TAR 106 - History of Seljuks

This course explores the Seljuk history, starting from the early period of settlement in the western Eurasian steppes until the demise of the Anatolian Seljuk dynasty during the fourteenth century. After their migration to Transoxania, the earliest Seljuks conquered Iran, Iraq, Anatolia and Syria and established one of the largest and most powerful states of the Islamic world in the eleventh century. The Great Seljuk State also marked the beginning of Turkish rule in the Islamic world. The establishment of the Great Seljuk State has not only influenced the history of various other peoples, but it also connected Turkish history as an crucial branch to the history of the Muslim world. The various periods of the Seljuk state building will be discussed. The course will give special attention to the social dynamics of nomadic state formation and its transformation into a sedentary and centralised Islamic empire. This course is aimed to deliver the students with knowledge on the political, social, religious, demographic and cultural processes of change and continuity in the history of the Seljuk Turks.

In the tenth century, when the Islamic world had fallen into political and religious fragmentation and the threat of the Crusaders had increased gradually, how did the Seljuk sultans, who had migrated from the Eurasian steppes, succeed to  reunite and govern almost all of the central heartland of the Islamic civilisation? What were the factors that made the establishment of the Great Seljuk State possible? This course will answer these basic questions. Focusing on perhaps the most important and least understood phase, the transformation of the Seljuks from Central Asian nomads into to rulers of a great Muslim empire, this course examines the sources on Seljuk history to demonstrate the central role of the nomadic dynamics in the evolution of the Seljuk state. Arguing that the nomadic origins of the Seljuks were of much greater importance in determining the early development of the empire than is usually believed, this course sheds new light on the arrival of the Turks in the Islamic world.

The period of Great Seljuk rule, the eleventh and twelfth centuries, marks a turning point in demography, religion and politics in the Islamic world. The demography of the region changed permanently through significant waves of Turkish migrations. Ultimately, these migrations led to the formation of Turkish populations in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Iran and Syria that exist there today. The Seljuk period also marks the reassertion of Sunni domination in the Islamic civilisation, which had been eclipsed by the rise of the Shi‘ite Buyid dynasty in Iran and Iraq and the Fatimid state in Syria, Egypt and North Africa in the tenth century. It was under Seljuk rule that scholars like al-Ghazali reconciled Sufism with Islam, and it was then that the medrese or Islamic university came to prominence. All these developments were to shape the subsequent political, religious and intellectual history of the Islamic world.

After the disintegration of the Great Seljuk Empire in the twelfth century, various branches of the Seljuk dynasty continued to rule in the Islamic world through different states. One of these was the Anatolian Rum Seljuks in todays Turkey. The Anatolian Seljuk dynasty was heir to the Great Seljuk heritage and it left great a mark on the cultural, intellectual, economic and political history of medieval Anatolia.