Early Seljuq History: A New Interpretation By A. C. S. PEACOCK

Abstract

The author has set himself the task here of throwing light on the historical processes behind the formation of the Great Seljuq state in the fifth/eleventh century, more exactly, up to 1072, since he avers that the Seljuqs are not only ‘the least understood of the nomadic dynasties’ but also ‘the least understood of all major Islamic empires’ (p. 3). These processes are of wider interest to Islamic historians because they involve the evolution of Inner Asian nomads into a political entity, a state and even an empire, given the fact that Turks, mainly if not exclusively the following of the Seljuqs, and their epigoni, came to dominate lands as diverse as Khurasan, Anatolia, Syria and Yemen; in particular, the Great Seljuqs became a notable part of the Perso-Islamic successors of the earlier, once universal in its claims, ʿAbbasid caliphate. Peacock considers various problems in this evolution. What was the role of the Turkish tribal following of the Seljuq chiefs? Were these Turks really, as some have portrayed them, mindless, anarchic bands who had to be tamed and controlled by the Seljuqs, and who were, from the mid-eleventh century onwards, gradually replaced by a professional army of slave troops, ghulāms? And if the tribal bands were so undisciplined and unamenable to control, how was it that they were so successful in overrunning virtually all the northern tier of the Middle East, from the upper Oxus lands and Khurasan to Anatolia and the eastern shores of the Aegean, bringing about enduring changes in land utilization and demography for those lands? One of the religio-cultural effects of Seljuq hegemony in the Middle East has been traditionally to view the Great Seljuq sultans as a driving impulse behind the Sunni revival of the eleventh century, after a preceeding century of domination by the Zaydi Shiʿi Buyids and other Daylami lines in the Iranian world and Iraq and by the Ismaili Fatimids in Egypt and Syria, and as protagonists of the Hanafi law school, even inaugurating persecutions of the partisans of Ashʿari kalām and of the Shafiʿi and Hanbali madhhabs. Finally, there is examined an instance of Seljuq conquest in this eleventh century, that of the Turkish penetration of Byzantine Anatolia, specifically up to the time of Alp Arslan's victory over Romanus Digenes at Manzikert/Malazgird in 1071, a battle often seen in the past as the crucial point in the Islamization and Turkicization of Asia Minor and the shrinkage of the once-mighty Byzantine empire to the status of a local power of the northern and western Aegean shores—a view still largely entrenched in much modern Turkish historiography, despite the recent efforts of e.g. Speros Vryonis and Carole Hillenbrand in cutting down the Seljuq success of 1071 to size.