The Persian vizier who effectively ran the Seljuk Empire for twenty years
Sultans held the title, but for two decades a Persian scholar named Hasan from a village near Tus held the reins. Known by his honorific Nizam al-Mulk, Orderer of the Realm, he became the model of the wise minister, building schools and writing a guide to good government.
He was born on 10 April 1018 in Radkan, near Tus in Iran, to a family of landed gentry, the dehqans. A family story says that two days after the birth his mother dreamed of Fatima al-Zahra, who nursed the baby and told her to call him Hasan, like her own son, since his father too was named Ali. He trained in Shafi law and Ashari theology, while his father worked as a finance officer for the Ghaznavids.
When the Seljuk Turks beat the Ghaznavids at Dandanaqan in 1040 and took Khorasan, father and son fled to Ghazni, where Hasan held his first government post. After three or four years he switched sides, joining the Seljuks around 1043, and by 1059 he administered all of Khorasan. When Tughril died without children, a succession fight broke out; Hasan helped Alp Arslan defeat the rival claimant Kutalmish, and Alp Arslan took power in 1064 and made him vizier.
He stayed vizier under Alp Arslan and then under Malik-Shah I, the next sultan, and after Alp Arslan was assassinated in 1072 he was the real ruler for 20 years. The division of labour was clear: the sultan fought, and the vizier governed. He organised military land grants called iqta, run by Seljuk princes, which let nomadic Turkish soldiers draw on settled farming communities. That system, plus taxes on merchants, let the sultans keep a vast standing army without relying on plunder.
His most lasting monuments were intellectual. He founded a network of madrasas across the empire's cities, named Nizamiyyas after him, and tradition credits him with the Siyasatnama, or Book of Government, which uses historical anecdotes to discuss justice and bureaucracy. His methods shaped Persian and Islamic statecraft for centuries.
Source: Nizam al-Mulk
