The Seljuk Turks and the History of the Seljuk Empire, 1040 to 1300

Who were the Seljuk Turks? Of the four peoples in this history they are the ones who changed the map most. In 1040 they were a clan leading a confederation of pastoralists on the edge of the Iranian world. By 1092 the Seljuk Empire ran from the Oxus to the Mediterranean, held Baghdad, had broken a Byzantine army at Manzikert and had opened Anatolia to Turkish settlement, which is the single event with the longest consequences in this entire thousand years.

Who were the Seljuk Turks?

Who were the Seljuk Turks, then, in the terms their contemporaries would have used? They were Oghuz Turks, named after Seljuk, a chieftain of the late tenth century whose descendants led the family. Like other steppe confederations they were mobile, organised around herds and cavalry, and governed by a shared family claim rather than a single throne. What distinguished them was timing and direction. They moved west at a moment when the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad was politically hollow and the Byzantine east was thinly held, and they arrived as Sunni Muslims, which made them acceptable as protectors rather than merely as conquerors.

Tughrul Beg entered Baghdad in 1055 and was given the title sultan by the caliph. The arrangement suited both sides: the caliph kept religious authority, the Seljuk sultan took the actual power, and the question of who were the Seljuk Turks was answered, for contemporaries, by that transaction. They were the new secular authority of the Islamic east.

How the Seljuk Empire was governed

The Seljuk Empire did not invent an administration. It inherited one. Persian bureaucrats, above all Nizam al-Mulk, ran the state on Iranian lines, and the sultans were content to let them. Nizam al-Mulk's Book of Government is the clearest surviving statement of how the arrangement was meant to work, and it is worth reading as a document of anxiety as much as of policy: the vizier is constantly warning against exactly the decentralisation that eventually took the empire apart.

Two institutions matter for the art. The first is the madrasa, the endowed teaching college, which the Seljuks founded in numbers across their territory as a matter of state policy. That produced a building type, a client and a reason to spend money on architecture in provincial towns rather than only in capitals. The second is the iqta, the assignment of tax revenue from a district to a commander in place of pay. It funded the army and it also created a class of regional patrons who built.

What the Seljuks built

Seljuk architecture is recognisable at a glance and hard to mistake for anything else. The materials are brick and stone; the ornament is geometric before it is floral; the glaze, when it appears, is turquoise and used against bare brick rather than covering it. Portals are the focus. A Seljuk doorway is cut so deeply that the carving reads as shadow, and the pattern usually continues around the frame without stopping at the corners.

Inside, the four-iwan courtyard plan becomes standard for madrasas and caravanserais alike. On the roads between towns the Seljuks built a chain of caravanserais roughly a day's travel apart, fortified, vaulted and open to travellers without charge for three days. Very few states in any period have built infrastructure of that quality for that reason.

Metalwork and ceramics follow the same instincts. Inlaid brass, bronze mirrors cast with hunting scenes, lustre and underglaze-painted pottery from Kashan: surfaces filled edge to edge, figures flattened into the pattern rather than set against a background.

Whenever the king is negligent in inquiring into the condition of his subjects, the whole state falls into disorder.

Nizam al-Mulk, Book of Government, eleventh century

The Anatolian Seljuks after 1243

The Great Seljuk state came apart in the twelfth century through the usual mechanism, a family claim divided among too many claimants, and the last Great Seljuk sultan died in battle in 1194. A branch had already established itself in Anatolia, ruling from Konya, and the Anatolian Seljuks, the Seljuks of Rum, outlived the parent state by a century.

The Mongol defeat of the Anatolian Seljuks at Kose Dag in 1243 turned them into a tributary, but it did not end the building. Some of the finest Seljuk portals in Anatolia postdate 1243, which is a useful corrective to the habit of treating political decline and artistic decline as the same curve. When the sultanate finally dissolved around 1300, the small principalities that took its place included one in the north-west that became the Ottoman state.

A short history of what the Seljuks left behind

The lasting result of the Seljuk Turks is not a border. It is a demographic and cultural fact: Anatolia became Turkish-speaking and predominantly Muslim over the two centuries after Manzikert, and it has remained so. Everything Ottoman rests on that. The Seljuk Empire also fixed the working relationship between Turkish military power and Persian administrative culture that later Turkish states, including the Ottoman, continued to use.

Seen from the objects rather than the chronicles, the inheritance is a set of habits: the preference for geometry, the treatment of a wall as a single continuous surface, the willingness to let brick and glaze do the work that sculpture does elsewhere. Those habits pass into Timurid work and from there into the Ottoman court style.

Manzikert, and what a battle actually changed

On 26 August 1071, near Manzikert in eastern Anatolia, Alp Arslan defeated a Byzantine field army and captured the emperor Romanos IV. The battle itself was not decisive in the way it is usually described: Alp Arslan released the emperor on terms and had no plan to occupy Anatolia.

What made it consequential was the civil war that followed in Constantinople. The frontier was left unguarded for a decade, and Turkmen groups who owed the sultan nothing moved into the plateau and stayed. By 1080 there was a Turkish principality at Nicaea, a hundred kilometres from the capital. The Seljuk state did not conquer Anatolia; it failed to control the people who did, and the result outlasted the state by eight centuries.

Five buildings worth knowing

The Friday Mosque of Isfahan carries the Great Seljuk contribution in its two brick domes of the 1080s, the southern one built for Nizam al-Mulk and the northern for his rival Taj al-Mulk. The northern dome is the more remarkable: a geometry of intersecting ribs that resolves a square into a circle with no visible awkwardness.

The Great Mosque and Hospital at Divrigi, finished in 1229, carries stone carving so deep and so unlike anything around it that its portals have been argued over for a century. The Ince Minareli Medrese at Konya, of the 1260s, wraps a monumental inscription band around its doorway as the principal ornament. The Sultanhani caravanserai on the Konya to Aksaray road, of 1229, shows the type at full scale: a fortified court, a covered hall, and a small raised mosque in the middle of the yard.

The Gok Medrese at Sivas, of 1271, is the case that matters most for chronology. It postdates the Mongol defeat by nearly thirty years and is among the finest things the Anatolian Seljuks built, which is the clearest argument against reading political decline and artistic decline as one curve.

What a caravanserai cost, and who paid

The road network was funded through the waqf, a charitable endowment in perpetuity. A commander or a member of the ruling family assigned the revenue of named villages to the upkeep of a building, and the deed specified what the revenue had to cover: the staff, the repairs, the food given to travellers, sometimes the shoeing of their animals.

These deeds survive in numbers and they are the best economic evidence for the period. They name the villages, the crops, the wages and the number of staff, and they show a state that treated infrastructure as a religious obligation rather than a budget line. Three days of free lodging for any traveller, Muslim or not, is written into several of them.

Games, leisure and the Seljuk court

Court life left its own traces. Chess and nard, the ancestor of backgammon, both travelled the same routes as the ceramics, and both appear in the poetry and in the excavated gaming pieces. A society that could afford caravanserais could afford pastimes, and the sources treat games as a normal part of an educated adult life rather than a vice. Leisure has never stopped being a market. In this digital landscape, players often seek out the best roulette sites to enjoy engaging gaming experiences, much as a Konya household of the thirteenth century would have kept a board and a set of pieces.