Seljuk Empire

The Turkic empire that took over the caliphate without abolishing it, and opened Anatolia to the Turks. The Seljuks were a clan of the Oghuz Turks who converted to Sunni Islam, moved south out of Central Asia, and in 1055 entered Baghdad, where the caliph gave their leader the title of sultan. The arrangement set the pattern for centuries: the caliph retained religious authority and the sultan held actual power. Their decisive act was the defeat of the Byzantine army at Manzikert in 1071, where the emperor himself was captured; the battle mattered less for its casualties than for the collapse of Byzantine control in Anatolia that followed, which let Turkic groups settle a peninsula that had been Greek for two thousand years. That settlement is why Turkey is Turkish. The loss also prompted the Byzantine appeal to the west that produced the First Crusade. The empire was administered by Persian officials, above all Nizam al-Mulk, whose treatise on government is a classic of the genre and who founded a network of madrasas to train officials and standardise Sunni teaching. Persian became the language of administration and literature. Omar Khayyam worked on calendar reform under Seljuk patronage. The empire fragmented after 1092 into competing principalities, of which the Sultanate of Rum in Anatolia lasted longest. The Mongols broke it at Kose Dag in 1243. The empire ran from Anatolia to Central Asia at its height. Isfahan and Nishapur served as capitals. Its rulers held the title of sultan from 1055. Seljuk mosques introduced the four-iwan plan that became standard in Iran. The Sultanate of Rum lasted until around 1308.

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