Download PDF | (Idea of Iran, Volume 07) David O. Morgan & Sarah Stewart - The Coming of the Mongols-Bloomsbury Publishing (2018).
153 Pages
Acknowledgements
It is now 12 years since the first volume of The Idea of Iran was published. Since that time the symposia have become a landmark event in the academic calendar and the published proceedings a popular contribution to academic work on Iran.
The publication of the series is due to the generosity of the Soudavar Memorial Foundation and its continued support year after year. We are particularly grateful to Mrs Soudavar-Farmanfarmaian for her interest and advice and for helping to ensure the success of the series. We thank Edmund Herzig for convening the symposium in February 2013 entitled ‘The Idea of Iran: From Seljugq Collapse to Mongol Conquest’ on which this volume is based. It has taken some time to produce and the editors would like to thank the authors for their patience and for producing such excellent contributions.
As always, the publication would not have been possible without the skill and meticulous eye for detail of Parvis Fozooni who formats and typesets the papers. We also thank Charles Peyton for the time he devoted to copy-editing and also Burzine Waghmar for his help with the transliteration of Arabic and Persian words. We would like to thank Iradj Bagherzade, Alex Wright and the staff at I.B.Tauris for their help in producing the publication.
Introduction
David O. Morgan (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
The Seljuq Turks had had a major impact on Iran. They ruled most of what is now Iran, Iraq and Turkey, as well as adjacent parts of Afghanistan and Central Asia, for over a century. Their empire is conventionally dated from the battle in which Toghril Beg defeated the Ghaznavids in Khorasan in 1040; or perhaps from his entry into Baghdad in 1055; and in what is now Turkey, from the Seljuq victory over the Byzantines in 1071.
As for its ending, the major landmark is the death of the last Great Seljuq sultan, Sanjar, in 1157, though the Seljugs in Iraq did not finally disappear until 1194; and in Anatolia, Seljuq rule — ultimately under Mongol suzerainty — endured, at least in theory, until the early fourteenth century.
There has been a tendency to date Seljuq ‘decline’ from the death of Sultan Malikshah in 1092. But this suggests an excessive reliance on hindsight. It is true that there were, after 1092 (as indeed before) disputed successions within the royal family, and that Sanjar, though for most of his reign, from 1118, generally recognised as supreme sultan, did not effectively rule in the western Seljuq lands.
But it should be remembered that his rule in Khorasan lasted for 60 years, and that for much of that time he was a distinctly effective monarch. Excessive attention to the fact that, in Iraq, there were nine Seljuq sultans between 1118 and 1194 has tended to obscure the fact that in the very extensive eastern lands, Sanjar’s rule provided a long period of considerable stability, despite his endless struggles to limit the depredations of the unruly Ghuzz Turks from Central Asia.
Elsewhere, however, things were changing. The lack of real Seljuq control in Iraq made it possible, for the first time in many years, for the Abbasid Caliphs to reassert the power they had lost to secular monarchs: Seljuq officials were expelled from Baghdad in 1152. Real power was exercised by the Abbasids particularly during the long reign of the Caliph al-Nasir (1180-1225). Iran saw another religious entity making itself felt during this period: the Nizari Isma’ili Imamate.
This, a splinter from the Shi’i Isma’ili Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo, was not a major territorial state, but it was able to punch above its weight because of its unusual approach to warfare: the sending of individuals or small groups of devotees to murder those at the head of the Ismai’ilis’ enemies, rather than facing their armies in battle.
The Seljuq approach to government was to prove remarkably durable, aspects of it surviving into the nineteenth century. One characteristic feature was the igta’, a means, among other things, of arranging the machinery of provincial government. A province might be assigned to a notable Turk as governor, this being termed an igta’. It was revocable at the will of the sultan, and did not, therefore, necessarily involve a reduction in the sultan’s power while the central government was strong.
But as it became weaker, igta’s tended to become hereditary, provoking a drift towards some measure of independence in some provinces. Once central Seljuq government in Khorasan had collapsed after the death of Sanjar in 1157, it was the descendants of an igta’-holder who contrived to become their principal successors in that part of their erstwhile empire: the rulers of Khwarazm, a very fertile province in the north, where the Amu-Darya river flows into the Aral Sea.
But before that had occurred, a startling new power had come on to the scene in Sanjar’s later years. In 1125, the Liao dynasty, which had ruled Mongolia and north China since 907, was evicted by new conquerors from Manchuria, who ascended to the throne in north China as the Chin dynasty: it survived until succumbing to Mongol conquest in 1234. A Liao group of the formerly ruling Khitan people, refusing to submit, headed westward and set up a new empire in Central Asia.
This was called Qara Khitai (though to the Chinese it was Western Liao). Among the areas conquered and incorporated by the Khitans was Transoxania. The Khitan ruling class were Buddhists, while Transoxania was of course Muslim. The Khitans met Sanjar in battle, and defeated him, at the Qatvan steppe, near Samarqand, in 1141 — an encounter which may have had something to do with the origin of the European legend of Prester John, the great Christian king in remotest Asia who was thought to be hastening to the rescue of Christians menaced by the Muslims (the Khitans were not in fact Christians, but it was at least clear they were not Muslim; and Christian Europe knew nothing of the existence of Buddhists). Qara Khitai was by and large a tolerant entity: no attempt was made to discriminate against its Muslim subjects, and it allowed a good measure of local autonomy.
A further player in the game of post-Seljuq politics was the Ghurid Sultanate. The Ghurids had originated in the inaccessible centre of Afghanistan, where even the great Ghaznavid Sultan Mahmud (d. 1030) had been unable to subdue them. In 1186 they destroyed what remained of Ghaznavid rule in eastern Afghanistan and northern India; and subsequently, when obliged by the forces of Khwarazm to withdraw to their Indian lands, some of their generals were able, in the thirteenth century, to establish an enduring polity, the Delhi Sultanate.
After Sanjar’s death, then, political power in the Iranian region had become very divided. It is true that the empire of the Khwarazm-shahs eventually became much the most extensive and impressive-looking power. Under the Khwarazm-shah ‘Ala’ al-Din Muhammad II, who came to the throne in 1200, the empire eventually encompassed most of Iran, plus Transoxania, from which the Qara Khitai (to whom earlier Khwarazm-shahs had acknowledged their submission) were evicted in 1215.
Similarly, as we have seen, the Shah was able to take over the Afghan lands of the Ghorids. But this extensive imperial strength was much more apparent than real. The Khwarazm-shah’s empire was riven with internal disputes — not least, he was on particularly bad terms with his mother, a princess of great influence in her own right. And he was in conflict with the Caliph al-Nasir. This, and the breach it opened up with the Sunni religious classes, created a hazardous question of legitimacy so far as the ruler of a recently founded polity was concerned.
Politically, then, Iran was in a state of considerable vulnerability at just the wrong moment: when the Mongols under Chinggis Khan were beginning their military campaigns of expansion in the early decades of the thirteenth century. Sanjar, at the height of his power, might have effectively resisted a Mongol-like assault: after all, his rule survived defeat by the Khitans for a further 16 years after 1141. But the Khwarazm-shah’s empire fell to the Mongols very easily indeed.
We sometimes think that the Mongols were the practitioners of some sort of proto-blitzkrieg, in that Chinggis Khan’s conquest of Central Asia and Iran was accomplished so quickly and, apparently, faced very little effective resistance. But this was peculiar to Chinggis’s western campaigns. The Mongol conquest of China — certainly much more important, in Mongol eyes, than the Middle East - was no blitzkrieg: it took them 70 years. Iran, because of what had happened there after the ending of Seljuq rule, was an easy target.
It should be emphasised, though, that political instability and disintegration by no means resulted in cultural decay. Rather, indeed, the opposite. But history makes it clear that political stability is not a necessary precondition for cultural efflorescence, Renaissance Italy being the most conspicuous example; and the so-called Timurid Renaissance is another.
The period we are examining saw the lifetimes of some of the most important literary figures in the whole of Iranian history, such as Anvari, Khaqani, Nezami, Attar, and Sa’di. Great poets, like other people, may well prefer to live in a time of peace and quiet. But perhaps societal turbulence such as Iran experienced in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries provides its own stimulus to cultural creativity.
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