Seljuk Empire

The Seljuk Empire was a vast Sunni Muslim empire founded by the Seljuk branch of the Oghuz Turks, which for a time dominated the central Islamic lands and reshaped the political and ethnic map of the Near East.

Originating among Turkic nomads of the Central Asian steppe who had converted to Islam, the Seljuks under Tughril Beg captured the Persian city of Nishapur in 1037 and went on to defeat the Ghaznavids, marking the conventional founding of the empire. In 1055 Tughril entered Baghdad, where the Abbasid caliph recognised him as sultan, making the Seljuks the temporal protectors of Sunni Islam and effective rulers of the caliphate while the caliph retained spiritual authority. Under Tughril's successors Alp Arslan and Malik-Shah I the empire reached its zenith, stretching from the frontiers of Central Asia across Iran and Mesopotamia to Syria and Anatolia. A pivotal moment came in 1071, when Alp Arslan crushed the Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert and captured the emperor, opening Anatolia to permanent Turkish settlement and beginning the long transformation of that region into what would become Turkey. The empire's administration was largely guided by the brilliant Persian vizier Nizam al-Mulk, who promoted a centralised bureaucracy along Persian lines, authored a famous manual of statecraft, and founded the influential network of Nizamiyya madrasas that strengthened Sunni orthodoxy and learning. The Seljuk era was culturally a high point of Perso-Islamic civilisation, fostering achievements in architecture, scholarship, and the sciences, including the work of the poet and astronomer Omar Khayyam. After the deaths of Malik-Shah and Nizam al-Mulk in 1092, the empire was weakened by succession struggles and gradually fragmented into competing principalities ruled by Seljuk princes and their Turkish atabeg regents. The Great Seljuk state in the east declined under pressure from the rising Khwarazmian Empire, which extinguished the last Great Seljuk sultan in 1194, although an offshoot, the Sultanate of Rum, persisted in Anatolia.

Key figures