Seljuk Turks turned Manzikert into Anatolia’s open door
Founded in 1037 by brothers Tughril and Chaghri, the Great Seljuk Empire stretched some 3.9 million square kilometres of Turco-Persian power. Their 1071 triumph at Manzikert cracked Byzantine Anatolia and set up both Crusades and Turkish beyliks.
Oghuz Qïnïq clans under the warlord Seljuk converted to Islam near Jend on the Syr Darya in 985. Around 1034 his grandsons Tughril and Chaghri were routed by Ali Tegin and fled to Khwarazm, then pushed into Khorasan, seized Merv and Nishapur (1037–38), and crushed the Ghaznavid Masʽud at Dandanaqan in 1040. They staffed a Persian bureaucracy while remaining Turkic overlords; their uncle Musa Yabghu may have made early rule a triumvirate.
In 1055 Tughril entered Baghdad and ended Buyid tutelage over the Abbasid caliph. Alp Arslan took Armenia and Georgia in 1064, invaded Byzantium in 1068, and at Manzikert in 1071 shattered imperial recovery hopes. Within two years Turkoman chiefs planted beyliks as far as the Aegean—Saltukids, Shah-Armens, Mengujekids, and more.
Malik-Shah I and viziers Nizam al-Mulk and Taj al-Mulk pushed borders out to the old pre-Arab Iranian frontier, touching China in the east and Byzantium in the west. Nizam grew so powerful that chroniclers called the era the Nizam’s state, and modern scholars have described him as the empire’s real ruler. When Malik-Shah died in 1092, his brother and four sons fought over the inheritance, and Kilij Arslan I escaped captivity to reclaim his father’s Anatolian lands.
His son Ahmad Sanjar governed Khorasan from 1096 and took the whole empire in 1118. In 1141 he met the Kara Khitans near Samarkand at Qatwan, suffered the first defeat of his career, and lost everything east of the Syr Darya. In 1153 his own Oghuz tribesmen beat and captured him, holding him until 1156, and central rule collapsed. When the Mongols under Tolui sacked Merv in 1221 they destroyed his tomb; the 700,000 deaths claimed at the time are now considered exaggerated.
Source: Seljuk Empire
