When
Seljuk, the leader of the Seljuk clan, had a falling out with
Yabghu, the supreme chieftain of the Oghuz, he split his clan off 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.[16] 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.[17] At the
Battle of Dandanaqan they defeated a Ghaznavid army, and after a successful siege of
Isfahan by
Tughril in 1050/51,[18] established the
Great Seljuk Empire. The Seljuks mixed with the local population and adopted the
Persian culture and
Persian language in the following decades.[19][20][21][22][23]
Head of Seljuk male royal figure, 12–13th century, from
Iran. Carved and drilled stone with Iranian craftsmanship. Kept at the
New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The
Kharāghān twin towers, built in Iran in 1053 to house the remains of Seljuk princes
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.
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.
Muhammad's son
Mahmud II succeeded him in western Persia, but
Ahmad Sanjar, who was the governor of
Khurasan at the time being the senior member of the family, became the Great Seljuk Sultan.
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
Eldiduzids.
^Harris, Jonathan (2014). Byzantium and the Crusades. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 39–45.
ISBN9781780937366.
^Rāvandī, Muḥammad (1385). Rāḥat al-ṣudūr va āyat al-surūr dar tārīkh-i āl-i saljūq. Tihrān: Intishārāt-i Asāṭīr.
ISBN9643313662.
^Tetley, G.E (2009). Hillenbrand, Carole (ed.). The Ghaznavid and Seljuk Turks: Poetry as a Source for Iranian History. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 1–16.
ISBN978-0-415-43119-4.
^Fleet, Kate (2009).
The Cambridge History of Turkey: Byzantium to Turkey, 1071–1453: Volume 1(PDF). Cambridge University Press. p. 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.
^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."
^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")
^
abcEncyclopædia Britannica, "Seljuq", Online Edition, (
LINKArchived 2007-12-19 at the
Wayback Machine): "... 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 ..."
^
abM. Ravandi, "The Seljuq court at Konya and the Persianisation of Anatolian Cities", in Mesogeios (Mediterranean Studies), vol. 25–26 (2005), pp. 157–169
^M.A. Amir-Moezzi, "Shahrbanu",
Encyclopaedia Iranica, Online Edition, (
LINKArchived 2007-03-11 at the
Wayback Machine): "... 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 ..."
^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) ..."
^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.
^John Perry, THE HISTORICAL ROLE OF TURKISH IN RELATION TO PERSIAN OF IRAN in Iran & the Caucasus, Vol. 5, (2001), pp. 193–200. excerpt: "First, since the Turkish-speaking rulers of most Iranian polities from the Ghaznavids and Seljuks onward were already iranized and patronized Persian literature in their domains, the expansion of Turk-ruled empires served to expand the territorial domain of written Persian into the conquered areas, notably Anatolia and Central and South Asia."
^Ram Rahul. "March of Central Asia", Indus Publishing, p. 124: "The Seljuk conquest of Persia marked the triumph of the Sunni over Shii but without a decline in Persian culture. The Seljuks eventually adopted the Persian culture.
^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."
^C.E. Bosworth, "Turkish expansion towards the west", in UNESCO History of Humanity, Volume IV: From the Seventh to the Sixteenth Century, UNESCO Publishing / Routledge, 2000. p. 391: "While the Arabic language retained its primacy in such spheres as law, theology and science, the culture of the Seljuk court and secular literature within the sultanate became largely Persianized; this is seen in the early adoption of Persian epic names by the Seljuk rulers (Qubād, Kay Khusraw and so on) and in the use of Persian as a literary language (Turkish must have been essentially a vehicle for everyday speech at this time). The process of Persianization accelerated in the thirteenth century with the presence in Konya of two of the most distinguished refugees fleeing before the Mongols, Bahā' al-Dīn Walad and his son Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, whose Mathnawī, composed in Konya, constitutes one of the crowning glories of classical Persian literature."
^Stephen P. Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India, 1639–1739. Cambridge University Press, 1991. p. 123: "For the Seljuks and Il-Khanids in Iran, it was the rulers rather than the conquered who were 'Persianized and Islamicized'".
^Mehmed Fuad Koprulu, Early Mystics in Turkish Literature, Translated by Gary Leiser and
Robert Dankoff, Routledge, 2006, p. 149: "If we wish to sketch, in broad outline, the civilization created by the Seljuks of Anatolia, we must recognize that the local, i.e. non-Muslim, element was fairly insignificant compared to the Turkish and Arab-Persian elements, and that the Persian element was paramount/The Seljuk rulers, to be sure, who were in contact with not only Muslim Persian civilization, but also with the Arab civilizations in al-jazīra and Syria – indeed, with all Muslim peoples as far as India – also had connections with {various} Byzantine courts. Some of these rulers, like the great 'Ala' al-Dīn Kai-Qubād I himself, who married Byzantine princesses and thus strengthened relations with their neighbors to the west, lived for many years in Byzantium and became very familiar with the customs and ceremonial at the Byzantine court. Still, this close contact with the ancient Greco-Roman and Christian traditions only resulted in their adoption of a policy of tolerance toward art, aesthetic life, painting, music, independent thought – in short, toward those things that were frowned upon by the narrow and piously ascetic views {of their subjects}. The contact of the common people with the Greeks and Armenians had basically the same result. {Before coming to Anatolia}, the Turks had been in contact with many nations and had long shown their ability to synthesize the artistic elements that they had adopted from these nations. When they settled in Anatolia, they encountered peoples with whom they had not yet been in contact and immediately established relations with them as well. 'Ala' al-Dīn Kai-Qubād I established ties with the Genoese and, especially, the Venetians at the ports of Sinop and Antalya, which belonged to him, and granted them commercial and legal concessions. Meanwhile, the Mongol invasion, which caused a great number of scholars and artisans to flee from Turkistan,
Iran,
Afghanistan, and Khwārazm and settle within the Empire of the Seljuks of Anatolia, resulted in a reinforcing of Persian influence on the Anatolian Turks. Indeed, despite all claims to the contrary, there is no question that Persian influence was paramount among the Seljuks of Anatolia. This is clearly revealed by the fact that the sultans who ascended the throne after Ghiyāth al-Dīn Kai-Khusraw I assumed titles taken from ancient Persian mythology, like Kai-Khusraw, Kai-Kā'ūs, and Kai-Qubād; and that 'Ala' al-Dīn Kai-Qubād I had some passages from the Shāhnāme inscribed on the walls of Konya and Sivas. When we take into consideration domestic life in the Konya courts and the sincerity of the favor and attachment of the rulers to Persian poets and Persian literature, then this fact {i.e. the importance of Persian influence} is undeniable. With regard to the private lives of the rulers, their amusements, and palace ceremonial, the most definite influence was also that of Iran, mixed with the early Turkish traditions, and not that of Byzantium."
^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."
^Black, Jeremy (2005). The Atlas of World History. American Edition, New York: Covent Garden Books. pp. 65, 228.
ISBN9780756618612. This map varies from other maps which are slightly different in scope, especially along the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
Dietrich, Richard (2018). "The Names of Seljuk's Sons as Evidence for the Pre-Islamic Religion of the Seljuks". Turkish Historical Review. 9 (1): 54–70.
doi:
10.1163/18775462-00901002.
Grousset, Rene (1988). The Empire of the Steppes: a History of Central Asia. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. p. 147.
ISBN0813506271.
Peacock, A.C.S., Early Seljuq History: A New Interpretation; New York, NY; Routledge; 2010
Previté-Orton, C. W. (1971). The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.