Fragmentation and Successor Dynasties

from long lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places tales of murder, power, faith and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Yarneigger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world to World WarI Just visit historyhit. com Forward slash, subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval fromrom History Hit, a podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobbsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here find out who we really were Gone medieval fertile lands between the gushing rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Heonely goat herd spies plume of dust, billowing dark against the nonday sky Weathered by suunbeam and worked hard by his grazing flock teextlif from Motus Couriers on horback often pass by, traversing Mesopotamian arteries of spice and silk whipping up stale dirt as they race ever onward But the bloe fade like it does most days. Instead, It darkens and grows, rippling outward to blacken the sky cararbinger of a nameless storm, edging ever closer to the goat herd's pastures The earth begins to quake. shhards of rock, reed, and willow rattle and writhe upon the ground All instruments in the Rising Symphony of Chaos and Dorder S get ces Iron shod hoos pound the vast carpets of tilled soil and burd grass crimal screams of war horses, bred for their agility in battle Merge with the guttural cries of riders adorned in gold threaded kaftans and barbed conical helms Each rider carries a bow deftly curved to enhance its deadly firepower, and a razor edge cimeter that arcs like a braking wave age old stories from long ago Once told of a fearsome horde of horsemen descending from the north They were called the Huns and they ravaged Mesopotamia's rich floodplains before being repelled by the mighty Persian Empire these new riders of a different breed . Other Seljk Turks It said They're created in the shape of lions to ascend high mountains, ride in the face of danger, raid narrow abysses into unknown lands I'm Matt Lewis and this is Gone Medieval. Today, we're going to trace the story of these lesser known Middle Eastern horsemen The Seljuk Turks From the middle of the eleventh century, these irrepressible Turkic nomads utterly transformed the political landscape the medieval Middle East carving out an empire that' stretched from the Indian Ocean. to the Black Sea, subsumed the glittering Abasid caliphate in Baghdad and locked hors with sworn enemies like the Fatimid Caliphs of Egypt and the Frankish lords of Crusade Both considered barbarians on the fringes of the Steljuk ordered world How did the Celjix doing it Why were they so extraordinarily successful? How did they govern their newly won territories And were they always at odds with their sworn enemies Was there more fluidity in the maelestrom of Middle Eastern politics then there is at first glance To help me answer those questions, I'm joined once again by Dr. Nicholas Morton, associate professor of History at Nottingham Trent University, whose new book covers exactly this. It's called Crusader Store, a global history of the wars for the Middle East V veryy war welcome back to Medieval Nick. It's great to be with us It's greated back on the show. Matt, Thanks for having me Absolute pleasure. I' really looking forward to digging into your new book Crusader Storm. And we're going to pay particular attention to one of the groups of people that you talk about in this period, the Seljuk Turks I wonder if you could give us kind of give us the headline, give us the tagline here, Who are the Selj Turks and why should we care about them We should really care The easiest way to explain this is that In the twenty first century it's not common to see people rushing down the streets, shouting the nomads are coming We don't do that. And if someone did, we might think it was a bit strange. That's actually quite a recent phenomenon. Up to about sixteen hundred, that is a very serious concern for many, many communities all the way across Eurasia And so we can think of the Huns invading the Eastern Roman Empire in the fifth century. or we could talk about the magyardars or the petch and eggs and the eighth and the tenth century or the Mongols in the thirteenth, we could talk about the creation of the many iterations of the Great Wall of China and the other fortifications built to defend China against a Central Asian step. We could talk about the fortress cities created in the Islamic world specifically to keep out the nomads So this is a primary concern for so many communities. all the way across history right the way up to the modern era And what we're looking at in the invasion of the Seljuk Turks into the Middle East. is one particularly significant episode. will shape the history both of the Middle East, but also neighboring regions as well. I've done a social media video before now hiding in a bush in my garden saying quiet the Mongols are coming. So I haven't quite run down the street saying the nomads are coming, but I have to talkld people to be quiet if the Mongols are coming What you doing in Cvcy at home atat that way f Yeah. Maybe I should keep that to myself. Where does the name seell juck that we know this group by. whereere does that come from? What does it mean Yeah, so the Seljk dynasty itself wasn't They didn't necessarily control the entirety of the mass migrations into the Middle East that mark the Seljik conquests got is around the turn of the eleventh century. So around the year one thousand a little bit afterwards You have the sudden movement of large numbers of nomadic communities south and then west into Persia, that's modern day Iran and then moving west towards Iraq and Syria. Many of those groups are unaligned the Seljuk family acquires control over many of them Never fully in command, but it has more control than most And the Seljk family itself, they look back to Seljk who is a deep ancestor, who lived a little around around turn of the eleventh century, but most of the major conquests of the Seljuk dynasty are carried out by Seljuk's descendants. Interesting. so it's similar idea to kind of the Caapetians in France being descended from Hugh Kappet. It's kind of a family name Absolutely. ye. Similarly, with Saladin's dynasty A couple of centuries later. Saalon's dyasty is called the Ayubid dynasty named after his father, Ayubbe. So It's quite a common practice. And do we have any sense of what causes, what sparks this particular movement of the seeljokes from the stepppes into the south and the west No. And that's very interesting because this happens from time to time because For hundreds of years Nomadic communities are not necessarily fighting huge wars the whole time. They may well spend their year going from winter spring grazing every single year living in narrow area moving from one area of grassland to another, taking their flocks and herds with them. They might find the the occasional neighbouring war with another nomadic group, but that's it But what causes them to suddenly weld together into a confederation Big enough tackle say the fortifications along the line of the Chinese border or the border to the Muslim world And we don't know There are various theories. some people talk about maybe a leader united them or there was some s of council where they all came together Another quite thought provoking explanation which to some extent has been disapproved, but it still remains in orbit around this question is it' climate change. because if the temperature on the Central Asian step Maybe that will make it harder for herds to graze, which will mean the population will starve. so they have no alternative. You move south where it's warmer. So maybe it's that. that's driving people south towards the Muslim world, but we're not told for certain stories we've got and the sources we've got for this early partot of Seljuk history Often they tell a story of a mythologized turn and at terms we don't have much from the actual period And I guess to some extent, if you're living in that area in the eleventh century, it kind of doesn't really matter why they're coming. The fact is there's a bunch of people coming down from the steps and that's a pretty scary moment for anybody. Why were I mean, I guess the seeljuks in particular in this instance, but even more broadly, the nomads from the steps, why are they always such a kind of disruptive and unstoppable force Yeah, I'll ans up with a bit of a comparison actually because we're talking about the era of the eleventh and twelfth century and often when, say, military historians Augustus period, we might talk about the Knights Templar or the Crusader knnights and they will get deeply involved in a conversation about chain mail and couched lances and various types of helmets and things like that. What made them so effective and Cu Satum knights were very effective But here's the point Really, this is not the era of the crusador night. It's not the era of the byzantine or Islamic heavy cavalrymen at all This is the era of the nomadic horseman ins scross so many battlefields across so many wars and campaigns, and you see exactly the same thing with the Mongols in the follow in later centuries ability for a nomadic society to mobilize tens of thousands of warriors exceptionally hardy, require virtually no logistics, can move incredibly fast, raised from birth to ride and shoot. coordinate for large scale hunts These are all military skills and compared to agricultural societies where people are born and raised to till the earth. Well, sure, they might be healthy and strong from doing that But they won't have that same military training. And when they put together armies They'll have big convoys and logistics trains, which can so easily be cut A nomadic army is exceptionally difficult to stop And so one of the points I make in Crusader Storm really is this is not the era of the crusading knight any other equivalent from an Eastern Christian or Muslim society, this is the era of the nomadic light horseman And there's something about all the way through this period isn't that mounted archers from the steps being utterly devastating. Nobody really finds a way to deal effectively with them It's not a tactic that anybody else seems to pick up across Europe, but they also never manage to the code of how do you deal with an army of mounted archers? Yeah, it's exceptionally difficult. One of the biggest problems is that unless you have all your cavalry very heavily armored then the nomadic archers simply will ignore the heavily armored knight or mammalook warrior on their back and they stoot down the horses and then you'll our movement is curtailed and they will just ride around you and carry on shooting until you go down So it's very hard to stop amounted Nomadic army, the only One of the reasons why the first Cusade commanders are effective on the battlefield is they do find one way of doing this, which they try and repeat in later decades with mixed success which is that when you know your aboutouts twenty or thirty kilometers away from A nomadic army What you don't do is simply set out your army for a pitched battle. You don't do that because you're going to lose What you do instead is very quietly and fully aware that you're probably being watched. so you're going to have to be very careful but how you execute this? you get a large number of heavily armored knights to lead out their horses just as it gets dark And then very, very quietly, you march them across the hills and crags. until they're within a few hundred meters of a seelldical nomadic army And then literally just as the sun crosses the horizon, just as you can see your hand in front of your face, you charge straight into the enemy camp So they have no opportunity to evade you whatsoever. You're already in their mids before they can respond And so for a short while at least That's how crusaders managed to defeat the Seljuk Turks in battle But there aren't many tactics that will bring about that kind of victory and in other contexts Crusader Kights, like so many other Societies from this era suffer very badly in encounters with nomadic like Cavaway I'm definitely going to store that tactic up for next time I'm suuck in a bush in the backyard. I'll keep that to myself from now on I And as we move through, we're going to talk more about the conquests the seel joes and things like that. But as we move through the establishment of their kind of empire, are they bringing a nomadic culture with them or do we see them sort of adopting Persian cultures as they conquer people Yeah, like so many nomadic conquors, it's a bit of a mixture really. So The soldier tucks originally invadeed from the beginnings of the eleventh century and They conquer large areas of Persia, Iraq and Syria. And within that process, as you say, there's a lot that they pick up if you look at the surviving material culture, so the artwork or the ceramics or the other items that have survived from that era they're very much within the Persian tradition So they do borrow or make use of a great deal, the bureaucracies are very similar to what they had been previously because like most conquerors It's easier to extract tax from people if you use the existing tax systems and you govern using the existing bureaucracies, but they do bring their own cultures with them There was a slow movement, particularly among leading elites away from their previously nomadic way of life through to a more settled way of life, but there are also huge numbers of what become known as Turkmen or turk groups who carry on living that nomadic way of life and often they will force off local nomadic groups such as the Bedouin away from their grazing because they want them themselves And like many other conquerors they will have things their own way. if they do want to change institutions or laws or the way they manage things. they will do so. and they speak Turkish not either Persian or Arabic, or indeed Greek in many of the areas that they conquer And for many people, that's a major change because they no longer speak the language of the ruling elites Yeah, so again again, not dissimilar to the Norman invasion in England, you're seeing a change at the very top and a change of language But actually a lot of the structures are remaining very similar There's a lot of continuity. most conquerors who want their conquest to stick and are good at doing that they will normally adhere to a fair number of existing processes because It's just easier that way. Yeah. Sometimes I'll change things a bit in the long term in the short term You just want to get things stable as quickly as possible so you can hold down what you've conquered. Yeah Wow, so now I know how to avoid a nomadic army and now I know how to make a conquest stick. I feel like I'm gonna in trouble after this. life skills M. So if we get into the beginnings of the seeljk advance, where does it start? Your book opens with the Battle of Dandican Is that kind of the first big victory that they have Yeah, that's a very big victory. before that, you've already got the movement of large numbers of nomads moving south and west, sometimes violently, sometimes less so is a crucial battle against the existing authority in Persia, which is the Gaznnavid Empire And that does open the floodgates for the Seljuks to they continue their advance westwards moving towards the big Persian cities like Isfahan and then beyond that to places like Baghdad and into Syria. And they I mean, they're occupying Baagdad by ten fifty five, aren't they so? then they're into Abasid territory. So kind of what's going on with the Abasid Empire that makes them I guess relatively easy picking for the seell jokes. So the There was a time before the Seljuk invasions, maybe a century before when the Abbassid Empire was huge extending across much of North Africa indeed all the way to the Stepp borders But Politically, it began to fragment. there was civil war, there was unrest there' fighting at the center and the various provinces began to go their own separate ways. And so when the Seljuks invade Pitically The Middle East is a bit of a mosaic with various different Arab or Kurdish the Gazoavids themselves are from Turkish background themselves And indeed, beyond that to the north, you've got Anatolia, which is the eastern districts of the Byzantine Empire is a mixture of different territories and of course if you're invading Defeating a series of smaller territories is a great deal. harder often than trying to defeat a few really big ones. Yeah. And then as you mentioned there, the Byzantine Empire kind of gets drawn into all of this as well. In ten seventy one, we have battle at Manzaka. C you talk us through a little bit about what happens there? and again, a little bit about why The Greeks, the Byzantines, are kind of vulnerable at this time as well. Yeah. so It's really difficult to keep out nomadic raiders If you sort of visualize that sort of map of Turkey or Anatolia as it was, then What happens is you have the infiltration of various nomadic groups, not necessarily under Soeljuit leadership Just moving into an area, raiding it and then pulling away and getting out before reinforcements can arrive. and doing that all the time And so already there's a process of wearing down setting in And when the Seljuks invade a region, they don't necessarily invade with a Seljuk army What normally happens is there' a bow wave of unaligned or semi aligned nomadic Turkman groups who go in there first and they're raiding attacking small towns undefended settlements and other targets that attractive to them and they're doing it all the time. So In ten seventy one at the Battle of Manzakkurt Byzantine Anatolia has already been suffering from a great deal of attrition for several decades As you say, the big battle that's is perhaps the most famous one of these wars is Manzakkurt in ten seventy one. ground to this is you have the rise of a new emperor in Byzantium. called Romanus IV Diogenes. And he's determined to restake the border and to defend himself against incoming Turkman groups And so in the late ten sixties, he wages a series of campaigns. particularly effective, but enough to show that he can make his military count And then in ten seventy one, there is a really large invasion on it un usually This invasion is led by the Seljuk sultan called Alp Ulan And so Roman has puts together the largest army he can big historical debate around the effectiveness of the troops within this army, but it seems to have handled itself reasonably competently in terms of overall organization And Romanos I four met Al Hazlan in battle, probably holding upper hand in terms of numbers Again When you've got a largely infantry army dependent on logistics Lots of contingents moving by separate roads and try to unify that. a force hasn't fought together much previously And On the other side of the battle you've got a very experienced nomadic army. It's smaller, but it's exceptionally mobile. It can cut your communications and logistics really easily and Turks themselves are very famous for their use of feigned flight tactics. So giving the impression that you're running away luring your enemy into a pursuit and then you've got them in an ambush. The exact course of the battle, again, it's quite contested. There are various interpretations some interpretations put emphasis on the miscommunication within the Byzantine Army among its command structure, which then caused a rout Other people talk about the defection of forces, but ultimately, this did lead to the route of the Byzantine army and the capture of Emperor Romanus. Now in itself, yeah, it's a big defeat. Of course when we talk about a battlefield defeat, it's not just the army. that we need to talk about it's the effect of that on morale, on all the various other power brokers saying, well, who's going to win this which side do we gently sort of begin tilting towards? So there's always bigger repercussions from this a really important one is not the seldier of vods. Alpzlon doesn't follow up his invasion, but the Turkan nomads do And they continue to move westwards. conquering cities and towns and to compound matters The Byzantine court devolves into infighting. and that civil war L so many years in that civil warar, it creates enough disorder for much of Etern and central Anatolia to fall to his various Turkish And that's where much of Byzant on Anatolia is lost Interesting. So it's not so much a seeljk conquest as the Selju kind of weakening the Byzantines enough that other Turkic groups can move in And it gets even more complicated than that because the byzantines, some of the various factions fighting this civil war actually recruit Turkish warriors in large numbers So it's not likeike so many wars in the Middle East, it's not quite as simple as well. in this case Turkmanen nomads on one side and the Byzantines on another. you may well have byyzantine armies with Turkman auxiliaries fighting alongside them. Like so many wars from this period, it becomes very mixed very quickly We do tend to fall into traps, don't we of thinking all of this period is or at least the crusades that are coming is always Muslim against Christian and this will always be Byzantine against Turk. And you the lines are never quite that clear, are they? Yeah. I think understand the complexity of the Middle East in this era or indeed any era, even the way up to the present always important to grasp just how complex the region is and how indifferent communities, religions Tade routes, interests and individuals were involved in shaping events One of the other groups that the seell drrucks are going to come up against is the Fatamids who are also significant power in this region as well. At this point at the time of the arrival of the Seljues, and who are the Fatamids and how much territory are they holding Yeah, sure. So we've mentioned the Abazid caliphate. That's the Sunni Muslim caliphate. but in Egypt there is well there's a North African ig a sheer religious movement, which ultimately leads to the conquest Egypt, which establishes the Fatimid Caliphate. This is a sheia Islamic Caliphate and that emerges in the tenth century And Egypt's always important because Egypt is key factor in many people's heads is just how wealthy Egypt is This is the region which intersects with Bice routes from India and Southeast Asia ammber routes from all the way from north of the Black Sea region across Anatolia down to the Mediterranean, the silk roads from Central Asia and China, the Tr Saharan gold routes the Mediterranean trade and of course, the fact that the Nile Dlta and is exceptionally fertile farmland produces a good chunk of the Middle East Arabble crops Egypt always valuable. It always has been and the Fatamids control it. And they're the great opponents previously of the Abdid cniphate, but then when the seeljit Turks overthrow much of Syria, Iraq, Persia, and create the Seljuk Sultanate. They tried to invade Fatimid Egypt unlike so many other power brokers across the region, this is where The soldier couldvance is held The Seljuks invade Egypt I think it's ten seventy seven, but the invasion fails The fatims are able to keep them out. And so a new frontier of war develops and to the south west you have the fatamids who control Egypt And then much of the Holyand region and then to the north east of them You have the Seljuk Sultanate and the frontier between those societies passes through Jerusalem and that's important. So the fatamids are the ones who are finally you're strong enough to stand up to the seell joks and halt their advance a little bit As the Seljuks are taking control of all of this new territory, what is the kind of structure of the way that they rule? Because we've talked about a Seljuk sultan. We've also talked about how loosely aligned, they can often be in that there's lots of more independent Turtman groups around. So Is this an empire with a solid center around a sultan or is this much more of a loose ing of people The central hub of the Seljic Sultanate is the Seljic Sultan himself His main cities are mostly in northern Persia, places like Isfahim but also Baghdad's. very important as well. So well away from the region to be impacted by the crusades, for example and many of the surrounding territories under Turkish rule are commanded either by members of the Seljuk immperial family or indeed by favored regional governors So that's at a sort of very high level That's the structure and all those various different commanders and governors and family members will then rule and try and impose their control And it's not easy Because there's plenty of people, as with have so many invasions, people necessarily want to be invaded And so there's a fair amount of resistance to the Selj Turks from early on or at least people looking for an opportunity to rise up against them. But 's that's the sort of the broad structure We're reaching the point now where Frankish crrusaders European crusaders are going to start arriving into the Holy Land. And to what extent the first Crusad is always remembered as this huge Success. in a way that it probably shouldn't have been So to what extent should we think about the success of the first Crusade being reliant on kind of rebellion and division amongst the Seljuks, but also the fighting that's going on amongst these different communities in the region at the time, with the Fatamids and the Abasids and the Byzantines kind of fighting each other in the area as well. Yes. so When the crusaders begin their advance into Turkish ruled territory, which they enter Turkish territory near the city of the city of Nicea which they recapture for the Byzantine empire It seems that they acquire at least a broad understanding of the political geography of the region fairly quickly Most importantly, they know or they come to learn The Fatid Empire is a firm opponent of the Seljuk Turks and the seeljuit tks, they're well aware. primary opponent But that means several things. The first thing it means is that the crusaders send ambassadors down to Egypt from a very early stage They have no objection whatsoever to fight to forming an alliance with the Fatamids against the Seljuks because this is the principle of my enemy's enemy is my friend As to the Seljuk Turks themselves only a few years before The arrival of the first crusade You have the assassination of the Seljuk Sultan Malikhah following which all those various family members and governors Command all the various districts of the Seljuk emmpire n on each other and fight a massive civil war. which lasts for around a decade. And that's more than enough time for the first crusaders to move into the region and benefit from the chaos that creates So the crusaders advance across Anatolia and into Syria And so in some respects, they are beneficiaries of this ongoing seeljuk civil war and yet many of the regional governors near to the cr or near to the crrusaders' line of advance, they do realize just how big a threat the crusaders are And so they the big armies against the crrusaders, which are then defeated So yes, the Seljuks are fighting amongst themselves, but there's still a lot of resistance being offered. to the crrusaders as they advance moving southwards from the Byzantine border And while this is going on, the crusaders are talking to the Fatimids and they want to create Alliance with the Fatamids Things there are complicated because the fatamids can see that they' seeljer components are really struggling in the face of the crusader's advance and their own infight in And so one year before the crusade reaches it The fatamids take Jerusalem And so a Fabid army marches out from Egypt and takes Jerusalem creates a problem in the negotiations for an alliance between the Crusaders and the Fatimids and the crusaders their best offer. to the Fatamids is they say we'll offer you Every city the Seljuks have ever conquered from you if in return We can have Jerusalem The Fatimid's counter proposal to them is they say to the crusaders, We will allow you to visit Jeruth. You can visit, you can conduct your prayers and your acts of reverence to all the various locations that you might want to in the Jerusalem area, but then you're going home You can't keep it in the long term and It's on that point that the negotiations hinge And it's on that point that the negotiations break down. And so ear ten ninety nine one year after the Fatabids took the city for themselves The crrusaders conquered Jerusalem in as it is well known, exceptionally brutal stage But it is interesting to see that the battle lines of the first Cusade are complex And it should be pointed out that as many Islamic sources Tell us from this ero or a little bit later that there are various Bedouin groups and indeed some Turkish some small Turkish rulers Ally with the first crusaders from a very early point lies are are often very complicated. It's so interesting, such an interesting patchwork. We cove the crusades aair bit. we've got a wonderful series on the crrusades, which people can go back and listen to to find out more about what really happens during the first Crusade and all of the other ones too. But for now, if we think about The first Crusades success takes Jerusalem The crrusader states are established. What does this do to the Seljuk E empire? I mean, does it force them to get over their own divisions and infighting. Yeah. so It's worth taking a sort of thinking about what the Cusade, what the Crusade of States would have looked like. from the Seljuk Empire. because the Seljik Empire is vast, It's from Afghanistan and the east all the way to the Mediterranean seeaboard at its greatest extent And the Seljuk Empire has a lot of problems It's not just the crusaders who are invading their very new empire There are many other societies doing that not to mention their own internal divisions, which are serious and probably their main concern And then you have the fact that the first Cusade seems to have triggered a series of rebellions not against the Crusaders, against the Seljuk Turks because they are themselves recent invaders. And one of the other priorities that the Seljuk Turks are facing timeime of the first Crusade is that attempts to suppress a shia Islamic community known as the Nazaris and the Nazaris are often known today as the Assassins And they're very worried about the Nazaris and led an intense persecution of the Nazaris across Selju territory, which plays its own part in these events. So my point is the crusades are not necessarily the biggest show in town There are lots of concerns occupying the Seljuks, and we shouldn't fall into the trap of assuming that the crusaders all they're thinking about. There's a lot of other things going on So it takes a long time for anyone other than the regional governors who are having to deal with them directly for the Seljuk Empire as a whole to respond to the advance. of the Crusaders and the Crusaders establishment of were essentially four European countries in the Middle East that we now refer to as The Crusader states. As it's really do you need to get about eleven, ten. That's over a decade after the first cruayade that the Seljuic Sultanate is herent enough internally to send big armies out to try and suppress the crusader states. But even then in a so six year period from eleven ten. ele fifteen, the seelj ex sal that senter a lot of armies to try and suppress the crusit of states. But one of the biggest problems they have is not the crusad of states themselves It's their own regional governors because they're regional governors in cities like Damascus and Aleppo When they see the advance of the Seljuk Sultan's army, concern is, well, is his army going to replace to me? Is it going to impose a new Seljuk governor because I haven't been particularly loyal to the Seljic Sultant over the years. So Am I going to be viewed as an enemy And so these armies sent to defeat the Crusid states, often they meet Yes, the armies raised by the Crusader States on. The crusaders themselves enjoy a degree of support right the way up to substantial military support from regional Turkish governors who are afraid of losing their position Just to add to the mix, we've now got kind of Seljuk governors joining with the Crusaders against the Seljuk Empire. So little bits of infighting internally as well we get I mean, we've talked a lot about people allying with people you might not expect them to in particular against the sell jokes. I mean do we have any examples of of the Franks and the Seljuks looking to all lie, you know, if it's the Fatimids who are in Jerusalem and they're the problem. Not so much the Seljuk Sultan, but you have lots of other groups who They're curious what the crusad has mean They don't know who they are. When the first crusade arrived, most people have a very thin understanding of who these strange people are Yes, you get pilgrims going to Jerusalem from Western Europe in fairly large numbers, but Beyond that, there's not much experience of interacting with Western Europeans. indeed the Western Europeans in many ces have very little idea where they're going You have one account that says they get halfway through Germany and say, okay, where's Jerusalem the maps So there's a lot of curiosity, clearly the crusaders are violent because they've been behaving very violently, but then that's not particularly unusual for this era. But there's lots of interactions. C we do trade with the Crusades or the Franks as they become known The answer to that is nearly always yes could treaties and alliances be formed with them? and the answer today it depends on the various interests shaping those alliances. but we have lots of dynasties do fight with the crrusider states. and we have also a fair number people who flee or go into exile or even migrate into the crusider States, looking for a safe haven For example, the assassins in eleven twenty nine There is a major wave of movement from the Nizarro community. into the Cusit of States where they're looking for a safe haven. It wasn't especially safe for them but it was safer than where they had been previously. There's always these sorts of complexities that shape the map. key point, I think for me at least is that the causes of war are various They're about the struggle between nomadic peoples and agricultural peoples. They're about the control over trade routes They're about individual personal ambition They're about forming alliances so that you don't become too weak. facing and another alliance is forming on the other side of your border They're about family rivalries or disputes. they're about internal civil wars And yes, also they're about holy War as well And so it's that ecosystem of conflicts creates all sorts of constellations of alliances and certainly any faction that refuses to ally with other ethnic or religious groups on principle, they are not going to prosper or have any chance of prospering because that's just not how it works. And to what extent should we think about this It seems like, you know, incessant infighting and division amongst the Seljuk Empire and its governors what extent is that the undoing of the Empire? becausecause it doesn't feel like a very way for an empire to be functioning. One of the key issues here It's a problem, but it does it does bring advantages to the Seljuk Empire in some respects is the Seljus practice partable inheritance So we're familiar with primogeniture in Western Europe whereby the eldest son inherits and People talk about how unfair that is, etcetera. There's only one child, normally the male gets more or less everything. And yet there is a stabilizing quality to that because the alternative is you split up the inheritance between everyone And as people with large numbers of siblings, I'm sure will be aware that the idea of spitting things up like that when you have an entire empire at your disposal that can create problems And so this is what happens in the Seljuk Empire. they still view it as an empire. We are still the Seljuk Empire, but different regions are ruled by different members of the family which inevitably leads to feuds and wars and internal conflicts. and every now and again You get a ruler who's powerful enough or has enough support. to provide a degree of unity But actually the moment when the Seljuk Empire is a single empire under a single ruler quite a fleeting phase. For most of its history, the Seljuk Empire is a sort of a mixture of different dynasties, all who have a reasonably clear shared idea of seeljic authority, that does not mean that they're in agreement over who should be in charge They're all reading the same book but maybe on different pages. different times I should say that this is not simply a negative because there are problems. If, for example, sticking with premogeniture, if you have the eldest son inheriting then whatever that eldest son's personal qualities You are going to inherit those qualities as your leader Are they strong? Are they weak Are they clever? Are they not? Are they effective? A they unwise, whatever that sn's qualities, you're going to feel it. whatever happens next One of the advantages of partable inheritance is, yes, it may well lead to almost instantaneous civil war But whoever arises At the end of that civil warar, whoever is able to forge a degree of unity There will be no weaklings among those people because they've been through every possible challenge and confrontation in order to achieve that primacy. Yeah that's a really interesting aspect of that And to what extent do we begin to see kind of the Aterbegs who are kind of under soldi control But they seem to suddenly become a bit more kind of independently minded, almost as if they're trying to set up as their own independent power bases. How does that come about Yes. so over time and we're talking in the twelfth century now. so we're moving into sort of the eleven twenties, eleven, thirties, eleven, forties, that sort of period The Seljuk Sultan never really gets over its internal wars moments of of semi unity, but then they quickly fall apart as the next round of infighting kicks in until there are so many factions it just becomes impossible to maintain any semblance of order But within that, you have regional dynasties that begin to emerge, often starting life as governors appointed by the Seljuks. then as the decades pass and they have no oversight from the centre They go their own way And you have this with the rise of the Zangid dynasty And the Zangid dynasty is important because this is a dynasty that will pose sububstantial opposition you might even say decisive opposition to the crrusader states in the mid twelfth century. The dyny itself starts off because there's a very effective warrior call Zangi he proves himself as a leader and commander in general under the leadership of one of the various claimants to the Seljuk Empire And he's given the city of Mzul. Long way away. from the Crusadade of Stes, but he has that city to govern. And he very rapidly expands on that basis. Now he's not necessarily disloyal to the Seljuk Sous, It doesn't intends to be anyway, but as the Seljuk Empire begins to sort of collapse and fragment his part of that empire. remains very strong and gets stronger until the Zangid dynasty becomes a great deal more powerful than the seeljuic center itself And so this is the next stage in the evolution of the Seljuk Empire as various different regions, their governors become semi independent moving to become fully independent and just sort of join the dots Oftten it's those governors and their descendants. that were encountered by the Mongols when they invaded in the thirteenth century when the nomads next come in a big way To what extent then should we think about Pople like Zangyi and their Zang dyasty Are they seeljuk or would they have considered themselves something different? Are they setting up a new dynasty distinct from the seeljuks? or might they still have considered themselves seeljuk but you trying to survive in a world where the seeljks have less and less control One of the problems we have with the Soldik Turks is they wrote virtually nothing themselves. We trot out platitudes like victory that history is always written by the victors. Well actually it's not Not always The Seljuk Turks wrote very little about themselves and neither for that matter did the Mongols Often the histories we've got are written by courtiers to the Seljuks and later on to the Mongols And yeah, they' going to want to present history in a way that will not upset or antagonize their overlords, but it's not quite the same thing as them writing their own history. So what I'm offering here is my best guess, basically I think the notion that the Zangids had become disloyal to the seelj ex Sulanate would have appalled them I think they would have seen themselves very much being loyal to the Seljuk Sultans, and yet there are underlying realities here The seelldic Sultanate is not working It is not coherent is falling apart, is crumbling. and to the realities will then bring about a shift until They're independent reallyally, essentially. And it is that Is that what we should think of as bringing about the end of the Seljuk Empire? this fracturing and it's slowly splitting into pieces that sort of drift apart? And kind of is there a Is there a date that we can put on the end of it or is it kind of a slow torturous death? I think it's just a slow fragmentation sort of That was like a of tectonic shift of plates with the plates just moving slowly apart until really their're new and separate continents Politically speaking Yeah And and And are there, I mean, we've talked about the Zangid dynasty. Are there other significant dynasties that then kind of rise out of the ashes of the Seljuk Empire? Yeah. One of the most interesting of these dynasties, which again, is a dynasty I talk about quite a lot in my book because this is Saladin's dynasty And Salagon is unusual because most of the ruling elites across much of the Soeljuk empire are Turkish But Saldin's dynasty isn't Salard himself is from a Kurdish family and his father Ayub and his uncle Shirka They began their careers, or much of their career was conducted as warriors in the employ of the Zangid dynasty So they're warriors serving Turkish rulers. That's their origins. And Saladin, as he grows older and achieves adulthood, he then follows his uncle and father into that employ And then Nur al Din, Zeni's son, so the Zengid ruler of Syria, he sends Sherko with a large force of Turkish cavalry into Egypt to try and take control And after a series of wars, Shirka achieves it and then promptly dies leaving his nephew in command. And these are the origins of Saladin's empire So Salldin is from a Kurdish family and Salin has his family around him and he gathers many Kurdish warriors around him in Egypt, but he's also leading a very large number of Turkish troops And in many ways, it empire is a successor state from the Zangid. So there are all those sorts of cultural mixed qualities in his empire. foollowing that foundation in Egypt Salldin then reconquers Syria from his master's family until he's built up this huge Torial block So yeah, it's another very interesting dynasty that is in its way a successor state to the Seljuk Empire, albeit one under Kurdish rule rather than Turkish rule fascinating. And so interesting to think that so many of as you mentioned before, so many of the leaders and the structures that the Mongols will encounter a century or so later were their nomadic predecessors Y forms of control still lingering in the near East and the Holand I think so. and I think one of the reasons for that is that when the Selj Turks first invaded the Middle East They were in the early phases of a very long term conversion to Islam So many of the practices of the various groups that make up this Cederation of Turkish peoples would sort of practice step shamanism as their forefathers would have And even at the time of the first crusade, we have accounts gribing Turkish warriors burying their dead with grave goods to serve them in the afterlife. these are sort of step practices that they're repeporting here And the seeljuks then converted to Islam until by the time we get to sort of the late, mid to late, twelfth century that conversion process is in advanced form. And then the Mongols arrive a few decades later And they've got a lot in common with the Selj Turks. In fact, one missionary to the Mongols said that the way you can tell the difference between a Mongol warrior and a Turkish warrior is the Mongols tie up their robes on one side Turkish warriors typeed their robes on another If that's the biggest distinction he can find, that shows how similar they are And I my feeling in this is the Seljic Turks because they're from such a similar cultural origin to the Mongols. They provided almost sort of a slipstream and a cultural religious template which the Mongols could then follow in the thirteenth century Nick, this's been absolutely incredible. once again. what this book does like all of your books do and this region in particular is kind of blur all of those lines that we think are so fixed between all of these groups and we imagine this is always Christian against Muslim or you Franks against seeljokks and and your books are so good at bringing in all of the other players that are in a region and giving us a picture of just how I don't know flexible some of those alliances could be how people were willing to join with people who on paper look like their' enemies if it was what benefited them in the short term. So say I hope listeners have enjoyed. I hope they're going to grab the book and learn a bit more about the complexities of this period Thanks so much, Bat. it's been great be on the show Thanks very much Ne Well hope you've enjoyed this episode. Nicholas's book, Crusader Storm A Global History of the Wars for the Middle East is out now if you'd like to explore the world of the Seljuk Turks in more detail They also pop up as major players in our gripping four Part Crusade series released earlier this year Please do go back and have a listen to that if you missed it There are new instrumments of G Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history