Seljuk Empire

Also known as Great Seljuks, Seljukid Empire

Turco-Persianate Sunni empire whose victory at Manzikert in 1071 opened Anatolia to Turkic settlement, and whose disintegration after 1092 created the political vacuum into which the First Crusade marched.

The Seljuks were a clan of Oghuz Turks from the Eurasian steppe who under Toghrul Beg seized Nishapur in 1038 and Baghdad in 1055 — the latter as the new 'sultans' restoring the Sunni Abbasid caliph against his Shi'a Buyid overlords. Under Toghrul's nephew Alp Arslan (r. 1063–72) and Alp Arslan's son Malik Shah I (r. 1072–92) the Great Seljuk Sultanate became the dominant power of the central Islamic world, stretching from the Hindu Kush to the Anatolian plateau.

Their crucial moment for European history was the Battle of Manzikert on 26 August 1071, where Alp Arslan annihilated the field army of the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV and opened Anatolia to permanent Turkmen settlement. Within twenty years a cadet branch had founded the Sultanate of Rum at Nicaea, and the Seljuk-aligned Danishmendids had secured central Anatolia. The cumulative loss of half their old territory was the immediate provocation that led Alexios I Komnenos to appeal to the West for aid in 1095.

Malik Shah's death in 1092 fractured the Great Seljuk state into competing successor sultanates almost overnight, and it is into that wreckage that the First Crusade marched in 1097. The Seljuks of Anatolia (Rum), of Damascus, of Aleppo, of Mosul, and of the Jazira each fought the Crusaders separately, and the political shape of the early Latin East was determined by the fact that the empire that should have opposed it had already eaten itself.

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