Introduction

A. C.S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola, Sara Nur Yildiz

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingForeword/postscript

Abstract

The eleventh-century invasions of the Seljuq Turks affected to some degree almost every part of the Middle East. Nowhere, however, was their legacy as profoundly transformative as in the Anatolian peninsula. Up to the mideleventh century, Anatolia had been an almost entirely Christian land, populated largely by Greeks and Armenians and smaller numbers of Georgians and Syrian Christians. Anatolia represented the core territories of the Byzantine empire upon which Constantinople relied for revenue, and many emperors were themselves of Anatolian origins, whether Greek or Armenian. Over the seventh to tenth centuries, Byzantium had resisted, more or less successfully, Arab attacks that had reached on occasion as far west as Constantinople itself. Indeed, in the late tenth and early eleventh century, Byzantium started to expand eastwards, incorporating Arab territories around Lake Van and even in northern Syria. There was little clue that the infiltration of Turkish nomads of Central Asian origin, whose leaders had recently founded the Seljuq empire in Iran and Iraq in the 1040s, would lead to the sudden collapse of the Byzantine empire in Asia in the wake of the great Turkish victory at Manzikert in 1071. By the 1080s, however, Turkish Muslims controlled most of Anatolia; Byzantine territories were reduced to a few coastal outposts. Byzantium at times regained some coastal and western parts of Anatolia, but it was never able to challenge Turkish suzerainty in the Anatolian interior. Although Byzantium survived, much weakened, until the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, it never recovered from the loss of its Anatolian heartland. Nonetheless, Muslim rule in medieval Anatolia was never monolithic (see Maps 1-4). Alongside the best known Turkish dynasty, the Seljuqs (r. in Anatolia c.1081-1307), existed a host of other Muslim dynasties, such as the Artuqids of the Diyar Bakr, the Mengüjekids of Erzincan and the Danishmendids of central Anatolia.1 The situation was further complicated by the dominance in Anatolia from the midthirteenth to the mid-fourteenth centuries of the Mongols, whose early rulers, 1 The standard survey of this period in a Western language remains Claude Cahen, La Turquie pré-ottomane (Istanbul, 1988), which is to be preferred to the earlier and later English versions of this book that lack references (idem, Pre-Ottoman Turkey: A General Survey of the Material and Spiritual Culture and History c.1071-1330, trans. J. Jones-Williams (New York: Taplinger Publishers Co., 1968); The Formation of Turkey: The Seljuqid Sultanate of Rūm: Eleventh to Fourteenth Century, trans. and ed. Peter M. Holt (Harlow, UK and New York: Longman, 2001)). The standard work in Turkish remains Osman Turan, Selçuklular Zamanında Türkiye, Siyâsi Tarih Alp Arslan’dan Osman Gazi’ye (1071-1318) (Istanbul: Turan Neşriyatı, 1971, and many reprints). For a sample of more recent scholarship on the Seljuq dynasty in Anatolia see The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East, ed. A.C.S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013).

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIslam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia
PublisherTaylor and Francis
Pages1-20
Number of pages20
ISBN (Electronic)9781317112693
ISBN (Print)9781472448637
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2016

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