The Seljuqs

Ṭoghrıl I had proclaimed himself sultan at Neyshābūr in 1038 and had espoused strict Sunnism, by which he gained the caliph’s confidence and undermined the Buyid position in Baghdad. The Oğuz Turks had accepted Islam late in the 10th century, and their leaders displayed a convert’s zeal in their efforts to restore a Muslim polity along orthodox lines. Their efforts were made all the more urgent by the spread of Fatimid Ismāʿīlī propaganda (Arabic daʿwah) in the eastern caliphate by means of an underground network of propagandists, or dāʿīs, intent on undermining the Buyid regime, and by the threat posed by the Christian Crusaders.

The Buyids’ usurpation of the caliph’s secular power had given rise to a new theory of state formulated by al-Māwardī (died 1058). Al-Māwardī’s treatise partly prepared the theoretical ground for Ṭoghrıl’s attempt to establish an orthodox Muslim state in which conflict between the caliph-imam’s spiritual-juridical authority on the one side and the secular power of the sultan on the other could be resolved, or at least regulated, by convention. Al-Māwardī reminded the Muslim world of the necessity of the imamate, but the treatise realistically admitted the existence of, and thus accommodated, the fact of military usurpation of power. The Seljuqs’ own political theorist al-Ghazālī (died 1111) carried this admission further by explaining that the position of a powerless caliph, overshadowed by a strong Seljuq master, was one in which the latter’s presence guaranteed the former’s capacity to defend and extend Islam.

The caliph al-Qāʾim (reigned 1031–75) replaced the last Buyid’s name, al-Malik al-Raḥīm, in the khuṭbah and on the coins with that of Ṭoghrıl Beg, and, after protracted negotiation ensuring restoration of the caliph’s dignity after Shiʿi subjugation, Ṭoghrıl entered Baghdad in December 1055. The caliph enthroned him and married a Seljuq princess. After Ṭoghrıl had campaigned successfully as far as Syria, he was given the title of “king of the east and west.” The new situation was justified by the theory that existing practice was legal whereby a new caliph could be instituted by the sultan, who possessed effective power and sovereignty, but that thereafter the sultan owed the caliph allegiance because only so long as the caliph-imam’s juridical faculties were recognized could government be valid.

Ṭoghrıl Beg died in 1063. His heir, Alp-Arslan, was succeeded by Malik-Shah in 1072, and the latter’s death in 1092 led to succession disputes out of which Berk-Yaruq emerged triumphant to reign until 1105. After a brief reign, Malik-Shah II was succeeded by Muḥammad I (reigned 1105–18). The last “Great Seljuq” was Sanjar (1118–57), who had earlier been governor of Khorāsān.

Alp-Arslan had nearly annihilated the Byzantine army at Manzikert in 1071, opening Asia Minor to those dependent tribesmen of the Seljuqs of whom Iran and the world were to hear more in the period of Ottoman power. Transoxania was subdued, the Christians in the Caucasus chastised, and the Fatimids expelled from Syria. An empire was for a short time achieved whose extent and stability enabled Alp-Arslan’s and Malik-Shah’s great minister, Niẓām al-Mulk (died 1092), to pay a ferryman on the Oxus River with a draft cashable in Damascus.

Building and maintaining such a great empire necessitated a military regime and a vast war machine. The price to be paid later was oppression by military commanders and their units, set free to compete with each other and harry the land after the machine fell out of the grasp of powerful sultans. The soldiers had been remunerated by grants of land called iqṭāʿs, which were originally usufructuary but developed over time into hereditary properties. The grants later became nuclei out of which petty principalities grew with the decline of the central power. The cultivators were left at the mercy of military overlords in possession of the soil.

The great minister Niẓām al-Mulk was typical of the Iranian bureaucracy, which, in an area prone to invasion, was often called on to attempt to cushion the impact of the brute military force of nomadic invaders and contain it within the bounds of administrative, economic, and cultural feasibility. For his Turkish masters he wrote the Seyāsat-nāmeh (“Book of Government”), in which he urged the regulation of royal court procedures in line with Samanid models and the restriction of the arrogance and cupidity of the military fief holders. His book is the measure of the Seljuqs’ failure to provide enduring stability and equitable government. Had they done so, such a work would have been unnecessary.

The Ismāʿīliyyah

Of one disruptive force Niẓām al-Mulk’s book is dramatically descriptive, in terms betraying near panic. The Seljuqs failed to nip in the bud the power of the Ismāʿīliyyah, originally spread throughout the eastern Islamic world by clandestine Fatimid dāʿīs—many of whose cells later split from the mainstream of events in Egypt to become an independent organization within the Seljuq empire. This organization exercised power by terrorism, and the name given its adherents by Europeans in the Middle Ages, Assassins (from ḥashīshī, denoting a consumer of hashish), has become a common noun in English.

The movement in Iran crystallized under the leadership of Ḥasan-e Ṣabbāḥ, who had been trained in Fatimid Egypt. In 1090 Ḥasan gained the castle of Alamūt in the Elburz Mountains, and the order’s principal cells were thereafter situated, so far as possible, in similar impregnable mountain strongholds. From these centers, fidāʾīs, or devotees ready to sacrifice their lives, issued forth and permeated society, spreading their mission as peddlers and itinerant tailors and gaining influence among the urban artisan and weaving classes. They were also often able to win the confidence of many highly placed women and children, whom they could please with novelties of dress or toys. Niẓām al-Mulk himself was assassinated by one of the fidāʾīs, but it is possible that this was done with the connivance of one of Malik-Shah’s wives, whose son the vizier did not support for the succession.

The Ismāʿīliyyah were able to puncture Seljuq power but not destroy it. In the end the Seljuq empire collapsed where it had begun—in Khorāsān, where Sultan Sanjar ultimately failed to control Turkmen tribes related to him by blood. Sanjar could not rely on military commanders his family had raised to high posts and had rewarded with land and provincial powers. The tribesmen refused to be coerced into paying taxes. In 1153 they captured the old sultan and, although allowing him all the respect of his regal position, kept him captive for three years.

The Khwārezm-Shahs

Atsiz was the military leader who, after Sultan Sanjar’s capture in 1153, succeeded in supplanting Seljuq power in northeastern Iran. His ancestor, Anūṣtegin, had been keeper of Malik-Shah’s kitchen utensils and had been rewarded with the governorship of Khwārezm on the Oxus, where he founded the Khwārezm-Shah dynasty (c. 1077–1231). Regions elsewhere in Iran, on the passing of Seljuq supremacy, became independent under atabegs, who were originally proxy fathers and tutors sent with young Seljuq princes when these were deputed to govern provinces. At first the atabegs took power in the names of Seljuq puppets. When this fiction lapsed, atabeg dynasties such as the Eldegüzids of Azerbaijan (c. 1137–1225) and Salghurids of Fārs (c. 1148–1270) split Iran into independent rival principalities.

The Salghurid court in Shīrāz especially fostered the arts, as parvenu, competitive courts are wont to do. The poet Saʿdī (died 1292) was a contemporary in Shīrāz of the Salghurid atabeg Abū Bakr ibn Saʿd ibn Zangī (reigned 1231–60), whom he mentions by name in his Būstān (“The Orchard”), a book of ethics in verse. Abū Bakr’s father, Saʿd, for whom Saʿdī took his pen name, conferred great prosperity on Shīrāz.

Saʿd ibn Zangī came to terms with the Khwārezm-Shahs. Their power in Transoxania was secured by acceptance of tributary status to the non-Muslim Karakitai empire of Central Asia. They endeavored to emulate the Seljuqs by following an expansionist policy in Iran south of the Oxus. Saʿd ibn Zangī, in his relations with the Khwārezm-Shah, set the pattern his successor Abū Bakr followed later. These atabegs saved Fārs from outright invasion by northern military powers by paying heavy tribute. This tribute was the price of Shīrāz’s remaining the peaceful haven of the arts in which Saʿdī and after him Ḥāfeẓ (died 1390) flourished, to continue the Persian literary tradition begun under the Samanids and continued under both the Ghaznavids and the Seljuqs.

The collapse of the Karakitai empire northeast of the Oxus was partly accelerated by the unsuccessful bid of Khwārezm-Shah ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad (reigned 1200–20) to win Muslim approval while releasing himself from the Khwārezm-Shahs’ humiliating tributary status to an infidel power. But the coup de grâce to the Karakitai empire was delivered by its own vassal from the east, the Mongol leader Küchlüg Khan, who from 1211 onward was to be a direct opponent of the Khwārezm-Shahs in Central Asia. The Karakitai had been defeated, but the situation on the Khwārezm-Shah’s eastern border had worsened.

Meanwhile, Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad quarreled with the caliph; he set up an anticaliph of his own and further antagonized his Muslim subjects, who were unremittingly suspicious of a regime once subject to the Karakitai infidels and whose Kipchak mercenary militia and brutal commanders brought cruelty and desolation wherever they marched. ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad was unable to control his army leaders, who had tribal connections with such influential people at court as his own mother. The post-Karakitai wars between him and Küchlüg Khan damaged the safety of the Central Asian trade arteries from China to the West. The great Mongol leader Genghis Khan took Beijing in 1215 and, as lord of China, was concerned with Chinese trade outlets. The situation between Küchlüg and the Khwārezm-Shah sultan afforded scope as well as a pretext for the Mongols’ westward advance, if only to restore the flow of trade.