands that they intended to conquer in the future. For example, most of Iran that lay to the west of Nishapur was not yet under Seljuk control, but it was already included in this division. If this report is true, then this moment can be considered the beginning of a real empire. Here, we see not simply a nomadic conquest, but a broader and more deliberate political project.

But there is another possible date that we can use to pinpoint the starting of their empire—1055, which was when the Seljuks first entered Baghdad, the capital of the Islamic world and the seat of the caliphate. By then, their territories already stretched from Iraq through Iran to Central Asia. So if we are speaking in terms of territorial scale, I would connect the beginning of the Seljuk Empire with that moment.

What did the conquest of Baghdad mean?

Politically, the conquest had two consequences. The first and best known was that the Seljuks were able to dominate the caliphate. After this, the caliph could grant them titles such as sultan, which gave them legitimacy in the Islamic world. However, an important caveat is needed here: although the Seljuks entered Baghdad in 1055, they left it again quite quickly. The climate of Iraq was poorly suited to nomadic life, and the nomadic elite of the Seljuk state strongly resisted settling in these territories. Later, this would create the basis for political tension within the Seljuk Empire.

How was the Seljuk army organized? What was its advantage?

Until the mid-eleventh century, the Seljuk forces consisted almost entirely of their nomadic Turkic-speaking followers. This gave them a crucial advantage while creating the empire. Their main opponents during this period were the Ghaznavids, another dynasty of Turkic origin, which controlled most of the territory of present-day Afghanistan.

The Ghaznavids had a well-developed army built around heavy cavalry, and sometimes they used the elephants they acquired during campaigns in India. But they lacked the maneuverability of the Seljuks. It was precisely the maneuverability of these nomadic forces that gave the Seljuks their decisive advantage and allowed them to win their first victories.

Each time they struck the Ghaznavids, they could disappear back into the steppe, where the Ghaznavid forces, more burdened by heavy armor and cumbersome formations, found it very difficult to follow them. To add to these problems, the Ghaznavids also constantly ran out of water because they were not used to operating in the steppe.

So the combination of knowledge of the steppe ecology and this maneuverability was, in my view, the key factor in the early Seljuk victories. Over time, the structure of the army became more complex, and new forces, such as slave soldiers recruited from conquered territories, began to appear. Yet, even as the share of Turkic nomads in the Seljuk army declined, their role remained central until the end.

What was the significance of the Seljuk victory over the Byzantine Empire at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071?

The Battle of Manzikert has an enormous reputation as a turning point not only in the history of Anatolia, but also in the history of the Middle East more broadly. A decisive Seljuk victory, it is often seen as the point from which the Turkification and Islamisation of Anatolia began.

In fact, the Battle of Manzikert was the culmination of a longer period of Turkic raids into the region. These raids had already had long-term destabilizing consequences for Byzantines. What changed at Manzikert was this: a Byzantine army under the command of the emperor himself took the field against the Turks and was defeated, while Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes was captured by Alp Arslan. This effectively led to the more or less complete collapse of Byzantine political structures in Anatolia.

However, it would still take some time for a Seljuk state to emerge in this territory.

Some historians suggest that Seljuk expansion triggered the Crusades. Is that true?

There is an element of truth in this, but only an element. Documents issued by the papacy do mention the presence of the Seljuks in Jerusalem and the Levant as one of the reasons for launching the Crusade. It is probably also true that the Byzantines hoped to use the Crusaders against the Turks who were now occupying Anatolia.

In this sense, there is no question that the Seljuks contributed to the chain of events that brought about the Crusades. At the same time, Jerusalem had, of course, been under Muslim rule for many centuries before the arrival of the Seljuks. Therefore, the roots of the Crusades lay in the political circumstances of Western Europe at the time as well, for example, in the problem of what to do with an underemployed military elite. War against Muslims was, in many ways, an answer to that problem. So I think one can also say this: if the Seljuks had not been there, the Crusades would most likely still have happened, only under a different pretext.

How did the political, military and cultural traditions of the Seljuks influence the rise of the Ottoman Empire?

The Ottomans, like the early Seljuks, had nomadic origins. Moreover, Ottoman chronicles say that the Seljuk sultan Ala al-Din invested Sultan Osman with the symbols of legitimate rule. But there were three Seljuk sultans named Ala al-Din, and it is clear that, in these accounts, we are not dealing with one real, specific person, but rather with a composite image of all three figures.

The early Ottoman army, like the early Seljuk army, relied on the steppe traditions of mounted warriors. There are also other traditions that we first observe in the Seljuk period which then continued into Ottoman times. One of them is the institution of the atabeg, a military official who acted as guardian to a prince. Among the Ottomans he was known as a lala, but this is clearly the same institution, going back to Seljuk origins.

Another tradition among Turkic dynasties was the reluctance to shed royal blood. In the Seljuk period, members of the ruling family were executed with a bowstring and not a sword. We see this again in the Ottoman period, when princes were executed without bloodshed by strangulation with a silken cord.

A final example is the institution of the tuğra: the stylized signature of the sultan, originally recalling a bow-and-arrow motif. We know that it already appears in the Seljuk period. The Ottomans adopted this practice, and the tuğra survived until the end of the Ottoman dynasty as a symbol of the sultan’s power.