During this period, migrating peoples once again played a major role, perhaps greater than that of the Arabs during the 7th and 8th centuries. No other civilization in premodern history experienced so much in-migration, especially of alien and disruptive peoples, or showed a greater ability to assimilate as well as to learn from outsiders. Nowhere has the capacity of a culture to redefine and incorporate the strange and the foreign been more evident. In this period, which ends with the death in 1405 of Timur (Tamerlane), the last great tribal conqueror, the tense yet creative relationship between sedentary and migratory peoples emerged as one of the great themes of Islamicate history, played out as it was in the centre of the great arid zone of Eurasia. Because this period can be seen as the history of peoples as well as of regions, and because the mobility of those peoples brought them to more than one cultural region, this period should be treated group by group rather than region by region.
As a general term, “migrating” peoples is preferable because it does not imply aimlessness, as “nomadic” does;
Or herding, as “pastoralist” does; or kin-related, as “tribal” does. “Migrating” focuses simply on movement from one home to another. Although the Franks, as the Crusaders are called in Muslim sources, differed from other migrating peoples, most of whom were pastoralists related by kinship, they too were migrating warriors organized to invade and occupy peoples to whom they were hostile and alien. Though not literally tribal, they appeared to behave like a tribe with a distinctive way of life and a solidarity based on common values, language, and objectives. Viewing them as alien immigrants comparable to, say, the Mongols helps to explain their reception: how they came to be assimilated into the local culture and drawn into the intra-Muslim factional competition and fighting that was under way in Syria when they arrived.
For almost 400 years a succession of Turkic peoples entered eastern Islamdom from Central Asia. These nearly continuous migrations can be divided into three phases: Seljuqs (1055-92), Mongols (1256-1411), and neo-Mongols (1369-1405). Their long-term impact, more constructive than destructive on balance, can still be felt through the lingering heritage of the great Muslim empires they inspired. The addition of tribally organized warrior Turks to the already widely used Turkic slave soldiery gave a single ethnic group an extensive role in widening the gap between rulers and ruled.
Seljuq Turks
The Seljuqs were a family among the Oghuz Turks, a label applied to the migratory pastoralists of the Syr Darya-Oxus
Fourteenth-century vellum depicting the sultan Alp-Arslan, the second ruler of the Seljuq dynasty. Ms Or 20 f. i38r/Edinburgh University Library, Scotland/With kind permission of the University of Edinburgh/The Bridgeman Art Library
Basin. Their name has come to stand for the group of Oghuz families led into Ghaznavid Khorasan after they had been converted to Sunni Islam, probably by Sufi missionaries after the beginning of the iith century. In 1040 the Seljuqs’ defeat of the Ghaznavid sultan allowed them to proclaim themselves rulers of Khorasan. Having expanded into western Iran as well, Toghril Beg, also using the title “sultan,” was able to occupy Baghdad (1055) after “petitioning” the Abbasid caliph for permission. The Seljuqs quickly took the remaining Buyid territory and began to occupy Syria, whereupon they encountered Byzantine resistance in the Armenian highlands. In 1071 a Seljuq army under Alp-Arslan defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert north of Lake Van; while the main Seljuq army replaced the Fatimids in Syria, large independent tribal
Bands occupied Anatolia, coming closer to the Byzantine capital than had any other Muslim force.
Policies of Nizam al-Mulk
The Seljuqs derived their legitimacy from investiture by the caliph, and from “helping” him reunite the ummah; yet their governing style prefigured the emergence of true alternatives to the caliphate. Some of their Iranian advisers urged them to restore centralized absolutism as it had existed in pre-Islamic times and in the period of Marwanid-Abbasid strength. The best-known proponent was Nizam al-Mulk, chief minister to the second and third Seljuq sultans, Alp-Arslan and Malik-Shah. Nizam al-Mulk explained his plans in his Seyasat-nameh (The Book of Government), one of the best-known manuals of Islamicate political theory and administration. He was unable, however, to persuade the Seljuq sultans to assert enough power over other tribal leaders. Eventually the Seljuq sultans, like so many rulers before them, alienated their tribal supporters and resorted to the costly alternative of a Turkic slave core, whose leading members were appointed to tutor and train young princes of the Seljuq family to compete for rule on the death of the reigning sultan. The tutors were known as atabegs. More often than not, they became the actual rulers of the domains assigned to their young charges, cooperating with urban notables (a‘yan) in day-today administration.
Although Nizam al-Mulk was not immediately successful, he did contribute to long-term change. He encouraged the establishment of state-supported schools (madrasahs); those he personally patronized were called Nizamiyyahs. The most important Nizamiyyah was founded in Baghdad in 1067. There Nizam al-Mulk gave
Government stipends to teachers and students whom he hoped he could subsequently not only appoint to the position of qadi but also recruit for the bureaucracy. Systematic and broad instruction in Jama‘i-Sunni learning would counteract the disruptive influences of non-Sunni or anti-Sunni thought and activity, particularly the continuing agitation of Isma‘ili Muslims. In 1090 a group of Isma‘ilis established themselves in a mountain fortress at Alamut in the mountains of Daylam. From there they began to coordinate revolts all over Seljuq domains. Nominally loyal to the Fatimid caliph in Cairo, the eastern Isma‘ilis confirmed their growing independence and radicalism by supporting a failed contender for the Fatimid caliphate, Nizar. For that act they were known as the Nizari Isma‘ilis. They were led by Hasan-e Sabbah and were dubbed by their detractors the hashishiyyin (assassins) because they practiced political murder while they were allegedly under the influence of hashish.
Nizam al-Mulk’s madrasah system enhanced the prestige and solidarity of the Jama‘i-Sunni ulama without actually drawing them into the bureaucracy or combating anti-Sunni agitation, but it also undermined their autonomy. It established the connection between state-supported education and office holding, and it subordinated the spiritual power and prestige of the ulama to the indispensable physical force of the military emirs. Nizam al-Mulk unintentionally encouraged the independence of these emirs by extending the iqta‘ system beyond Buyid practice. He regularly assigned land revenues to individual military officers, assuming that he could keep them under bureaucratic control. When that failed, his system increased the emirs’ independence and drained the central treasury.
World History
