REVIEW ARTICLE

RECENT PUBLICATIONS ON THE HISTORY OF UNDER THE SELJUQS

Aziz BAŞAN, The Great Seljuqs. A History (London: Routledge, 2010): xii, 209 pp. Includes bibliography and index, ISBN 978-0-203-84923-1; David DURAND- GUÉDY, Iranian Élites and Turkish Rulers. A History of Iṣfahān in the Saljūq Period. (London: Routledge, 2010): xxiii, 435 pp. Includes bibliography and index. ISBN 978-0-415-45710-1; Christian LANGE and Songül MECIT (eds), The Seljuqs: Politics, Society and Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011): 288 pp. ISBN 978-0-748-63994-6; Andrew C.S. PEACOCK, Early Seljūq History. A New Interpretation (London: Routledge, 2010): xi, 190 pp. Includes bibliography and index. ISBN 978-0-415-54853-3. There is consensus among specialists that “the Seljuqs remain one of the understudied Muslim dynasties”.1 In more detail, Peacock states that “[t]here is not a single book-length study of the Seljūq Empire in the Middle East in a western language”,2 although there are several, even if somewhat dated, in Turkish.3 Durand-Guédy sets out with the observation that there is a “growing gap between the expanding corpus of sources on this crucial period and the meagre number of serious studies devoted to it, whether in Iran, Turkey, the West or Japan”4 and posits that Bosworth’s contribution to the Cambridge History of Iran5 is still the standard account. All authors agree that this is deplorable because of the extreme significance of the Seljuq period in the history of the Middle East (at least for Iran and , but in a way also for the Arab East). “Crucial”, “pivotal” and other such epithets are used to stress this. Now, a lacuna in itself is no reason to devote time and labour to filling it, and even less reason to write a special review article on works aiming at doing just that. In fact, a number of monographs and longer articles have been published on the Seljuqs over the last few years, and a group of younger scholars seem determined to make the best out of this lacuna (and there are some senior scholars in the field too). Why the Seljuqs? ———— 1 Lange and Mecit, Seljuqs: Introduction. 2 Peacock, Early Seljuq History: p. 3. 3 See Başan, Great Seljuqs. 4 Durand-Guédy, Iranian Élites : p. 1. 5 Bosworth, C.E., “The political and dynastic history of the Iranian world (AD 1000- 1217)”, in The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. 5: The Saljuq and Mongol Periods, ed. J.A. Boyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968): pp. 1-202.

Eurasian Studies, IX/1-2 (2011): pp. 263-275. © Istituto per l’Oriente C.A. Nallino \ Orientalisches Institut der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg 264 Review article ———————————————————————————–

There are a number of reasons one might adduce. Some authors point to the many and important changes that took place during the Seljuq period, whether or not they were brought about by them (Lange and Mecit use the metaphor of the switchman who makes a train change its course without having to know the train’s ultimate destination). I am not sure whether this could not be said of any major dynasty in the medieval Middle East, but I am convinced that the Seljuqs are not the only case in point. It would be difficult to admit that in more than one century, indeed up to two centuries in some places, and so vast a region no great changes could be identified, and therefore all dynasties that ruled for any significant period would be such “switchmen” because all ruling dynasties at least exercise the minimal degree of activity that warrants the use of the metaphor. The major changes that occurred in Seljuq times are most prominently: the “Sunni revival”, which put an end to the “Shi’i century”, and the concurrent rise of the , together with a new role for the caliph; the increased importance and systematisation of the iqṭāʿ; and, of course, the task of warding off the crusaders in Syria and Palestine – the appearance of Frankish invaders was an entirely novel phenomenon. Another reason to see the Seljuqs as a particularly important dynasty in the history of the Middle East is that they may be said to be the first dynasty of Turkic (and therefore nomadic) background to rule over Iran – many more dynasties of that type were to follow. The same could be said of the Qarakhanids in Transoxiana (who were earlier than the Seljuqs by two generations), but then a boom in Qarakhanid studies is unlikely ever to take place because of the scarcity of the sources. So, if we want to know how Turkic rule was first established in Iran, we have to turn to the Seljuqs. Likewise, if we want to know what it means to say that a “steppe tradition” of rule and government was introduced to the settled Iranian lands, we must consider the Seljuqs; later dynasties could evidently draw on already established precedents. There is another standard argument we must consider too: the Seljuqs are sometimes construed as a contrast to the Mongols, and so may serve as a “benevolent” model for nomadic rule in a sedentary context. Is there a specifically ‘nomadic’ way of ruling settled countries? And if so, did the Seljuqs conform to any of the patterns we can observe in such cases? And if we can identify such features, how long did the Seljuqs retain to them? Or is the whole question of whether a ruling group comes from the steppe or the sown completely irrelevant, since the only way of governing Iran with any reasonable chance of success is the Iranian way? In other words, is identifying ‘Turkic’ or “Iranian” methods of rule a form of essentialising rulers and ruled alike in a way that is no longer admissible in modern (or post-modern) historical scholarship? Since this volume deals with “nomads in the political field”, I have chosen not to address the first group of questions linked to the consequences of Seljuq rule (or simply of the Seljuq century) for the , but to concentrate on the debate that is evolving around “the Seljuqs and the nomads”. The standard narrative about Turkic or Mongol nomads coming to Iran (or to China, for that matter) is that they take on the superior culture of the sedentary agrarian empire rather quickly, as a general rule no later than after the second

Review article 265 ———————————————————————————– generation. Remnants of nomadic ways may persist, but in an antiquated manner: petrified rituals (e.g. a preference for executing rivals within the royal family or within the ruling stratum without shedding their blood, for example by having the culprit strangled “with his own bowstring” as Başan repeats in numerous places), or a more or less innocent predilection for certain pastimes such as the royal hunt (which does not in itself distinguish steppe culture from Iranian since Iranian kings were no less keen hunters than their Turkic counterparts). In the really serious matters, such as bureaucratic accountancy, the levying of taxes and, above all, the military, the Seljuqs, like the Mongols after them, are said to have dropped their steppe ways rather quickly. Acculturation therefore is seen as a one-way affair: the nomads have to adapt to the habitus of the sedentary agrarian empire or they will not survive. No similar effort is required of the other side. Since they represent the superior culture, sedentary elites can remain just as they were. (One of the major points in Jean Aubin’s latest publication6 was to put this idea to rest. Acculturation in his view was double-sided.) Peacock explicitly aims at putting this narrative into question. The absolute power of the Seljuq sultans as rulers in the Islamic-Iranian mode is not only contested with regard to their relationship to their Turkmen followers; another vital aspect are the urban notables, who have been studied in Khurasanian contexts, but not in Western Iran. Durand-Guédy, by adopting a local perspective, shows very well how much the power of the central bureaucracy – and indeed the rulers themselves – was limited, even in what many consider as the Seljuq capital, Isfahan. This author, in articles published since or in print, has also addressed the “Turkmen problem” in Seljuq history. Thus, in this review essay, I shall focus on two or three new and innovative research tracks that are opened up in the books under review. First, there is the new assessment of the “Turkmen problem”, or, as Peacock puts it, the fact that the Seljuq sultans “found their nomadic subjects an embarrassment”,7 including the question of the extent to which the Seljuq sultans remained beholden to Turkmen ways. Second, there are the new insights to be gained by leaving the imperial perspective for a while. Religious questions will not be addressed in this essay, nor will the history of art and literature – all subjects that are central to the volume edited by Lange and Mecit.

———— 6 Aubin, Jean, Emirs mongols et vizirs persans dans les remous de l’acculturation, Studia Iranica, Cahier 15 (Paris: Peeters, 1995). 7 Peacock, Early Seljuq history: 4.

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David DURAND-GUÉDY, Iranian Élites and Turkish Rulers. A History of Iṣfahān in the Saljūq Period (London: Routledge, 2010): xxiii, 435 pp. Includes bibliography and index. The “politics of notables”, to use a term first coined by Hourani for the in the eighteenth century, reflects a widespread situation in the history of the pre-Mongol Near and Middle East too. Studies have largely concentrated on two regions: Syria and Khurasan. In all cases, very much the same patterns can be shown to be at work. Imperial rule is either absent or distant, and its representatives on the local and regional levels are weak; at any rate, they cannot hope to govern the city without help from the notables. Notables are a not very numerous group of people, often coming from no more than a handful of families, who assume leadership of city quarters or of entire cities and can attract the loyalty of large followings. They are responsible for tax collection, the upholding of order and so forth, and they are the interlocutors of the representatives of imperial power at the local level. In times of crisis, they decide whether their city is going to open its gate to a pretender or conqueror or whether it is going instead to defend itself. Notable families controlled most of the relevant offices, among them that of the city judge; in some cases, the office of šayḫ al-islām is heavily contested. In other cities, the office of raʾīs was the one that made the difference. Everywhere, control of the extensive awqāf established for the newly-founded was an important issue; this could be combined with corresponding professorships. The factional violence that haunted many Iranian cities in the pre-Mongol period was clearly linked to this situation, and it comes as no surprise that very frequently, though by no means always, this factional violence appears in the shape of clashes between Sunni schools of law, the Ḥanafīs and the Šāfiʿīs. Durand-Guédy’s book is the first to address a city in Western Iran, Isfahan, and, moreover, it is the first to address a capital city, where the presence of the ruler should have been systematically more important than it was in the “provincial” cities of Herat or Nishapur on the one hand and the Syrian cities on the other. The author presents the rise of two notable families, the Khujandīs, who were the leaders of the Šāfiʿī faction, and the Ṣāʿids, who were their counterparts on the Ḥanafī side. Both families had come to Isfahan from Khurasan, and it is indeed fascinating to see how the Khujandīs became ‘naturalised’ through their involvement in city life. Both families were, moreover, more or less directly linked to a dynasty that acted as their patrons; the Khujandīs were introduced to Isfahan by Niẓām al-Mulk, and they later worked together with the ʿAbbāsid caliphs; the Ṣāʿids were first linked to the Seljūq sultans, and later to the Ḫwārazmšāhs. The Khujandīs are much better represented in the sources, and one of the major findings of the book is that members of this family, together with apparently well- organised urban militias, were an important factor in driving the Ismāʿīlīs out of the fortress of Šāhdiz, which they had occupied (incidentally, without any traceable connection to the Ismāʿīlīs sitting at Alamut). This is the most outstanding example of notable power – indeed of urban power – demonstrated in the book. Other examples include decisions to deflect imperial armies to other targets so that Isfahan

Review article 267 ———————————————————————————– could avoid a siege, and so forth. Factional strife set in early on and increased over time until the Mongol invasion; as in other cities (such as Marv), Isfahani notables did not refrain from using the Mongols as allies in their own local interest – it goes without saying that this never worked out as the notables had planned. Durand-Guédy has developed his research on the notable families of Isfahan in his contribution to Lange and Mecit, “An emblematic family of Seljuq Iran: The Khujandīs of Isfahan”, which presents additional material. By adopting a local perspective, Durand-Guédy shows that even at the height of its power and in its very capital, the Seljuq Empire was unable to exert control over its urban spaces directly, and did not even pretend to. Indirect forms of rule were the norm in Isfahan as elsewhere, and in this respect there is no real difference between a capital and a provincial city. The very concept of the ‘capital city’ is also under discussion. In recent articles, Durand-Guédy shows that the Seljuq sultans did not live in cities. Even in the period when they are said to have fully conformed to Islamic-Iranian models of rule, they camped outside, on the hunting grounds, on summer pastures, or if they did set up camp in the vicinity of a city, it would be in royal gardens rather than in royal palaces intra muros. It is more difficult to ascertain whether their itineraries were modelled on the pastoral nomadic pattern, but residential areas for summer and winter can be clearly identified in at least some cases (e.g., Masʿūd b. Muḥammad). In a forthcoming article,8 Durand-Guédy shows that it cannot be firmly established that any Seljuq sultan resided in a city, although this does not, of course, exclude that they came into cities – to hold audiences, for example. The royal camp was extra muros, often in royal gardens. Elsewhere, he expands on this subject by showing how the sultan Masʿūd b. Muḥammad moved around, not only between Hamadan and Baghdad, but also into Adharbaijan; the use of royal pastures appears as a central subject.9 Their way of using Isfahan as a ‘capital’ clearly distinguishes the Seljuqs from the only “local” dynasty Isfahan had in the pre-Mongol period, the Kakuyids. In- deed, the Kakuyids emerge as the only dynasty that can be seen as a true representa- tion of local loyalties, and this goes a long way towards explaining the fact that they were able to survive for some generations in the midst of much more powerful neighbours (such as the Buyids and, above all, the in western Iran). The local perspective also helps to retrace identity constructions in Iranian societies in the Seljuq period. Religious identifications have been at the centre of discussions, and it is true that ‘factional’ identities often revolved around religious markers, such as the schools of law or of speculative theology (kalām). Regional, ———— 8 Durand-Guédy, David, “Ruling from the outside: A new perspective on early Turkish kingship in Iran”, in Every Inch a King: Comparative Studies in Kings and Kingship in the Ancient and Mediaeval Worlds, ed. L. Mitchell and C. Melville (Leiden: Brill, 2011 forthcoming). 9 See Durand-Guédy, David, “Where did the Seljuqs live? A case study based on the reign of sultan Masʿūd b. Muḥammad (1134-1152)”, StIr XL/2 (2011, forthcoming).

268 Review article ———————————————————————————– and indeed local, urban identities have been treated much less frequently, but apparently they also held enormous potential. Isfahan as a city was linked to Baghdad more than to any other place, and before the coming of the Seljuqs it had already acquired a culture of competition with the ʿAbbasid capital. The bureaucrats who came with the Seljuqs from the east continued to identify themselves as Khurasanis (and looked down on the Westerners from Jibāl). Never before has the regional structure of Iran been taken to imply such significant consequences, and a picture of a deep rift between Jibāl in the west and Khurasan in the east emerges. In sum, Durand-Guédy’s book is an excellent example of what can be achieved by adopting a local perspective. There are probably quite a number of Iranian cities that could be studied in a similar way. At first sight, the sources for Isfahan did not look particularly promising, but the author has succeeded in bringing together scraps of evidence from all quarters, including poetry, and has mined all the sources to the limit, but without overstretching his conclusions. This gives the book the additional quality of being a demonstration of the use of scant sources.

Aziz BAŞAN, The Great Seljuqs. A History (London, New York: Routledge, 2010): xii, 209 pp. Includes bibliography and index. Turkish historiography about the Seljuqs forms a large body of literature, even if most of the works seem a little dated; Sümer, Köymen and Kafesoğlu wrote their most influential monographs decades ago and, for a number of reasons, works of similar scope have since been rare in Turkey. The Great Seljuqs seem to have been abandoned, at least temporarily, but we have recently seen a number of good and influential monographs (such as those by Merçil, Sevim and Özaydın10) on regional Seljuq states or individual rulers. Most of the international research on the Seljuqs is now being published in English and is written by European or American authors. (Japanese studies should be mentioned too, but they are not linguistically accessible to the present writer.) In this field, as elsewhere, research in non-European languages is not always read as widely as it deserves, and so there have already been efforts to make Turkish research on the Seljuqs available. Başan’s monograph is not the first attempt at situating Turkish research on the Seljuqs in its historical and ideological context. In the introduction, he dismisses

———— 10 Merçil, Erdoğan, Fars Atabegleri Salgurlular (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1991²); Merçil, Erdoğan, Kirman Selçukluları (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları, Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1989); Sevim, Ali, Selçuklu Devletleri Tarihi: Siyaset, Teşkilat ve Kültür (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1995); Özaydın, Abdülkerim, Sultan Muhammed Tapar Devri Selçuklu Tarihi (498-511/1105-118) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1990); Idem, Sultan Berkyaruk Devri Selçuklu Tarihi (485-498/1092-1104) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2001).

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Strohmeier11 out of hand: Strohmeier “has attempted to evaluate the politics and ideologies of Turkish historians on the Seljuqs [...] arguably Strohmeier fails in this task”. However, the discussion of Strohmeier in the introduction is brief and clearly does not do justice to the German researcher’s work. Leiser12 is referred to in the bibliography, but I am not aware of any reference to this work in the book itself. As the title indicates, Leiser offers far more than just a translation of Kafesoğlu’s work, and he has translated several other works besides this. It is a pity that Başan has chosen not to discuss the works of these two authors. Turkish historiography in the 1950s and 1960s followed a very ideological agenda. It was important to stress the Turkishness of the Seljuqs, and above all their state in Anatolia. (For this reason, the Rum Seljuqs have received more attention in Turkey: they are so very evidently part of the national history.) The Seljuqs are seen as direct precursors of the Ottomans, who thus do not have to be seen as heirs to the Byzantines or to Iranian ideas of kingship (only), but can be styled as pure Turks. To a certain extent, the Turkish authors, with their emphasis on the ‘steppe tradition’ of the Seljuqs, occupy the opposite position to the mainstream ‘Western’ one, which stresses the ‘Iranian’ character of Seljuq rule for all periods from the earliest phases of the conquest. Turkish authors tend to make the Seljuqs appear to have passed through Iran without really being touched by Iranian culture. Başan summarises the “master narrative” present in the works of Köprülü, Köymen, Sümer, Kafesoğlu13 and others. The main body of the book makes very difficult reading indeed, even for readers who have a fairly advanced knowledge of the subject. One of the most salient features of earlier (and some of the current) Turkish historiography is the strong emphasis on events, the “history of kings and wars”. Başan does not spare his readers any of the events, and so the text is terse and indigestible. As far as the narration of events goes, the book does not replace Bosworth’s chapter in the Cambridge History of Iran, which remains the benchmark and the work of reference for the period.

———— 11 Strohmeier, Martin, Seldschukische Geschichte und türkische Geschichtswissenschaft: Die Seldschuken im Urteil moderner türkischer Historiker (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1984). 12 Leiser, Gary, A History of the Seljuks: İbrahim Kafesoğlu’s Interpretation and the Resulting Controversy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988). 13 Too many works to give exhaustive references here, so only a few key publications follow. Sümer, Faruk, Oğuzlar (Türkmenler): Tarihleri, Boy Teşkilatı, Destanları (İstanbul: Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları Vakfı, 1992, first published 1965); Köprülü, Mehmed Fuad, Osmanlı Devleti’nin İlk Kuruluşu (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 19945); Köymen, Mehmed A., Büyük Selçuklu İmparatorluğu – İkinci İimparatorluk Devri (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1954); Büyük Selçuklu İmparatorluğu – Kuruluş Devri (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1979); Kafesoğlu, İbrahim, Sultan Melikşah Devrinde Büyük Selçuklu İmparatorluğu (İstanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi, 1953); Idem, Harezmşahlar Devleti Tarihi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1956).

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The presentation here of the relationship between the Seljuq sultans and their nomadic followers does not deviate much from the traditional view: the Seljuq sultans very soon became Iranian in outlook, although they retained many of their Central Asian traditions in warfare and statecraft, such as patterns of succession. Here, a more general remark is in order: there were Iranian dynasties, such as the Buyids, that were “family concerns” to an extent that would qualify them as “Turkic” in the extreme, and even among the Samanids, the succession was not always from father to son, features that are often taken as indicative of a “steppe tradition”. Therefore, the “Turkishness” of given features must be shown rather than simply being asserted. To come back to the nomads: the pages on the “Türkmen” (50-1) are mostly about the etymology of the term, with other being sections about events linked to the Iraqi Türkmen and so on. It is only in the concluding chapter (“Evaluation”) that Başan presents some general information about Central Asian nomads, although this is barely linked to Seljuq history, in sentences such as: “The importance of safe and adequate winter pasturage may go a long way towards explaining the early history of the Seljuqs”, immediately following which cases are quoted, but not discussed. It is true that the need for “safe and adequate pasturage” has been underrated as a motif in Seljuq history, and not only the early history, and many cases could probably be cited of the sultans themselves going in quest of pasture, but Başan does not really address the question of how independent the Seljuqs ever became of the Türkmen. Sogdian script is not cuneiform (p. 47). Khurasan is not “almost completely without water and vegetation, even in comparison to the Gobi and Kara-Kum” (p. 152); there are deserts in and next to Khurasan, but it also has enormous agricultural potential, as well as famous pastures (e.g. the imperial pastures of Rādkān-i Ṭūs). Arslan Arghun was not Čaġrı Beg’s son, but his grandson through Malikšāh (p. 104 and elsewhere). These are only three of a certainly much greater number of factual errors. To sum up: Başan’s work can be used (with caution) as a summary of Turkish scholarship on the Seljuqs, but I suggest that we continue to use the Turkish originals. Başan does not link the narrative of the Seljuqs, as culled from Turkish historiography, to the ideological premises of the period, and he seems to stick to the original question of his masters: How can we prove the Turkishness of the Seljuq Empire and its successor states? Can we link the Ottoman Empire to via the Seljuqs, and since we have to try, how can we achieve this? – In all, Başan has contributed a weak book to a strong series, the “Routledge Studies in the History of Iran and Turkey”. The long-lasting Seljuq narrative, from the Rum Seljuqs to the Ottomans, is retraced by Peacock,14 whose excellent article shows how the Seljuq theme was used by different dynasties, who either claimed descent (often matrilinear) from the ———— 14 Peacock, Andrew, “Seljuq legitimacy in Islamic history”, in The Seljuqs: Politics, Society and Culture, ed. Christian Lange and Songül Mecit (Edniburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011, forthcoming).

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Seljuqs or else referred to Rum Seljuq models in their administrative practice. The article concentrates on the Karamanids and the Konya region, but also includes examples for Seljuq-Ottoman ‘continuity’.

Andrew C.S. PEACOCK, Early Seljūq History: A New Interpretation (London: Routledge, 2010): xi, 190 pp. Includes bibliography and index. The Seljuqs came to Iran as a group leading Turkmen warriors, and the accepted wisdom is that the relationship between the leading clan (the descendants of Seljuq) and its Turkmen followers evolved over time; as Peacock himself has it, the Turkmen warriors became an “embarrassment” for the Seljuq family, who had now become a dynasty ruling according to Islamic-Iranian styles. This evolution is one of the central questions in Seljuq history in general. The book addresses this question, but before we discuss its findings, some remarks on the other problems it deals with are in order. First, Peacock presents one of the best surveys of the available sources known to the present writer. He disentangles the various strands without trying to harmonise them; contradictions in the sources remain visible in the text. He discusses the Maliknāme tradition as well as the independent Persian sources such as Bū l-Fażl Bayhaqī and Gardīzī; in the Maliknāme tradition, he distinguishes an earlier and a later version (the one used inter alia by Ibn al-Atīr). A typical feature of the Maliknāme tradition is its confusion about the individual members of the Seljuq family and their respective contributions to the early history of the clan; Peacock does not try to resolve these problems. Indeed, his assumption that they have no cogent solution is convincing and must be upheld. All this makes the book, first of all, a very solid piece of scholarship. The origins of the Seljuqs are shrouded in mystery. Peacock opts for a “Khazar” thesis (which has also recently been adopted by Bulliet). This makes sense to me, and it is doubtful whether a more convincing thesis could be produced. The reasons for the initial migration are likewise discussed without a firm conclusion. Political strife within the Khazar qaganate is an option, as well as climate change. (Here, Peacock refers to some of the recent research on the climate history of Central Asia; it is clear that anecdotal evidence in narrative sources cannot serve as a firm basis for far-reaching assumptions if it is not supported by evidence provided by accepted methods in the exact sciences.) In a very similar fashion, Peacock discusses the various Turkmen (or Ġuzz) groups active in Iran and Muslim Central Asia until the 1040s. He shows that there was no overall command, and that members of the Seljuq family did not have to cooperate; indeed there was conflict and competition at practically every turn of early Seljuq history. The relationship between the Seljuq leaders and their Turkmen followers remains rather obscure, but that is due to the sources, which only very ra- rely give a glimpse of non-Seljuq leadership. It is, however, interesting to note that Peacock discusses not only the commonly accepted tribal mode of leadership, but also theorises that the Seljuq army of conquest may have been organised according to the decimal system much more strongly associated with the Mongols (p. 81). In

272 Review article ———————————————————————————– fact, Peacock uses the term ‘tribe’ quite freely, without paying much attention to the debates that surround it in social anthropology; there is nothing to show, however, that the Seljuq leading family was in any way genealogically related to its followers, or that agnatic kinship was the organising principle of the Seljuq army (with or without the decimal system as an overarching military format), or whether or to what degree Seljuq followers conceived of their social world in terms of agnatic kinship. That said, Peacock’s thesis is “that early Seljūq history should be understood in this steppe context” (p. 165) of “typical steppe state formation, of internal strife leading to the rise of a leader”. This thesis can be said to have been demonstrated in the book. Furthermore – and in line with that – pastoralist interests account for much of what the early Seljuqs did. Peacock reiterates his findings published in an earlier article15 about the motives for and routes of Seljuq penetration into eastern Anatolia and Caucasia: their campaigns were not motivated by an innate lust for plunder or wanton destruction, but were aimed at securing pasture for the Turkmen herders and their flocks. But even within the “steppe tradition”, there is room for forms of warfare that are more generally linked to the settled way of life. Already in the early stages of the Seljuq conquest of Iran, sieges were not infrequent. (In the Mongol and post-Mongol periods, siege warfare accounted for most of the military encounters; pitched battles in the open field were rare events in comparison with fighting around a fortress or a city wall.) Peacock is also quite justified in stressing the discipline of Seljuq-led troops as compared with their Ghaznavid enemies. Plunder and looting was important, but it was not uncontrolled. Indeed, strong military leadership in the context of steppe warfare translates into control over booty; it could be argued that a strong leader is strong because he is able to prevent individual looting and distributes booty instead. What is taken on the battlefield or after a siege, or can be gained in conquest, is handed out to the emirs and the warriors by the leader and not appropriated on an individual basis in or after battle or conquest. In sum, Peacock has provided (another) important contribution to the history of the Seljuqs, distinguished by a very considerate use of the sources, and by refusing the harmonised narrative that is still frequently expected from historians. The book stops at the conquest of Baghdad in 1055, and this date is seen as a turning point: from then on, the Seljuq leaders tried to reduce the importance of their Turkmen warriors and started to rely on ġulām forces instead. The question of the degree to which the Turkmen then really became an embarrassment for the Seljuq leaders is left open in this book, and the matter of how important Turkmen forces continued to be, both within the framework of the imperial army and its regional ramifications and otherwise, is not addressed here.

———— 15 Peacock, Andrew, “Nomadic society and Seljūq campaigns in Caucasia”, Iran and the Caucasus, IX/2 (2005): 205-30.

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Other articles reveal the continuing importance of the Turkmen warriors throughout the Seljuq period. Durand-Guédy, for example, has addressed this subject in a well-researched piece,16 and shows where major concentrations of Turkmens were to be found, identifying some of their groups and their leaders. He adduces numerous examples of where Turkmen were the principal body of military manpower available to Seljuq sultans and pretenders. The present writer has also has made a case study of Turkmen military importance17 in his contribution to Lange/Mecit, “Arslan Arghun – nomadic revival?”

Christian LANGE and Songül MECIT (eds), The Seljuqs: Politics, Society and Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). This review was written before publication and so references to the contributions are without page numbers. My thanks to the editors and the publishers at Edinburgh University Press for letting me have the manuscript of the volume. This volume goes back to a conference held under the title “The Seljuqs – Islam revitalized?” in Edinburgh in September 2008. It contains 15 contributions in all, besides a very substantial introduction. I have mentioned some of the contributions in the preceding sections (Peacock, Durand-Guédy, my own), and will address only a selection of the remaining ones. In its title, the conference announced that the contributions will revolve around the “Sunni revival” paradigm that is attributed to the Seljuqs, who are said either to have actively promoted it or else to have been the ‘switchmen’ who made the train of Islamic culture take that track. The introduction (by the editors) is one of the best summaries currently available of the state of the art in “Seljuq studies”, and it also details some of the reasons why a general history of the Seljuqs has not yet been written in any Western language. The “Sunni revival” is directly questioned in, e.g., Robert Gleave, “Shi’i jurisprudence during the Seljuq period: rebellion and public order in an illegitimate state”. First, Gleave puts to rest the idea that there were practically no innovative or important Shi’i thinkers during the Seljuq period (when everyone was busy helping with the “Sunni revival”). He names the authors and the works and, in the case he studies – the theories about ‘rebels’ and illegitimate rulers – he shows that Shi’i thought was no less fascinating in this period than in any other one. Deborah Tor also addresses questions of Sunni piety in her “ ‘Sovereign and pious’: the religious life of the Great Seljuq sultans”, but she does so from a quite ———— 16 Durand-Guédy, David, “Goodbye to the Turkmens? An analysis of the military role played by nomads in Saljūq Iran after the conquest (11th-12th centuries)”, in Nomadic Military Power: Iran and Adjacent Areas in the Islamic Period, ed. Kurt Franz and Wolfgang Holzwarth (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2011, forthcoming). 17 Paul, Jürgen, “Arslan Arghun – nomadic revival?”, in The Seljuqs: Politics, Society and Culture, ed. Christian Lange and Songül Mecit (Edniburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011, forthcoming).

274 Review article ———————————————————————————– surprising perspective. She analyses reports about the personal piety and religious observance of a number of Seljuq sultans and, time and again, she raises the question of “whether, or to what degree, these sources are tendentious”, since she admits that all we have to work with are the literary sources of late Seljuq historiography. Her contribution was discussed quite controversially during the conference, and I still think she makes an important point. The following argument was at the heart of the debate: “[W]hat is important for our present purposes – evaluating the piety or lack thereof of specific sultans – is not whether or not a sultan actually committed one specific act or another, but the fact that the historical memory of him is of a pious or impious individual [...]”. Indeed, the issue is the ways in which historical memories are formed, and the process of associating vice or virtue with any individual is, to me at least, a mystery; it is no surprise that a case study cannot do much do elucidate this. The “Sunni revival” is also the background of Christian Lange’s “Changes in the office of ḥisba under the Seljuqs”. Here, it becomes clear that a change in the religious atmosphere did indeed occur under the Seljuqs; while the muḥtasib was previously a market inspector working in the public sphere, his – sometimes arrogated – competences tended increasingly to infringe on people’s privacy. At the end of the period, Ġazālī advocates a very “robust” understanding of the office indeed. But it is not so certain whether this process was inspired by the Seljuq sultans or their ; I would venture to say that the re-orientation of the ḥisba comes across more as something which originated in “civil society”. Some of the main questions I personally consider vital for the Seljuq period are addressed in a quite surprising context in the book. One of the contributions I have most profited from is Scott Redford’s “City building in Seljuq Rum”. Redford takes the Seljuq inscriptions from Sinop on the Anatolian Black Sea coast as an example, and shows not only that they were commissioned by the sultan, but that local lords also participated in the marking of Sinop as a Muslim space after the conquest of the city in 1214. A whole series of inscriptions went along with a huge building spurt in the following year and the inscriptions shed light on the local structure of power. In particular, the term ṣāḥib (which Redford translates as ‘governor’ throughout) might merit closer attention. The term is used for local and regional lords in some twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources. The question here is the relationship of the sultan to local and regional lords, be they nomadic or settled, Turk or Iranian, and the character of local rule. In a way, this question also is addressed in Carole Hillenbrand’s “Aspects of the court of the Great Seljuqs”. First, she quotes a visual representation of a (presumably) Seljuq sultan in a court scene – this picture sits well with Durand- Guédy’s results. And then, she draws our attention to the multifarious ways in which subordination and hierarchy can be expressed in court protocol, ritual and ceremony. She also mentions “the little courts of upstart military barons and provincial governors” that offered ample opportunities and patronage for men of letters. This again stresses the importance of local rule – “military barons” who tried to grab power wherever they could and to emulate their superiors.

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In sum, the last years have seen a mass of publications on the Seljuq periods. Earlier accepted wisdom is being challenged in at least the following points: First, not only were the Turkmen important during the conquest, but they continued to be so throughout the Seljuq period, in ways that still remain to be explored in detail. Second, the local elites – urban notables – played a central role at the local level, and no administration could work without them. While this has long ago been proved for Khurasan and Syria, we now have corresponding results for Seljuq Isfahan. Third, the Seljuq sultans probably remained within the steppe tradition in many ways, one of them being their place of residence – outside the towns. Fourth, the “Sunni revival” may still be used as a shorthand for the evolution of Muslim thought during the Seljuq period, but the sultans themselves were probably much less involved in what was going on than we used to think. And there are important points on which our ideas about the “Sunni revival” must be fundamentally adapted to accommodate new findings.

JÜRGEN PAUL Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg