Download PDF | The Seljuks Of Anatolia Court And Society In The Medieval Middle East Ib Tauris ( 2012).
323 Pages
A.C.S. Peacock is Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of St Andrews, and holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. His publications include Mediaeval Islamic Historiography and Political Legitimacy (2007), Early Seljug History (2010) and, as editor, The Frontiers of the Ottoman World (2009), in addition to numerous articles on medieval Islamic history, especially with reference to Anatolia.
Sara Nur Yildiz is Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews, affiliated with the Orient-Institut, Istanbul. She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2006 with a thesis entitled Mongol Rule in Thirteenth-century Seljuk Anatolia: the Politics of Conquest and History Writing, 1243-1282, and has taught at the universities of Manchester and Istanbul Bilgi.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The ideas for the chapters in this volume derive from debates which arose during a workshop entitled ‘Court and Society in Seljuk Anatolia’ held at the German Orient-Institut in Istanbul in October 2009. The workshop was supported by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, whose financial contribution is gratefully acknowledged. We would also like to thank the other workshop participants, whose contributions helped shape our thinking on Seljuk Anatolia but whose papers, for reasons of space, it is unfortunately impossible to include. We are also very grateful for the assistance of our editor at I.B-Tauris, Maria Marsh, and our copyeditor Ian McDonald. The publication of this volume was made possible by a contribution from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung towards production costs.
A NOTE ON USAGE AND TRANSLITERATION
Anglicised Words
Common words, titles and names of Arabic, Persian or Turkish origin such as qadi, madrasa and caravanserai have been rendered according to their usage in English. Dynastic names with the suffix ‘-id’ and words assimilated to English are not transliterated, e.g., Khan instead of Khan, Ilkhanid instead of Il-khanid, Qur'an instead of Qur’an, Karamanid rather than Qaramanid and Abbasid rather than ‘Abbasid. We have made use of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) standards to determine which terms and names are Anglicised.
Place Names
Place names have been given their modern form whenever possible (Konya, Aksaray, Kayseri, Beysehir, Erzurum, Maras, Erzincan, Malatya, Bukhara, Samarqand, Khurasan, Herat, Iran). Variants are provided in parentheses when appropriate. Well-known place names are given their accepted English forms, such as Damascus, Aleppo, Tabriz, Mosul and Qipchaq steppe. Lesser-known names will be rendered in their medieval as well as their modern form.
Transliteration
Persian and Arabic names of texts and individuals have been transliterated according to the system used by the Library of Congress. The vowels of Turkic and Mongolian names and words have not been rendered long even if in the Arabic script they have been written so. Hence Balasaghun, rather than Balasaghun, Arslan rather than Arslan. With the exception of standard forms such as Chinggis Khan, Mongolian names, place names and terms have been rendered according to Igor de Rachewiltz’s Index to the Secret History of the Mongols (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University, 1972). We however have modified this system slightly by rendering Rachewiltz’s use of /c/ as /ch/ to reflect a more common pronunciation in English. We have followed the standard practice in Byzantine studies of transcribing Byzantine names rather than Latinising them, using as a model the works of Paul Magdalino and Dimiter Angelov. Thus we render Palaiologos, not Palaeologus. We, however, retain the common English forms of names such as Constantine, Theodore and Anna Comnena. The transliterations of original passages have been italicised.
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Rachel Goshgarian is Assistant Professor of History at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2008 and formerly directed the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center. She was a Senior Fellow at Kog University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in Istanbul in 2010-11.
Dimitri Korobeinikov is Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Byzantine and Eastern Christian Studies, Institute of General History, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. His book Byzantium and the Turks based on his doctoral thesis will be published by Oxford University Press. His chief subject is Byzantine—Turkish relations from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, with special emphasis on political history, state-building and confessional relations.
Gary Leiser is a retired civil servant. He completed a doctorate in Middle Eastern history at the University of Pennsylvania under George Makdisi in 1976. His primary area of interest is the eastern Mediterranean world in the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries. He has translated from Turkish the most important historical works of M.F. Kopriilii.
Oya Pancaroglu’s research interests are piqued by the medieval visual and literary heritage of the lands between Anatolia and Central Asia. She is captivated in equal measure by the pre- and post-Mongol architecture of Anatolia, the dissemination of Abbasid material culture, the appearance and development of inscriptions on the ceramics of Iran and the trajectory of ancient cults and rituals in medieval architecture and arts. Issues of methodology are a recurrent preoccupation and frequently infiltrate her teaching at the History Department of Bogazici University, Istanbul. The experience of researching and writing her chapter for this volume has left her with a new fascination for the political and artistic landscapes of the 1190s.
A.C.S. Peacock is Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of St Andrews, and holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. His publications include Mediaeval Islamic Historiography and Political Legitimacy (London: Routledge, 2007), Early Seljug History (London: Routledge, 2010) and, as editor, The Frontiers of the Ottoman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), in addition to numerous articles on medieval Islamic history, especially with reference to Anatolia.
Scott Redford is Professor in the Department of Archaeology and Art History and Director of the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Kog University, Istanbul. He is the author of three books and many articles on the art, architecture and archaeology of medieval Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean. His current publication projects encompass the medieval levels from Bilkent University excavations at Kinet Héyiik, and the Seljuk inscriptions of Sinop and Bayburt citadels.
Hasim Sahin, a specialist in the religious history of late medieval Anatolia, is a Lecturer at the Department of History, Sakarya University, Turkey, and holds a doctorate from Marmara University, Istanbul. He is the author of a collection of essays, Orta Zaman Tiirkleri: Orta Cag Islam ve Tiirk Tavibine Dair Yazilar (Istanbul: Yeditepe Yayinevi, 2011).
Rustam Shukurov is a docent in Byzantine and Oriental Studies at Moscow State University. His scholarly interest covers the relations between the Byzantine world and the Orient during the late Byzantine period. He is the author of the monograph The Grand Komnenoi and the Orient, 1204-1461 (St Petersburg: Alateia, 2001) (in Russian).
Sara Nur Yildiz is Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews, affiliated with the Orient-Institut, Istanbul. She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2006 with a thesis entitled Mongol Rule in Thirteenth-century Seljuk Anatolia: the Politics of Conquest and History Writing, 1243-1282, and has taught at the universities of Manchester and Istanbul Bilgi.
INTRODUCTION
A.C.S. Peacock and Sava Nur Y1ildiz
The kingdom of Turkey was very famous and very rich ...! {There were} almost a hundred cities there, quite apart from castles, towns, and estates. There was such an abundance of riches there that one amir, no matter what the winter, used to feed 10,000 rams on barley, quite apart from those which were in his pastures. This same amir also used to feed 10,000 horses on barley, quite apart from those which were in his pastures and stud-[{farms}. Moreover, on his land the sultan used to have six — or, according to certain people — ten silver [mines], one of which was worth 10,000 soldani per day. The silver [mine] in Lebena, it is said, is worth three rotas of purified silver per day. This is worth 3,000 soldani once the workers have been paid. So the sultan’s land was worth 4,000 hyperberi to him per day — i.e. 57,000 silver marks. What is more, there are three copper mines there and even more iron mines. There is also an alum mine very near Sivas, which is worth one silver [mine} ... In the land of Konya a mine of lapis lazuli has been discovered, but it has been completely covered by the earth which collects over it. There, too, in addition to sheep’s wool, they have the best goat’s wool from which are made bonnets which are sent to be sold in France and England. Therefore, the sultan of Turkey was well able to pay each one of his 50,000 soldiers a thousand byzantici every year ... One of the sultan’s treasurers has also said that there were three houses in Kayseri, one of which was full of hyperberi, the other two being full of drachmas.?
The description of Anatolia by the Dominican friar Simon de SaintQuentin, based on his visit around 1246, impresses us with the Seljuk sultan’s wealth and power. Anatolia’s natural resources of mines and extensive pastureland for animals, whose products could be exported as far as distant northern Europe, earned the sultan the riches to support a large army. Simon’s use of the term ‘Turkey’ (Turquie regnum), one of its earliest attestations, is suggestive of Seljuk rule’s profound influence in the transformation of Anatolia from a largely Christian — above all Greek and Armenian — part of the Byzantine empire into a land with a substantial Muslim and Turkish component following the Byzantines’ abandonment of much of Anatolia in the wake of their defeat at Manzikert in 1071 by the Great Seljuk ruler Alp Arslan. Yet if from the west Seljuk Anatolia seemed a land of riches and power — despite its formal incoporation into the Mongol empire shortly before Simon’s visit in the wake of the Battle of Késedag in 1243 — this view is not reflected in our Muslim sources.
Anatolia features rarely in histories and geographies produced in Iraq, Syria or Egypt, the heartlands of the medieval Islamic world. When it does, it little resembles the prosperous, all-powerful kingdom of our friar. Take the account of the Moroccan Ibn Sa‘id, also written in the mid thirteenth century, perhaps a decade or so after Simon’s visit. Although Ibn Sa‘id does briefly mention the existence of silver and iron mines, he is more impressed by the huge numbers of nomadic Turkmen — 200,000 households near Denizli, 30,000 near Ankara and 100,000 near Kastamonu. In contrast to the hundred major cities Simon claims for the Seljuk realm, Ibn Sa‘id — rather more credibly — notes only 24. He remarks on the existence of a Turkmen carpet-making industry, but the only other major product he finds worthy of mentioning is the abundant fruit that Anatolia produced. He states there were 400,000 agricultural estates (d7‘a), of which 36,000 were ruined.
In Konya, the Seljuk capital, the houses were of mud except for those of the ruler and the elite, which had marble panels. There is no mention of the sultan’s income.‘ So where Simon found wealth, splendour and power, Ibn Sa‘id found nomads, destroyed agricultural land and fruit. The differences between them doubtless come down to a matter of expectations. Where for Simon the Seljuk lands were the exotic east, the route through which prized luxuries came to Europe, from the point of view of the Middle East and the broader Islamic world, Anatolia was the wild west, a barely Islamised frontier land that produced few scholars or literary men.’ It was a place where one might seek one’s fortune, to be sure, as plenty of refugees and immigrants from the Iranian and Arab lands did, but culturally, geographically and historically, it was a different world.
This acute sense of difference from the broader Muslim world is also reflected in our sources, or the lack of them. In contrast to the profusion of historical writing in the central Islamic lands under the Seljuks’ contemporaries, the Seljuk sultanate of Anatolia found very few chroniclers. Unlike the situation in most of the rest of the Islamic world of the time (or at least its developed centres), no biographical dictionaries record the lives and teaching of the Anatolian ‘v/ama’, no works extol the virtues (fada@ il) of Konya or any other Anatolian city. The panegyric poets who so lavishly praise the Ayyubids, Mamluks and Great Seljuks of Iran are largely silent on the rulers of Anatolia. Muslim Anatolian rulers do not even leave much in the way of epigraphic or numismatic evidence until the second half of the twelfth century. Thus even the customary sources for Islamic history are largely absent for Anatolia.
The uniqueness of Anatolia therefore demands that the historian employ different methods from those commonly used to study other areas of the Muslim world. With the comparative paucity of literary sources, or at least chronicles, material evidence from archaeology and architecture as well as epigraphy and numismatics becomes a vital tool for interpreting the Anatolian past rather than the optional extra it is often seen as elsewhere. The linguistic diversity of the the written primary sources that do exist — Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Persian and Syriac are key, while Georgian, Latin and Turkish are also useful — presents a hurdle few individuals could hope to surmount.
Cooperation between scholars from different disciplines is thus essential, yet to date little has been done in this respect.°
This volume, which arises from a conference held in Istanbul in 2009, brings together scholars from various backgrounds ranging from Armenian studies to Islamic archaeology. We focus above all on the late twelfth to late thirteenth centuries, a period of tumultuous change in Anatolia that witnessed the rise of the Seljuk state to its brief apogee in the reign of ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad I (1219-37) followed by the humiliation of Mongol domination from the mid century onwards. This era saw the development of a sophisticated culture that drew on Iranian, Byzantine, Ayyubid and common Levantine elements, while the Seljuk court became the political, artistic and cultural centre of Anatolia. At the same time, the wider society, both Christian and Muslim, was affected by developments in religion and culture. The rise of Sufi groups — sometimes through court patronage, perhaps sometimes through a broader appeal of their own — may have played a part in spreading Islam to a broader audience. More certainly, tarigat-based Sufism influenced the institution of futuwwa, a type of religiously inspired guild and social organisation that came to dominate Anatolian urban life by the end of the thirteenth century. The religiously and ethnically diverse society in which the Seljuks lived was reflected in the life of the court and the ruling dynasty itself, while the Perso-Islamic culture and religion that the court publicly supported resonated far beyond the elite Muslim circles of Konya and the few other major Muslim cities of Anatolia.
We explore how court and society interacted and shaped one other, aiming to move beyond the more purely political history that has dominated to date. We have also tried to represent the political, as well as ethnic and religious, diversity of Anatolia. The Seljuks were the pre-eminent Muslim dynasty in the thirteenth century, but they were not the only one, and other, sometimes rival, sometimes allied dynasties such as the Mengiijekids in the north-east also played a role in Anatolian history — albeit one that is often overlooked. To enable the reader to appreciate the contribution of this volume, we shall firstly outline the state of the art of the historiography to date, before sketching what the Seljuk court was and how it operated. We will then conclude this introduction by surveying the chapters in this book.
The Seljuk Sultanate of Ram: Sources and Approaches
It is essential to distinguish between the Great Seljuk sultanate, based in Iran, Iraq and Central Asia (c.1040—1194) and the Seljuk sultanate of Rum, as Anatolia was generally known to the Muslims (c.1081—-1308). The Anatolian branch of the family had little to do with their cousins, with whom relations were tense owing to disputes over legitimate leadership. Alp Arslan, the Great Seljuk sultan who in 1071 won the Battle of Manzikert against the Byzantines, the event which is conventionally seen as marking the establishment of Turkish rule in Anatolia, does not seem to have intended to conquer the region. For a good 40 years before the battle Asia Minor had been penetrated by migratory Turkish groups in search of pastureland, with whom the Byzantines had proved wholly incapable of dealing. Neither Alp Arslan nor his successor Malikshah played any role in the establishment of the sultanate of Rim, and Malikshah’s efforts to exert his authority in the west came to naught in the long run.’
The two Seljuk states were very different in many ways, even if the one in Anatolia continued to draw on the prestige of their shared dynastic name long after the collapse of the Great Seljuks. Yet there is a widepread tendency to assume a certain identity between them, or at least that their institutions and culture were insufficiently different to be worth commenting on. In part this assumption of parallels is perhaps a natural reaction to the extreme paucity of sources for Seljuk Anatolia. As early as the thirteenth century, one Muslim historian was lamenting the absence of relevant historical information. Ibn Bibi, whose elaborate Persian chronicle a/-Awamir al-‘ala@iya fi ’l-umiir al-‘ala@iya, completed in 1282, is our principal source for the history of the Seljuk sultanate, declared that he was obliged to start his work with Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw I (r. 1192-6, 1205-11) owing to the lack of information about earlier periods (see the comments by Pancaroglu on pp. 25—6 below).° Our other main Islamic sources are also in Persian, and written after the demise of the Seljuk dynasty: the Musamarat al-akhbar of Aqsara’i, which is detailed only for the period of Mongol domination, and an anonymous chronicle written probably by several hands in Konya in the early to mid fourteenth century. We may also mention the work of Ahmad of Nigde, writing in 1333, called al-Walad al-shafiq, which preserves an abridged version of a history of the Seljuk dynasty by the same author.” However, al-Walad al-shafiq is more valuable for the snippets of information about the author’s home town of Nigde that it occasionally provides than for any new details of dynastic history. Apart from these we are largely reliant on occasional references in Arabic chronicles produced in Iraq and Syria, such as Ibn al-Athir’s a/-Kamil fi ’I-ta’vrikh (1222) or the anonymous Ta’vi kh al-mansiri.
Given the relative paucity of Muslim sources, Christian ones assume a greater importance. Without them, we would know virtually nothing about the Seljuk sultanate and its Muslim contemporaries in twelfth-century Anatolia. They also provide a useful supplement to our Persian and Arabic sources for later periods. Yet they suffer from a certain distance: the Seljuks may have had a Greek chancery,'? but all the Greek chronicles surviving were composed in Byzantium or the capitals of its successor states, such as Panaretos’ chronicle of Trebizond. Armenian and Syriac chronicles were composed within the Seljuk realm but are also removed from court life, and the chroniclers are usually more preoccupied with, say, Armenian church politics than with the deeds of their Seljuk overlords. In her chapter in this volume, Rachel Goshgarian notes the striking lack of Armenian references to the Mengiijekid rulers of Erzincan, despite the wealth of Armenian texts produced in and around that city.
Yet it is these Muslim and Christian chronicles that have supplied the basic thread of the narrative of Seljuk history. Their acute limitations perhaps explain why the study of Seljuk history seems in some respects to have stagnated for the last 40 years. Without any new ‘evidence’ in the form of previously unknown chronicles it may have seemed difficult to move beyond the two works which dominate the the field, despite their somewhat problematic assumptions. The first of these was Pre-Ottoman Turkey, published in 1968 by the prominent French medievalist Claude Cahen. In large part based on work carried out by Cahen in the 1940s, it provides an overview of the Seljuks and their contemporaries which has remained standard in the west to date (although the revised French edition of 1988, which provides references, is to be preferred).!' Shortly afterwards, in 1971, Osman Turan produced Selguklular Zamaninda Tiirkiye: Siyasi Tarih Alp Arslan’dan Osman Gazi’ye, 1071-1318 (‘Turkey in Seljuk Times: Political History from Alp Arslan to Osman Gazi, 1071-1318), which offers a detailed chronological survey for a Turkish-speaking audience. In addition to the narrative source base in Persian, Arabic and Latin, Cahen and Turan also occasionally drew on numismatic and epigraphic evidence. Turan’s history supercedes Cahen’s pioneering work in detail and depth. Both works, however, are limited by a certain assumption that is evident in their titles: that the history of Anatolia is identical with the history of Turkey. Despite the use of the term “Turquie’ by Simon de Saint-Quentin and other Latin authors of the Middle Ages, there is no equivalent in any of our Islamic sources: the Seljuk sultanate, Anatolia, Greeks and Byzantines are all described by the term Rim (meaning Rome), and the Anatolian Seljuk ruler was known as the Sultan of Rum. Although the territories that comprised Rum were never exactly defined, it certainly was not identical with the borders of modern Turkey. Throughout the existence of the Sultanate of Rim (the dates of which are conventionally given as 1081 to 1308, although the reality is more complicated), large parts of western, north-eastern and southern Anatolia remained in the hands of Christian rulers — firstly Byzantium, then its successor states in Nicaea and Trebizond (from 1204) and the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia (from the late twelfth century). Much of what is now eastern Turkey never or only very fleetingly formed part of the Seljuks’ domains, with the south-east retaining closer links to Syria and Iraq and the north-east largely comprising part of the medieval Caucasian and Iranian worlds.
Thus ‘Turkey’ is a rather anachronistic concept to apply to medieval Muslim Anatolia. Nor are the continuities between the Seljuks and Ottomans clear, as was claimed by what has been dubbed ‘the Ottoman dynastic myth’ of the fifteenth century. !* The Ottoman principality arose on the far western periphery of Anatolia, in a frontier land over which the Seljuk sultans had probably rarely exerted much authority, and almost certainly none by the time of the rise of Osman Ghazi around 1300. The Ottoman empire was a major European power before it was an Asian one, and key Seljuk territories such as south-central Anatolia were not definitively annexed to the Ottoman state for a good century and a half after the demise of the Seljuks: Konya itself, for instance, was only taken by Mehmed the Conqueror in 1468. Furthermore, the Seljuk domination of most of Anatolia was a relatively short-lived phenomenon of the first half of the thirteenth century. Up until the 1220s, the Seljuks shared Anatolia with various other Turkish, Muslim dynasties as well as Christian ones. In the north-east, Erzincan, Koloneia (Sebinkarahisar) and Divrigi were subject to the Mengiijekids and, until the late twelfth century, northcentral Anatolia was dominated by the Danishmendids. Erzurum, a Saltuqid possession in the twelfth century, was briefly ruled by a rival Seljuk at odds with his relatives in Konya in the early thirteenth century. In the second half of the thirteenth century the introduction of Mongol rule gradually weakened the Seljuk polity, and underaged sultans were dominated by amirs who consolidated their political power as clients of the Mongol rulers. By the final decades of the thirteenth century the Seljuk sultanate was no more than a historical relic, and its abolition in the early fourteenth century goes unnoticed by most sources: indeed, even the date of its demise is a matter of debate.'> Space precludes a lengthy discussion of all these complex and little-understood dynamics, but it is salutary to remember that Muslim Anatolia does not automatically equal Seljuk Rum, and that the latter itself was far from being a monolithic, centralised state. Many publications on the Seljuks have appeared in Turkey since Turan’s and Cahen’s magnum opuses. The quality of many of these is distinctly poor, and they have rarely succeeded in adding to (or subtracting from) the works of Turan and Cahen. The assumption of the identity of Seljuk Anatolia with Anatolian Turkey and the presumption that the Seljuks were the direct predecessors of the Ottomans remain largely unchallenged. This paradigm unproblematically places the Seljuks as another link in the chain of great Turkish states in between the pre-Islamic Turkish polities of Inner Asia and culminating with the Ottoman empire and modern Turkish Republic, and has remained more or less intact ever since it was first articulated in 1922 by Ziya Gokalp in his Tirk Devletinin Tekémiili. Undoubtedly, this is another reason for the assumption of the identity of the Great Seljuk and Anatolin Seljuk cultures.
Partly as a result of a sparse and difficult source base, combined with ideological considerations, the religious and intellectual history of medieval Anatolia has been approached as a tabula rasa, with scholarship dominated by modern nationalist concerns, primarily through the great imaginative powers of the pioneering scholar, Mehmed Fuad K@priilii (1890-1966). K6priilii’s Seljuk Anatolia — the homeland of the Turks — was populated with migrating nomadic Turkmen, the religious faith of whom remained essentially shamanistic, barely disguised by a thin veneer of Islamic faith and practice. K6priilii privileged the Turkmen as the main agent of change responsible for transforming the Anatolian landscape into a predominantly Turkish, heterodox and syncretistic Muslim one, under the guidance of antinomian dervishes and spiritual leaders from Khurasan, who, in essence, were no more than superficially Islamicised shamans. Influenced by Durkheim’s approach to the study of religion through primitive origins, Képriilii sought for traces of old ethnic traditions under new Islamic forms — ethnic traces that were distinctive of an essential and timeless ‘national character’ of the Turks and that had their origins in Central Asia. K6priilii aimed to recover the Turkish cultural heritage long dominated by Persian-, and later by Europeaninfluenced works.
K6priilii’s model, the initial framework of which was put into place in 1918, continues to inform how and what aspects of religious and cultural history are studied today. With no serious theoretical challenge to KGépriilii’s paradigm, other aspects of medieval Anatolian cultural and religious history remain unexplored. There is no detailed synthetic historical study of the intellectual and religious landscape of thirteenth-century Anatolia. We have no history of the ‘ulama , nor of intellectual trends. While there are many studies dealing with the life and works of religious luminaries such as Mawlana Jalal al-Din al-Rumi and Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, these figures have been viewed largely in isolation, detached from the political landscape and bereft of the greater socio-religious context shaping their careers and thought.
Studies of Sufism predominate in modern scholarship on medieval Anatolian Muslim religious and intellectual life, reflecting K6priilii’s influence. These works tend to approach Sufism according to the dichotomy of conformist urban Sufis vs. non-conformist rural Sufis. To pick a typical example of this approach, the ‘non-Sunni’ Sufi order of the Qalandariya (or Kalander), Ahmet Yasar Ocak argues, broadly appealed to the Turkmen communities of the thirteenth century because they were only superficially Islamised, and their practices better accommodated local pre-Islamic beliefs and traditions.'? For, as Ocak points out, Sufism probably meant little more for them ‘than a form of social life, rather than being a means of attaining any mystic goals’.!° Indeed, according to the predominant paradigms of the field, popular religion has been rendered static, unchanging and undynamic, set in a framework informed by a strict dichotomy between high and low Islam.
Although there have been a few works rejecting the Képriilii paradigm, their impact remains relatively limited. In his God’s Unruly Friends, Ahmet T. Karamustafa criticises the two-tiered model of religion of a high (normative) and low (antinomian) Islam for failing to generate explanatory analysis or to account for a historical dimension for popular religion. Karamustafa contends that originally extraneous beliefs and practices to Islam were neither ‘survival’ nor ‘traces’, but rather ‘the building blocks of a new Islamic synthesis’.'’ Devin DeWeese likewise objects to the notion that Central Asian nomadic Turks were merely superficially Islamic, and that their ‘conversion’ was in name only. DeWeese argues that Islamisation was both transformative and at the same time characteristically attuned to pre-Islamic traditions.'® Although we have a few voices such as Karamustafa and DeWeese pleading for new ways of regarding the problem of deviant dervishes or the Islam of nomads, their work focuses neither on the Seljuk period (in the case of Karamustafa), nor on Anatolia (DeWeese).
If research on the political, religious and intellectual history of Seljuk Anatolia has atrophied, much greater progress has been made in recent years with regard to the material culture of medieval Anatolia, often suggesting conclusions of broader significance. Recent studies on the landscape and architectural history of the region have added valuable fresh perspectives on Seljuk Anatolian culture and society. For instance, in his study of the Anatolian Seljuk tradition of suburban palace-garden complexes, Scott Redford compares the Seljuk suburban palace, garden and hunting practices and traditions with those of their neighbours to the east and west.!? Proposing that these garden and hunting preserves formed ‘a communality of chivalric practice’, Redford argues that the Seljuk traditions may be conceived of as a ‘shared chivalric garden culture in the Mediterranean and Islamic world of the Middle Ages’.?? Redford’s examination of garden culture offers a unique view of elite culture which transcended religious, linguistic or regional geographical boundaries. Such interdisciplinary approaches will further enrich the field of Seljuk studies.
The Anatolian Seljuk Court and Society
This volume addresses how dynastic power and authority based at the court interacted with broader social, political and religious communities throughout the realm. The reasons for the emphasis on the court are twofold: firstly, because as in most premodern Islamic (and non-Islamic) polities the court was the focus of political, artistic and cultural life; and secondly, because notwithstanding that fact, it has received very little attention in the medieval Anatolian context — and indeed, has been surprisingly neglected in studies of Middle Eastern and Islamic history to date.*! It would be instructive to say a few words about the internal dynamics and make-up of the Anatolian Seljuk court, but the dearth of critical studies on the subject is paralleled by the absence of even a single modern Turkish word conveying the broad meaning of ‘court’ as a social and cultural world. The closest word in modern Turkish to court is saray, which strictly means palace; indeed, the Seljuk court in modern Turkish historiography has been conceptualised as a palace complex and its institutions rendered most commonly as the saray teskilatz, ‘the apparatus of the palace’.
If one turns to contemporary record, one does not find a single comprehensive term for court, but rather a variety of related words. Ibn Bibi commonly uses bargah and dargah to refer to the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ courts of what could be considered an imperial complex. Thus, the European court, with its inner chamber and outer hall distinction, is clearly paralleled in the inner and outer courts of the Seljuk royal complex, which may be also compared to the inner and outer court in the Ottoman context (enderun and birun), and the inner and outer court in the imperial Chinese context.?? Palace complexes were generally divided into secluded inner areas and zones of wider presence. It is these two spheres which come into interaction to form the court.74 The court structure of bargah and dargah appears applicable to urban palace complexes located within the citadel of the main Seljuk centres of Konya, Kayseri and Alanya (Ala’iyya).”
The inner court, or bargah, was the space relegated to the sultan’s household centred at the palace, including his harem and entourage of extended family members, servants, favorites (Abawass), military retainers (sarwavan-i bargah), young nobles in attendance (mulazim) and household staff of ghulams.?® This was a restricted space consisting of various chambers with different functions centring around the saray, or palace, the living quarters and personal space of the sultan. Thus the sultan would receive private audiences at the diwan-i bargah.*’ He likewise would attend the suffa-yi bar or bargah to dispense justice, presumably receiving petitions and making judgements.78
Access to the inner palace complex, or bargah was limited; Ibn Bibi impresses upon us how important the security of the bargah was for the sultan sometimes. Early on his reign, ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad I, fearful for his life from the potentially hostile and powerful commanders that he inherited from his deceased brother and enemy, took measures to increase the security of the bargah. The sultan ordered that any amir seeking an audience with him at the bargah would enter alone and accompanied by one of his ghw/ams. In order to impress the seriousness of these measures, he had the commander of the imperial curtains (amir-i pardadaran-i khassa) clubbed 50 times in front of the dargah for having admitted commanders into the bargah in the company of large groups of heavily armed retainers (khawashi-yi umara’).??
The outer court of the palace complex, the dargah, constituted the space of public interaction between the sultan and his entourage and the rest of the ruling elite, military commandership and state dignitaries.*” One may see the dargah as equivalent in some ways to the bzran of the Ottoman court; it could hence be translated as ‘porte’.*! The wmara’-yi dargah were the amirs restricted to the outer court. The commanders of the outer court were commonly manumitted ghulam granted provincial military commands and governorships. Unlike the denizens of the dargah, the ruling elite restricted to the dargah maintained separate households located outside of the dargah. Scott Redford identifies the residences of these commanders in Konya as lying a little to the north of the citadel, in view of the Alaeddin Késkii, the imperial palace astride the citadel wall.°? The outer court of the dargah likewise consisted of different buildings for different functions. The dawlatkhana was also the site of official enthronements and other such public-oriented activies. The dawlatkhana \ikewise contained a section for the bazmkhana, where drinking majlis, or symposia, were held.*? The dargah was thus the site of imperial pageantry demonstrating hierarchy and order, and the conspicuous display of the Seljuk porte’s magnificence (shukih-i dargah-i sultant ).*4 Ibn Bibi refers to the Seljuk court collectively in metaphoric terms as the dargah-i jahan-panah-i padishah, ‘the porte of the padishah under whom the world finds refuge’ .*?
The diwan, or governing council, likewise was held presumably in the vicinity of the dargah, although Ibn Bibi sheds little light on its exact location. Ibn Bibi, however, does make a distinction between the members of the diwan and the dargah (mu‘tabaran-i diwan u dargah).°® Although more research is necessary for identifying more accurately the make-up of the Anatolian Seljuk diwan as well as its functions, it seems that its membership consisted of the top echelons of the ruling elite drawn from both the bargah and the dargah, including the vizier, the parwana (in charge of the royal chancery, also known as the
)>7 >
tughra’1),’' the n@ ib al-saltanat (in charge of overall administration of the realm),*® the wstadhar (or ustadh al-dar, the steward of the bargah and personal treasurer of the sultan).??
Members of both the bargah and dargah regularly interacted when court was in session, when various members of the military or political elite of the realm were summoned before the sultan. For instance, the newly enthroned ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad I ‘held court’ with his military commanders as he toured the city of Konya, and announced the order for his commanders to refortify the city walls. Indeed, Ibn Bibi tells us specifically that it was from the bargah or inner court that the sultan departed as he mounted his steed to tour the city with the commanders of the outer and inner courts (ba umara’-yi dargah wa sarwavran-i bargah).“° The ghulam corps constituted the most important network connecting the inner and outer courts. Although manumitted and promoted to a provincial commandership, and thus having ‘graduated’ into the realm of the outer court, commanders of palace ghulam origins would retain their palace /agab as a social marker of and sign of prestige, a clear indication of one’s palace connections and intimacy with the sultan. That we see many top provincial commanders bearing the title chashnigir, or royal food taster — yet no longer functioning as such — is the most salient example of the use of such titles: Shams al-Din Altun-aba chashnigir, Mubariz al-Din Chavli chashnigir, Sayf al-Din Tiirkeri chashnigir, and Siraj al-Din Sarija chashnigir. In fact, moving to the outer court not only signalled a new status for a ghulam, it also indicated new power bases with the creation of personal retinues — and hence, the development of autonomous spheres of power. It was this source of independent military power which increased the military potential of the Seljuk polity as an efficient means for extending Seljuk power throughout the realm in the absence of the sultan’s physical presence. Yet at the same time this autonomy posed a potential threat to the sultan, especially if bonds of loyalty were questionable as in the case of young and newly enthroned ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad vis-a-vis his elder brother's powerful and hostile amirs. Thus, an important dynamic of Seljuk political culture may be found in the struggle to maintain a balance between powerful provincial amirs and powerful administrators who often had a ‘foot’ in both the inner and outer spheres of the court, and those closest to the sultan forming his immediate household and entourage.
Like other medieval polities, Seljuk politics was based on social networks rather than institutional bodies. Furthermore, Seljuk elites, as elsewhere in the linguistically and ethnically diverse medieval Mediterranean world, constituted a social system which shared common values, status symbols and ruling patterns found among the elite throughout the region. Malcolm Vale has written of early medieval northern Europe that ‘{t}here was little, if any, sense of ethnic or national exclusiveness in this milieu. Court culture was open to external forces: it was essentially permeable and absorptive of a wide range of influences.”“! The same was certainly true of the Seljuk case, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, suggesting the necessity for finding alternatives to the nationalist paradigms that have dominated the study of Anatolia.
The Present Volume
The 2009 Istanbul conference which inspired this volume aimed to develop a more sophisticated approach to the study of medieval Muslim Anatolia, as far as possible on its own terms rather than with the benefit of hindsight as a prelude to the Ottoman or Turkish states. For that reason, this volume avoids the description of the Anatolian Seljuk dynasty as ‘the Seljuks of Turkey’ (Turkiye Selcuk/ulart), so common in contemporary Turkish scholarship. The conference brought together scholars seeking new approaches to understanding the history of the Seljuks and their contemporaries. As the title of the volume indicates, our aim was to move beyond the confines of political history to understand the underlying dynamics of the Seljuk state and its contemporaries, as it sought to establish its legitimacy among both its Muslim and Christian subjects on this remote frontier of Islamdom.
As the chapters published here illustrate, there is, in fact, no dearth of new, untapped sources on Muslim Anatolia. The classic sources for Islamic history such as chronicles are indeed limited, but both literary and material sources can offer new insights. Particularly promising is the study of epigraphy, which forms the basis for the chapters by two of our contributors (Pancaroglu and Redford). Although Christian sources have long been recognised as important for political history, the insights provided by Greek and Armenian sources into the functioning of society and even the Seljuk court itself has been undervalued to date (see the contributions by Korobeinikov, Shukurov and Goshgarian). Yet there is also much to be learned from the published sources, above all in Persian. After all, the complete text of our main Persian chronicle for the period, Ibn Bibi, remains available only in facsimile. Conclusions drawn on the basis of the edited abridged version or translations derived from it are often tendentious, and a complete edition of this major but extremely difficult source remains a desideratum. The chronicles we have also contain valuable material that is sometimes pushed aside in the search for ‘facts’: the chapters by Yildiz (Chapter Four) and Yildiz and Sahin (Chapter Seven) illustrate how the published chronicles of Rawandi and Ibn Bibi still have much potential to improve our understanding of the Seljuk court. The tendency in scholarship to prioritise pure political history has meant that more literary sources have often been neglected. The letters of Jalal al-Din Rumi, for instance, and the poems of his son Sultan Walad shed much light on relations between Sufis and the Seljuk court, as Peacock discusses (Chapter Eight), but have not previously been exploited for historical purposes. As Gary Leiser points out in his concluding chapter, a rich range of sources exists beyond those exploited by the contributors to this volume. The chapters are divided into the three sections, the first of which deals with dynastic identity and the Great Seljuk heritage. Oya Pancaroglu examines dynastic self-identification and self-proclamation at a time of flux in Anatolia and beyond with her exploration of the building activities of Sayf al-Din Shahanshah (r. c.1171—96) of the Divrigi branch of the Mengiijekid dynasty, which focuses on this local ruler’s epigraphic expressions of claims of wide tulership. This underlines that Seljuk hegemony in Anatolia was not to be taken for granted, and in moments of weakness rival dynasties were ready to assert themselves — a point which appears again later in the volume in Scott Redford’s investigation of the Erzurum branch of the Seljuk dynasty. The means by which the Seljuks themselves sought to assert their right to rule are investigated by the next two chapters. Dimitri Korobeinikov argues that the Anatolian dynasty rooted its right to rule in the Great Seljuk heritage and did not, as sometimes thought, see itself as heir to Byzantium — unlike, significantly, the Ottomans. Sara Nur Yildiz, meanwhile, shows how this emphasis on the Great Seljuk heritage was promoted after the collapse of the dynasty in Iran.
The second section deals with the royal household. Rustam Shukurov investigates the innermost part of the sultans’ court, the harem, using a rich range of Christian and Muslim sources to illuminate the functioning of this most obscure institution. Arguing that the Christian women of the royal household profoundly influenced the identity of the Seljuk sultans, his conclusions are suggestive for our understanding of medieval Anatolian society more generally. Scott Redford addresses the question of royal women from another angle, combining epigraphic and literary evidence to reconstruct the life of ‘Ismat al-Dunya wa ’1-Din, a wife of ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad I who was ‘written out’ of Ibn Bibi’s history.
The third section examines the role of Sufism at court and in society. Sara Nur Yildiz and Hagim Sahin’s chapter, ‘In the proximity of sultans: Majd al-Din Ishaq, Ibn ‘Arabi and the Seljuk court’, explores the contacts between these two major figures in the religious history of early thirteenth-century Anatolia and the courts of Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw I and ‘Izz al-Din Kayka’us I. Andrew Peacock, meanwhile, examines the links in the later thirteenth century between Jalal al-Din Rumi and his son Sultan Walad on the one hand and the elite on the other. Both these studies argue for much closer and more complex links between Sufi circles and the court than has hitherto been appreciated. Rachel Goshgarian, meanwhile, takes us back to north-eastern Anatolia where we began, with a study of the role of futuwwa among the Christians of Erzincan. Her work underlines the close links and mutual influences between Muslim and Christian communities in Anatolia.
The volume concludes with a chapter by Gary Leiser that points to further avenues for research, both in terms of themes and sources. The select bibliography is intended merely to highlight some of the major studies to which our contributors have referred and to act as a very preliminary guide to further reading. Indeed, this volume is far from being the final word on Seljuk Anatolia. Research on this difficult but extremely rich and rewarding area of study has scarcely begun, and these chapters are published rather in the hope that by illustrating the diversity of sources and approaches and their vast potential for transforming how we think about medieval Muslim Anatolia, they will in some small way encourage future work that may address some of the lacunae we have outlined above. Of course, there will always be large gaps in our knowledge: many parts of twelfth-century history, in particular, are always likely to remain obscure. Yet by adjusting our questions to the evidence rather than vice versa, there is still much we can learn about the Seljuks and their contemporaries.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق