Ala ad-Din Tekish
Ala ad-Din Tekish was the Khwarazmshah who in twenty-eight years took the kingdom of the Oxus delta from a vassal state of the Kara-Khitai to the master of Iran, destroying the last Seljuk sultan of the west in 1194 at Rayy and sending his head to Baghdad, where the caliph, who had asked for the war, found himself with a neighbour more dangerous than the one he had lost. The empire Tekish made was the one his son Muhammad II would provoke Genghis Khan into destroying twenty years after his death. He was the elder son of the shah Il-Arslan and was passed over for a younger brother when their father died in 1172, so he went to the Kara-Khitai, the Buddhist Chinese-speaking overlords of Transoxiana, and came back with their army to take Khwarezm. The brother, Sultan Shah, fought him for the next twenty years from Khurasan with whatever allies he could find, including the same Kara-Khitai, whom Tekish had thrown out as soon as they had served. Tekish took Nishapur from him in 1187 and Merv when he died in 1193. The caliph al-Nasir, who wanted the Seljuk Toghrul III out of Iraq-i Ajam, called Tekish in, and in March 1194 near Rayy Toghrul was killed in the battle, the last Seljuk of Iran, and his head went to Baghdad on a spear. Tekish took Hamadan and Rayy and installed his own governor, and when the caliph's vizier came with an army to claim the province he beat that too, in 1196, and the caliph's men went home without their vizier's head, which had also gone on a spear. He had the Kipchak nomads of the northern steppe as his soldiers and their princess as his wife, Terken Khatun, whose people would be the ruin of her grandson. He built a great tomb-tower and a Friday mosque at Urgench and kept the Kara-Khitai tribute, which he paid to the end. He died in 1200 at Shahristan on his way to punish the Ismailis, who had murdered his vizier, and Muhammad II, who inherited everything, inherited also a caliph who had learned to hate the house.
- Nationality: Khwarezmian
- Roles: shah, monarch
