67. The Twilight of the Seljuks
67. THE TWILIGHT OF THE SELJUKS
Persian miniature (c. 1400 A.D.) depicting a battle scene during the reign of Sultan Arslan Shah
Of “Human Cycle” described by the Apologist School of Islamic Historiography
Of the various historiographical approaches relative to the History of Pre-Mongol Islam, one that gained a large following in academic circles of Baghdad, is the so-called “Apologist School” - focused in comprehending the structural, social and cultural flaws and failures that allowed for the steep decline experienced by the various Islamic states between the 12th and 15th Christian Centuries.
One theoretical model is particularly relevant to us, that of the “cycle of dynasties”. It posits that a warmongering and expansionist group, led by a charismatic leader of a “desertic” frame of mind - usually from nomadic or pastoral origin and ascetic attitude - topples a regime and establishes a new dynasty. From its conception to its apogee, the personal authority of the leaders and the asabiyyah permit the regime to stretch its geographical and sociopolitical boundaries, much like a human being grows from its birth to the pinnacle of his health and physical and mental capacities. However, much like man, this civilization, upon becoming sedentary, grows increasingly decadent, its members driven by luxury and greed instead of by religious fervor and thus the leaders become fearless of exploiting the citizens and subjects, making them subservient and enfeebled. Thus, in the span of some generations, the dynasty becomes senile and debased, and its demise becomes inevitable, even if somehow experiences a revival (as was the case of the late Abbasids and the Fatimids, for example). Then, a new group, driven by a stronger asabiyya and desertic frame of mind, rises to power and establishes a new dynasty, and the cycle repeats itself. So it happened, according to this School, in the Near East, to the Abbasids in relation to the Umayyads, and then the former to the Seljuks and the various minor Turkish dynasties, which vanquished the various Persian statelets; in Africa and Egypt, the Fatimids came from the desert and dethroned the Aghlabids and the Tulunids, respectively, and then, centuries afterwards, their own civilization fell to the Christians; in Maghreb al-Aqsa, the Almoravids arose as a revolutionary Berber host which toppled the Cordoban Umayyads, the various Iberian taifas, the Zirids and the Idrisids, but, once they established themselves in al-Andalus and in northern Africa, their asabiyyah weakened severely and they would fall prey to the more formidable Almohads;
The concept of asabiyyah was familiar to the pre-Islamic Arabs, being an idea of social cohesion present in tribal and clannish social structures, orbiting around shared ties of culture and kinship, and strengthened by the rivalries against inimical tribes. Described in a theoretical and conceptual approach as the elementary force of human history, pure only in the nomadic character of social organization, and thus diminished in sedentary civilizations. According to this interpretation, the rise and fall of societies is fixed in a cyclical pattern, dependant on the asabiyyah - in the beginning, under the nomadic element, it is at its strongest, and it degenerates over the course of the civilization’s aging, until another, stronger asabiyyah, takes its place and establishes a new civilization.
This civilizational senility, in fact, was not supposed to be healed, because it happens as a natural existential process.
Of the State of Persia After the Death of Sultan Sanjar
We have before said that Malik Shah was succeeded by four sons, the most notable of whom was Ahmad Sanjar, who not only outlived all of his brothers, but, by establishing a sizeable domain in eastern Persia, centered in the region of Khorasan, managed to preserve a modicum of stability which the vast realm under the rule of the Seljuk dynasty sorely needed, considering that it was beset by formidable enemies in all frontiers and by various internecine conflicts, especially those resultant from royal succession.
In the first two decades of the 12th [Christian] Century, Sanjar had vigorously imposed his rulership by force of arms against the enemies of the realm, expelling from Khwarazm hostile Turkic raiders coming from Kashgaria, exacting tribute from the ambitious Ghurids and compelling the Ghaznavids into vassalage. By 1120, he had humbled his nephew, Mahmud [II], who was the Sultan in western and central Persia, and was recognized by the emirs and atabegs as the senior Seljuk Sultan. Then, while the decade of 1130 had been uneventful, the later ones, between 1140 and 1157, the year of his death, saw the rapid and inexorable dissipation of the central power of the Sultanate as consequence of two grave disasters. In 1141, his army was destroyed by the Qara-Kitai, led by the ambitious warlord Cathayan Yelü Dashi, who then became the master of the whole provinces east of the Syr Darya river, and the suzerain over the Khwarazmians. While the Sultan managed to recover, it was but a matter of time before another threat materialized; and, indeed, an unexpected appeared in 1153 A.D., when other confederated Oghuz tribes settled in Khorasan challenged Seljuk supremacy and won in the battlefield against Sultan Sanjar, who was imprisoned and remained captive for three years. After escaping from captivity, he was all but undone, and in the last year of his life (1157) he helplessly saw his domain be broken apart by the bellicose ambitions of his former vassals, be them Iranian or Turkic, while the western half of the Sultanate had long since been carved by ambitious vassals, and the regnant Sultans reduced to feeble figureheads.
Thence, this vast and expansive realm, from the mountains of Armenia and the rivers of Mesopotamia, to as far as Khorasan and Afghanistan, collapsed into anarchy, and would thus remain for the next four decades.
Now, it is of fundamental importance to know that the victory of Oghuz tribes - most of them who, while devout to Islam, still clinged to their quasi-nomadic pastoral lifestyle and to their steppe-born traditions, and had no sense of cultural affinity to the sedentary Persian society - saw Persia, at best, as a foreign country open to settlement and, at worst, to rapacious plunder. This explains why the erosion of the Seljuk power allowed for a gradual, but nonetheless impressive, demographic influx of Turkic nomads to the more urbanized regions of western Persia, 'Irāq al-'Ajam [1] but especially to the frontier regions of Azerbaijan, Shirvan and Jaziria, where they were frequently invited to serve as mercenaries respectively by the Eldiguzids, the Shirvanshahs and the Toghteginids.
These movements are commonly defined by modern scholarship as “the second wave of Turkish migration” - a controversial term, either because some academics refuse to consider that there had been, at any time, an interruption of the demographic influx of Turkish peoples across Central and Western Asia during the Seljuk era, or, according to other scholars, because in absolute numbers, this migratory trend saw the movement of, at most, some thousands of Turkish settlers, who scarcely had any capacity to transform the native composition in the regions where they settled. The concept, however, is still generally accepted by the academy, even more so because it considers that it was not solely the existence nor the agency of the Turkish Seljuks as rulers of Persia that triggered these demographic transitions in regions such Azerbaijan, but more general circumstances of social and economic nature, thus avoiding the pitfalls of the “Great Man Theory” [2]. And it must be noted that while their numbers might not have amounted to a large group of migrants, the fact remains that they were the unquestionable military elite of 12th Century Persia - above the Persians themselves, the Arabs, and thus they left their own significative cultural marks in the already complex and sophisticated strata of the Iranian cultural sphere, even if, in the medium and long run the Oghuz Turks were fated to become Persianized, as it usually happened to the nomadic conquerors who established themselves in the Iranian realm.
These migrations will play a significant role in the History of the Eastern Roman Empire and of the Crusader State.
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Indeed we must know that ever since the years after the *Second Crusade the Byzantine Empire, having expanded as far as the heartland heartland of Armenia, mostly pacified its eastern frontier. Yet, in spite of the efforts of emperors John II and Manuel Komnenos of repopulating the Eastern provinces of the Empire, the Armenian ones have been established mainly as military outposts, to safeguard the economically profitable provinces of Anatolia. However, it is clear that upon the accession of Basileus Alexios II, the Empire is badly overstretched and, in the case of the Armenian provinces, still dependent on the manpower of the Turkish auxiliaries and of the local Armenian communities, who are very passionate about their autonomy. The situation has been worsened by the financial troubles and by the manpower losses resultant of Manuel’s wars in Europe and in Egypt, a circumstance that halted the repopulation program for eastern Anatolia and Armenia sponsored by John and Manuel himself. Thus we can comprehend why and how these Turkoman warbands will come and flourish in this vast frontier zone, relishing in banditry and wantonly preying upon the barely regrown rural and riverine communities, be them Christian or Muslim. This will, in turn, provoke other waves of migration from native Armenians and Kurds fleeing from the raiders, between the 1160s and 1190s, the former usually to Armenian Cilicia or to Frankish Syria, and the later generally to Arabian Iraq. It should be made clear, however, that these demographic movements, while significant, are not representative of a full-fledged diaspora, nor did they cause the disappearance of these hardy native peoples, most of which survived in fortified settlements and secluded hill and mountain villages.
Even if it is obvious that these Turkoman bands of adventurers and bandits do not represent an existential menace to the Armenian or Kurdish communities, and far less to Rhõmanía herself, they nonetheless are a grave liability to be reckoned with, considering that they jeopardize the demographic and commercial recovery of the Rhomaioi in the region, further further weakening the already exhausted economy of the Empire. This means that even if the Rhomaîoi are not poised to suffer another disaster like the battle of Manzikert, they, on the other hand, are still incapable of completely avoiding the state of endemic warfare in the frontier.
As for the Crusader States, Syria is fated to be the most affected one, considering that its territory borders that of Mesopotamia, and is, in that country, far less defensible than in its core. This explains why we will see various castles being built in its northern and northeastern frontiers, most notably in Palmyra, where the Knights of Saint Michael repurposed the ancient and derelict Temple of Bel to serve as a fortress.
Of the Rise and Fall of the Eldiguzids
Even if cognizant of Ahmad Sanjar’s hegemony and preeminence among the rulers of Persia, in the western provinces another lineage of Seljuk Sultans ruled from their court in Hamadan. None of them were, however, strong in force of arms nor determined in resolve and willpower, and thus the erosion of the central government that befell eastern Persia after the death of Sanjar occurred in the western reaches of the realm much sooner, exploited and aggravated by the rise of various regional warlords. The most notable of these was the Kipchak mamluk Shams ad-Din Eldiguz, who, rising from insignificant origins, by the middle of the 12th Century A.D. had become the most powerful potentate of Persia. From his initial base of military power in Azerbaijan, he made himself the master over all the Muslim princes of Mesopotamia and Persian Iraq.
His stroke of luck came in 1137 A.D., when he, having been attached to the retinue of Sultan Ghiyath ad-Din Mas’ud, was nominated Bey of Azerbaijan and given in marriage to Mu’mine Khatun, the widow of his brother, Toghrul [II], and became tutor of the latter’s son, Arslan Shah [II]. His honorific title of atabeg then became to be used as his principal title. Indeed, as it happened to many other strongmen of this age, who came to use infant monarchs as figureheads to rule as a power-behind-the-throne, the term atabeg assumed a connotation related to high rulership, not unlike that of “vizier” in Arabian countries [3]. Sultan Mas’ud himself, despite impressive efforts of statesmanship and military command, only barely survived in the throne, having over the course of his twenty years of rule been challenged by the Abbasid Caliphs, by his nephew Dawud, who proclaimed himself Sultan, and by inimical emirs, notably Bozaba - the same who had been one of the reluctant leaders of the Islamic army during the *Second Crusade, against the Rhõmaîon and Frankish advance into Armenia. In the end, Mas’ud would rise triumphant against his enemies, but the troubles that marred his whole reign will only worsen after his passing in 1152. Then, Eldiguz - who had made himself a quasi-independent ruler over Azerbaijan and Arran, and, having amassed a large army to protect the northwestern frontier of the Sultanate against the expansionist Georgian kingdom - took advantage of the circumstances to establish himself as the overlord over the neighboring fiefs of Mosul and Shirvan. Shirvan had been previously coerced into vassalage to Georgia by King Demetrius, and thus Eldiguz, seeing the instability in that Christian kingdom resultant of Demetrius’ deposition by his own son, David [V] (1154), exploited it and advanced against the enfeebled Shirvanshahs, who then admitted his suzerainty. On the other hand, he used the very same pretext of protecting the frontier emirates against the Georgians to march into Mosul in 1155, and there he was met with little resistance, considering that, after the death of Saif al-Islam, his three sons, Shams al-Mulk Isma’il, Shihab ad-Din Mahmud and Jamal ad-Din Muhammad, had been engaged in a bloody succession struggle. In the end, none of them actually came victorious, and Eldiguz, after capturing the two elder brothers, placed the younger one, Jamal, in the government of Mosul as his own subordinate.
In the next year, Eldiguz’s success would seemingly be interrupted by the action of the new Sultan, Muhammad [III]. However, his attempts to retake control over Azerbaijan were ill-fated and he desisted after short raiding campaigns, forced to devote his attention to the south, against another rebellion of the Abbasids, who came to supported Suleiman Shah as a claimant. To the despair of his few supporters, Muhammad II died of natural causes in 1159, and in his wake, the central authority of his state enthroned in Hamadan finally collapsed.
Suleiman Shah would prove to be a weak ruler, and was fated to live a short life under the strings of the powerful Emir of Rey, Inanch Sunqur. Eldiguz, once again secure in the northwestern provinces, and unchecked by the Georgians, convinced Suleiman’s mamluks to betray him and he was ignominiously deposed and assassinated, replaced by Eldiguz’s own stepson Arslan Shah, and then he came to reside in the Seljuk capital of Hamadan, ruling as Sultan in all but name. This aroused the enmity of three other formidable powerbrokers: the Emir of Rey himself, as well as Aq Sunqur Ahmadili, Atabeg of Maragheh and Sunqur ibn Mawdud, Atabeg of Fars [4]. Howbeit they ought to be much more formidable together, their greed and haughtiness thwarted the efforts of establishing a coalition against the Kipchak kingmaker, and Eldiguz masterfully challenged them. The extent of his influence is demonstrated by the fact that, in 1162, he alone commandeered a coalition of Islamic princes against the Kingdom of Georgia to conquer the city-fortress of Dvin, comprised by the almost defunct Shah-Armens - who had previously accepted Mosuli suzerainty to protect themselves against Rhõmanía and Georgia -, and his own adversaries in Maragheh and Arzen. He went as far as restoring the deposed Kurdish Shaddadids to Ani, the former capital of Armenia, and there they would rule until Eldiguz’s death.
Inanch of Rey was his most dedicated enemy for almost a decade, having fought two wars, in 1161 - when he attempted to capture Hamadan to depose Arslan Shah - and in 1165 - when he obtained the support of the Bavandids of Mazandaran and of Il-Arslan, the Shah of Khwarazm, and marched against the Eldiguzid territory while the Atabeg of Azerbaijan was in Ardabil to oversee the succession of the local atabeg, Jamal ad-Din Muhammad ibn Nasir ad-Din. In both times Inanch failed, and, in 1169, he was finally defeated and slain when Eldiguz took Rey by storm. And while Eldiguz never succeeded in capturing the well-defended Maragheh, he nonetheless diminished the territory of the Ahmadilis by capturing the wealthy city of Tabriz in 1174.
By the last year of his life, 1175, Shams ad-Din Eldiguz had made himself the master of almost the whole of Persia proper, from Mosul, Azerbaijan and Shirvan, all the way to Fars and Kerman, both of whose rulers briefly accepted his overlordship. He was opposed by the Ahmadilis of Maragheh, by the Bavandids of Mazandaran and by the Anushtegnids of Khwarazm, but none of them obtained any victories against him nor against his immediate successors.
The framework of power constructed by Eldiguz, while impressive and formidable, exemplary of the will of a great man who rose from nothing, would only barely outlive him. His sons, Muhammad Jahan Pahlavan and Qizil Arslan, were, each in his own way, capable and talented rulers, but their reigns were short and they failed to secure stable succession. Eldiguz’s grandsons, who received Rey, Isfahan and Iraq to rule, were much less capable, and would see the complete deterioration of the rulership crafted by his father in the span of a couple years. Despite the fact that they would mostly renounce their Turkic heritage, eagerly adopting the more prestigious Persian and Arabian languages in their courts, as well as the customs and manners of the Persianized Turkish rulers, and avidly sponsored literary endeavors - such as those of Athir ad-Din Akhsikati, Khaqani and Nizami Ganjavi, all of whom dedicated poems to the Eldiguzid rulers - they lacked any sort of actual political legitimacy, and had no better claim to rule than the other rival warlords. In this state of anarchy, might made right, and not the contrary, and if one player failed to secure his position, he would inevitably fall, either by military humiliation or by actual diminishment into irrelevance.
Surprisingly, their demise would come by the hand of none other than Sultan Toghrul [III], whom Jahan Pahlavan treated as a hostage in order to rule in his name. The Sultan briefly obtained the allegiance of mamluks disgruntled with the Eldiguzids and successfully ousted them from Hamadan and Isfahan. By the 1191, the year of Qizil Arslan’s death, he and his sons and nephews were once again confined to the rule of Azerbaijan, far less relevant to the fates of the Mesopotamian and Persian realms than other players who rose to the challenge: the Abbasid Caliphs and the Khwarazmians, respectively.
The Caliphs and the Barbarians
For more than two centuries, the Abbasid Caliphs saw their political power wane over the course of various internecine conflicts, such as the infamous Anarchy of Samarra, so that, from their apogee as the largest and most powerful state in the Earth, they now survived as a vestigial polity whose confines coincided with the boundaries of the metropolis of Baghdad. Their slow but steady decline had begun in the middle of the 8th [Christian] Century, when, in a succession of decades, the regions of al-Andalus, Maghreb al-Aqsa [i.e. Morocco], Ifriqiya and Sicily, Khorasan and Transoxiana, Persia and Egypt, all broke off under native peoples and local dynasties, most of whom still preserved the fiction of a Caliphal suzerainty. By the late 10th Century, the Caliphate only held de facto rule over Mesopotamia and parts of Syria and Arabia, but their most humiliating blow came when they were reduced to a position of submission to the Buyids of Daylam, whose monarchs made the Caliphs their much venerable hostages. The Abbasids in name and right ruled over the realms of Islam, but, in practice, they were powerless servants of more formidable foreign warmongers. Even the resourceful Buyids, however, could hardly impede the eventual invasion of the Turkomans, led by Toghrul , and the Seljuks thus made themselves the master over Persia and almost the whole of Islamic West Asia, as we have previously described.
In the twilight phase of the Seljuk era, however, the Abbasids, under the rule of ambitious Caliphs, managed to restore their own political and military independence, enjoying the inglorious decadence of the Turkoman Sultans. In 1157 A.D., Caliph al-Muqtafi successfully defended Baghdad against Sultan Muhammad II, who saw his large army suffer massive casualties over the course of almost six months of carnage, many of them incinerated by naphtha bombs. But a genuine reckoning came under Caliph al-Nasir, who came to power in 1180 A.D. - the same year in which Robert Capet was crowned King of Syria -, and deftly exploited his own religious leadership to gather and move the masses through the influence over the futuwwat organizations [5]. These men, many of whom went into campaign in the name of Caliph, were guided by religious zealotry and cultural contempt - viewing the Turkish dynasts as barbaric, corrupt and ignorant, and desirous of the restoration of the pre-Turkic Islamic age - and they formed the backbone of a small, but reliable, army which allowed al-Nasir to expand against the decrepit rule of the Seljuks over Lower Mesopotamia, the country the Muslims call Arabian Iraq [Ar. al-ʻIrāq al-ʻArabi].
In his long reign, Baghdad would reassume, for a short period, the preeminent position as a center of learning in the Islamic world, which had been disputed with Cairo, Damascus and Seville. And while the Caliph might cherish the prospect of witnessing the disgrace of the Shiites in Egypt and the downfall of the Almohads in al-Andalus - both fated to fall to the violence of the barbaric Franji and both of whom the Abbasids regarded as usurpers to the Caliphal authority -, he would also live long enough to see the prelude of the greatest disaster that would befall the realm of Islam, in the early 13th Century.
In any event, in late 12th Century, the Seljuks in Hamadan were still a force to be reckoned with, and despite his resourcefulness, al-Nasir had no conditions of projecting his military power beyond Lower Mesopotamia. Baghdad might be one of the largest and wealthiest cities of the globe, but it was one city nonetheless, and the other provinces, such as Samarra, Basra, Wasit and Tikrit, could hardly provide the necessary manpower to allow for a sustained war of conquest (or reconquest, if the rule of the Abbasids is regarded as the more legitimate one). The Caliph depended on other potentates to bring the Seljuks to heel.
Firstly, he found convenient allies in the Eldiguzids themselves. In 1191, Qizil Arslan proclaimed himself Sultan after defeating Toghrul [III] in battle, as the latter attempted to occupy Azerbaijan. His victory was short-lived, however, because later in the same year, his former sister-in-law, Inanch Khatun - the widow of Muhammad Jahan Pahlavan - had him murdered by poison. After his passing, Jahan Pahlavan’s sons began to fight amongst themselves, and they failed to united once Toghrul, released from prison by a disgruntled mamluk, mustered his own army and retook Hamadan in 1192.
Just as Toghrul seemed poised to reclaim his dynasty's position in Persia, the Caliph pleaded to his cause yet another Turkic warlord, Ala ad-Din Tekish [Ar. Aladdin Tekish], the Shah of Khwarazm, who, 1193 A.D., became the sole ruler of the whole of eastern Persia, after a twenty-year long succession dispute against his brother Sultan Shah. Tekish hardly needed any encouragement to invade and take the rich provinces of central Iran, but the alliance and sanction of the Sunni Caliph made the vanquishing of the Seljuks an even more prestigious victory. The last Seljuk Sultan, Toghrul [III], who had recently humbled the Eldiguzids and restored a semblance of authority in his state, was humiliated and forced to accept the hegemony of the Khwarezmians. In 1194, he attempted a last ditch effort to secure his position by attacking the recently captured city of Rey, but was slain in the battlefield by Qutlug Inanch, Eldiguz's grandson, who had become a vassal of Tekish Shah. Toghrul’s young sons were brought as prisoners to Gurgānj, and there they would languish and eventually die, and with them would die the lineage of Seljuk Bey.
The Abbasids would receive from Tekish the outlying provinces of Lower Mesopotamia to rule, notably Khuzestan and the western reaches of the Jibal, but it became clear from the beginning that the Khwarazmians were to take the place of the Seljuks, and, once they entered Hamadan and Isfahan, they demanded the Caliphal recognition of their paramountcy over the Iranian emirates and atabeyliks. Al-Nasir attempted to save face, but his diplomatic overtures insulted and incensed the hot-tempered Shah, and their alliance dissolved barely two years after it was celebrated. For the next twenty years, until al-Nasir’s last days, the Abbasids and the Khwarazians would be hostile to one another, even though they never actually went to war. The lowest point of their relations came when Shah Tekish, infuriated by the fact that al-Nasir employed the Assassins to murder the Khwarazmian governor in Hamadan, elevated an obscure Daylamite Shia scholar to the post of Caliph to insult and spite the ruler of Baghdad. The measure was unpopular, however, because, while there was a significant Shiite population in the mountainous and rural areas of Tabaristan, Gilan and Daylam, the presence of the Nizari Assassins in Alamut gave them to all of them a poor reputation, and they were despised by the Turkic rulers. This short-lived Shia Caliphate quickly disappears from History, but it is noteworthy that Shia Islam would survive for much longer in Persia than it did in Egypt, where, ironically enough, the very first Shia Caliphate preceded a Catholic Christian regime.
By the beginning of the 13th Century, it was all but clear that the Khwarazm-Shah was the ultimate suzerain over not only Khorasan and Turkestan [6] but also the whole of Persia.
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The most notable event of the History of the Khwarazmian dynasty is certainly their unforeseeable and brutal downfall at the hands of the Mongols which would result in centuries of Khitayid rule in Persia. Yet, their ascension gives us a fascinating tale as well, especially because they, much like other barbarian dynasties, came from nothing. Their progenitor was another ambitious mamluk warlord named Anushtegin Gharchai [Romanized Persian: Anūštigin Ḡaṛčaʾī], who for twenty years ruled Khwarazm as a vassal of the Seljuks. He died in 1097 A.D., one year before the conquest of Jerusalem to the Crusaders, and, at the time, he had already incorporated the traditional honorific of “Shah”, peculiar to the peoples who inhabited that part of Central Asia. Despite its meaning, the title was not seen as higher than that of Sultan, and neither were the Anushtegnids seen as a threat to their power, considering that, in that period, they were confined to Khwarazm proper, that is, the land bordering the Aral Sea, irrigated by the Amu Darya, which the ancient Macedonians and Greeks knew as the Oxus river.
Now, we know that the Khwarazmians would later be responsible for the destruction of the Seljuk rule, but their rise to power was a consequence, not a cause, of the latter’s decline. In the later turbulent years of Sultan Sanjar’s reign, the Shah Il-Arslan continued to pay tribute, but their position in Khwarazm was far more substantial, and, indeed, it was shortly after Sanjar’s death that they annexed the wealthy country of Khorasan to their domain. It is true that they were nominal vassals of the Qara Khitai, but their masters left them to their own devices, as long as they paid their annual tribute. Il-Arslan attempted to break off Khitai suzerainty in 1172, but was defeated and forced to kneel. It would be his son, the aforementioned Shah Ala ad-Din Tekish, who, after a long struggle with his brother Sultan Shah, would finally overthrow the Khitai overlordship over Khwarazm, and would in turn submit their former vassals into paying tribute to the court in Gurgānj.
It is important to acknowledge the role played by the Khwarazmians in the continued migrations of the Turkoman warbands into Western Asia, addressed in the very beginning of this Chapter. Indeed, the region of Khwarazm was relatively prosperous and urbanized - Khiva being chief among these cities - but it was but an island in the expansive stretches of the Asian steppe, now mostly inhabited by the Turkic peoples who had begun to immigrate from Altai three centuries before. To the west of Khwarazm laid the Kipchaks, most of whom were still pagan and very much hostile to the Iranian way of life, and to the east, the remaining tribes of the Oghuz confederation. The pervasive influence of the Turkic immigration can be seen in the linguistic transition of the region - at the time of the Anushteginids, they still spoke the Iranian Khwarazmian language (and Royal Persian in court) -, but it was in steep decline, considering that peasants and urban-dwellers alike came to speak the tongue of their rulers. Now, the Anushteginids, most notably under the reign of Shah Tekish, eagerly recruited these Kipchak, Turkoman and Qara-Khanid nomadic warriors to his armies, in even greater numbers than the Seljuks, regardless of the fact that many of them were not even Muslims, and placed their chieftains in the rule of Persian cities. Once they outlived their usefulness, however, in worriment of their unruliness, the Shahs instigated their clans to go settle in the frontier regions, especially in the provinces of the Caspian Sea, such as Azerbaijan, Shirvan, Maragheh and Gilan. Many of them would go even further west to find employment as mercenaries or to settle with their families, and would venture especially in Upper Mesopotamia, where the Toghteginids of Mosul were to experience, in the beginning of the 13th Century, a revival after three consecutive generations of weak rulers, under the rule of Atabeg as-Salih Isma’il Saif ad-Din al-Isfahbadh.
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The decay and belated fall of the Seljuk dynasty caused decades of strife in one of the most populous and wealthy parts of the Islamic world, and they lacked both the interest and the resources to impede the events occurring in Western Asia beyond the Tigris, as their lukewarm response to the *Second Crusade had demonstrated. Once again, the expansionist movement of the Christian powers of the Orient - the Rhõmaîoi, the Georgians, the Armenians and the Franks - had only actually been possible due to the paralysis and weakness of those that once had been one of the most powerful states of the Earth, the Seljuks and the Abbasids. And now, the Khwarazmians, even after becoming the masters of Persia, from their distant seat in Gurgãnj, had no real stakes in regards to the gradual subjugation of the Muslim nations in the Levant and in Egypt, and their dedication to the jihadist rhetoric against the Christian infidels served only as a convenient political expedient.
Of course, resistance to these continued Christian assaults against the Muslim metropolises - denounced by various contemporary statesmen, literary writers, poets and scholars as veritable barbarian invasions - would come from local potentates, such as the Toghteginids, the Shirvanshahs, the Ahmadilis, as well as, surprisingly enough, from the encroaching Turkoman chieftains who came to raid and settle in Armenia, Mesopotamia and Syria, but none of these would be strong nor resourceful enough to threaten the Rhõmaîon, Georgian and Frankish domains, respectively. Moreover, none of the Sunni rulers would seriously lament the grueling destitution of the Shia Fāṭimīds in Egypt to the cross-bearing armies of the *Third Crusade, and neither would resist enough to thwart the aggressive expansion of the Georgian kingdom under the reign of Tamar the Great.
In the courts of Baghdad and Gurgãnj, the respective rulers did not feel the same sense of loss and bereavement felt by the populations of Syria and Egypt. On the contrary, the apparent resurgence of the Abbasids as a political force in Mesopotamia and the rise of the Khwarazmians in Persia, there was an enthusiastic atmosphere and the expectation of a new age of stability and peace in between the realms of the Caliph and of the Shah.
From our vantage point of coming to know the course of human events as they did happen we can say that this was but the calm before the storm.
Soon the Islamic world would see an era of unprecedented devastation, violence and weeping, to be innaugurated by a warlike race of horsemen birthed in the far confines of the Earth, fated to forever change the world.
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Notes:
[1] The name means, literally “Persian Iraq”, being the Arabic name given to the region that in ancient era was called Media, and it is distinct from “Arabian Iraq” (Mesopotamia, in whose territory the Republic of Iraq is established).
[2] The terminology of the “Great Man Theory” is certainly not used ITTL, but the concept associated to this name - that the course of human events can be defined by individual human agencies - exists, and I opted to use OTL nomenclature to ease understanding.
[3] “Atabeg” in its original sense meant “guardian”, but it historically became a title of rulership. When a Seljuk prince died, leaving minor heirs, a guardian would be appointed to protect and guide the young princes. These guardians would often marry their wards' widowed mothers, thus assuming a sort of surrogate fatherhood.
[4] I researched many times about the meaning of the name “Sunqur/Sonqor”, which occurs frequently among the Turkic rulers of the Seljuk Empire (and not coincidentally it is also the name of a city in modern-day Iran). Any Turkish-speaking poster might help me, but I suppose that it is a name associated with the mamluks/freedmen under the Seljuk era.
[5] The definition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is a good one to explain: “In Islamic civilization, the futuwwāt (“spiritual chivalry”) were military and economic orders similar to the knightly fraternities and guilds of medieval Europe. Combining craftwork or service in the military or government with spiritual discipline, these orders have played a major role in Islamic history by drawing their members more fully into the spiritual life and ethos of Islam (the craft orders still survive in some areas of the Islamic world).”
[6] Turkestan corresponds to the ancient Sogdiana/Transoxiana.
Comment: This chapter is almost entirely a more retelling of historical events with my own words - the only actual divergences are related to the Toghteginids, who, as you know, are the historical Burids, who OTL ruled Damascus before the Zengid era, but ITTL came to settle in Mosul - but it was nonetheless fascinating to write. The timeline of events is complicated, and you might have seen by the dates that there is a lot of stuff happening in short periods of time; the Wikipedia articles which I used for research are confusing and thus I had the double effort of studying the history and streamlining the narrative into a more palatable format, coherent with the rest of the story. I hope the effort was good enough.
The first section is wholly based in Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the cycle of dynasties described in al-Muqaddimah. I did not credit him, however, because I’m still unsure if he will appear in the TL in his capacity as an historian and philosopher, or in another role altogether. In any case, his theory and the idea of social decadence and asabiyyah will play a significant role in the ummah’s self-image in the wake of the Crusades and of the Mongol invasions.
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