The term Turkoman first appeared in Islamic texts during the tenth century and was used alternatively with Oghuz, the Turkic nomadic people that one century later and after a long migration invaded Asia Minor. More precisely, Turkoman came to mean the Muslim Oghuz in contrast to the pagan, shaminist or the Christian Oghuz, a minority group. The term had already passed into Greek in the first half of the twelfth century.
The Turks practiced a variety of religions, being Buddhists, Manicheas, Christians (mainly Nestorians), even Zoroastrians; but initially the most popular religion was shamanism, the religion of the steppe. With the Arab conquest of Transoxiana (705-15), Islam spread successfully among the Turks.
Most probably the earliest Turks known to history are the Huns. The first people whom the Byzantines called Tourkoi, however, were governed by a Khagan, who in 568 sent ambassadors to Constantinople, seeking alliance with Justin II against the Persians. In the following year a Byzantine ambassador, Zemarcos, reached the khagan's nomadic court; the account of his mission still survives.
The northern Black Sea regions attracted several Turkic peoples such as the Avars, the Bulgars, the Khazars, etc., while the lower Danube remained an area of confrontation between the Byzantines and Turks. In the twelfth century, this area was occupied by the Cumans.
Around 960, the first Turco-Islamic state appeared, that of the Karakhanids or Ilek-khanids. Established in the cities of Balasagun and Kashgar (eastern Turkestan), they soon conquered the region of Transoxiana.
Shortly after the Karakhanids, another Turco-Islamic dynasty appeared in Ghazna. The Ghaznavid sultan Mahmud (998-1030) was glorified for his long and victorious war against India. The end of his campaigns left the warriors of the faith, the ghazis, unemployed and seems to be one of the reasons for the great migration of the Oghuz Turks in the eleventh century.
The Oghuz people living around the year 1000 south of Lake Aral included twenty-two of 24 tribes; Byzantine sources mention some of these (e.g., the Avshar or the Cepni). The first Oghuz tribe that headed toward the west and reached the Danube regions was the Pechenegs. A second wave of Oghuz reached the territories of the Rus'; the Byzantines mention them by their real ethnic name, Ouzoi. For the Byzantine Empire, the most significant Oghuz migration was that guided by the family (later dynasty) of the Seljuks. The Seljukid Tughrul Beg, sultan of Baghdad from 1055, unable to control the Oghuz nomads, dispatched them as ghazid against the Christians. This policy led his successor Alp Arslan to open confrontation with the Byzantines and the victory at Mantzikert.
During the twelfth century the Turks of Asia Minor were divided and established several states, the most important of which, after the Seljuks, was that of the Danismendids. After the Seljuks defeated the army of Manuel I in 1176 near Myriokephalon, the Byzantines were obliged to regard the Turkish occupation of Asia Minor as permanent.
Turk in Byzantine Service. From the eleventh century onward, the Byzantines hired Turkish peoples (Pechenegs, Cumans, Seljuks) as mercenaries, and some groups of Turks settled on Byzantine territory. According to the chroniclers of the First Crusade, the Tourkopouli formed a substantial and effective contingent of the Byzantine army. Eustathios of Thessalonike praises Manuel I's tolerance toward foreigners and relates that significant "Persian" colonies were established within the empire. Several Turkish families (Axouch, Samouch, Prosuch) reached high ranks and supplied the empire with generals. After the twelfth century, however, the Turks appeared in the empire as allies rather than settlers, and finally as overlords and conquerors.
Others of the Turkomans had, however, already moved in Byzantine Anatolia, often as ghazis, enthusiastic warriors for their newly found faith of Islam. In part they aimed at fulfilling the religious duty of jihad, in part at finding plunder and good pasture for their herds. Increasingly, after the establishment of the Great Seljuk sultanate, these raiders wished to escape from the central control of the sultans. It is improbable that these bands ever envisaged the actual overthrow of the mighty Byzantine Empire.
The real weakness of the Byzantine Empire was nevertheless demonstrated by the victory of the Great Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan (1063-1072) at Manizkert in 1071, after a series of campaigns had weakened the Armenian princes who guarded the routes through eastern Anatolia. Soon after this, we first hear of the four sons of Qutlumush ibn Isra'il/Arslan, one of whom, Sulayman, was to found the Seljuk sultanate of Rum (from the Bilad al-Rum of the Islamic geographers, that is, the "land of the Greeks, Rhomaioi"). The sons of Qutlumush no doubt held only some of many Turkoman bands that were making lightning raids across Anatolia as far as the Aegean Sea around Latrus and also raiding through Syria and Palestine, where they came up against the Fatimids of Egypt. Sulayman seems to have achieved a certain primacy among the leaders of these bands, for Byzantine sources acord him the title of "sultan," which must have been either self-asumed or else awarded by consensus of the Turkomans. One of the Turkoman raids penetrated as far west as Nicaea, where in 1081 Sulayman established a principality that endured for sixteen years until in 1097 a joint crusader-Byzantine force recovered it for Christendom. The security of the Bosporus was threatened, but the strong rule of Alexios I Komnenos (1081-1118) managed to deflect Sulayman's activities toward the Taurus region, where a Byzantine general, the Armenian Philaretos, had set up a virtually independent principality. Sulayman was killed in 1086, but his son Qilik Arslan I (1092-1107) managed to get himself recognized by the Turkoman chiefs who had followed Sulaym'n after his own release from captivity under Maliksh'h on the latter's death in 1092. After the sultan's demise, the Great Seljuk sultante was for several years racked by internecine strife; this fact allowed the Seljuks of Rum to consolidate their position in Anatolia with minimal interference from the east.
While the Seljuks were controlling the more southerly routes across Anatolia, those across the center and north through Cappadocia to Ankara and beyond were dominated by rival groups of Turkomans, above all the Danishmendids. Emir Danishmend (d. 1104), though the hero of a later epic glorifying the family's exploits, is a shadowy figure; but there is no gainsaying the forcefulness of the line he founded, which controlled Sivas, Amasya, Tokat, Kayseri and Ankara, and which disputed Maras and Malatya with the Seljuks, only temporarily showing a united Turkoman front against the First Crusade.
The Seljuks' base was the town of Konya (Ikonion), which was to remain their capital for two centuries and which they beautified and turned into a center of art and learning Their power was at this time essentially an inland one, on the Anatolian plateau, for the crusader states of Antioch and Edessa and the Rubenid kingdom of Cilicia Armenia, which emerged in the later twelfth century, cut them off to the south, and on the north and west the faced the Byzantines and the Danishmendids.
The middle decades of the twelfth century saw the Seljuks, plagued by the Danishmendids until the later fell into dissension. Seljuk fortunes revived under Qilij Arslan II (1155/1156-1192). An arguement with Manuel I Komnenos in 1161 at Constantinople gave Qilij Arslan II a free hand against rivals in Anatolia, and his decisive victory over the emperor at Myrikephalon in 1176 allowed him to consolidate his position.
About 1186 or 1187 the aged sultan decided to divide his territories among his humerous sons, keeping for himself only the capital, Konya. The inevitable disputes after his abdiction reduced the sultanate to near anarchy, a condition to which the passage of the Third Crusade throgh Anatolia in 1190 and the crusaders' pillaging of Konya contributed.
The slow task of rebuilding the sultanate fell to the brothers Sulayman II and Kaykhusraw I (1192-1210). Their success was such that the first forty years of the thirteenth century are the sultanate's aopgee.
A prerequisite for this strengtheneing of the state is the acquisition of outlets to the sea. There had been tentative movements through Lycia in the southwest, and in the north Samsun had been seied about 1194 but then lost to the Byzantine princes of Trebizond. In 1207, Kaykhusraw I acquired the southern port of Antalya, important as an outlet for trade from the Black Sea region, above all trade in slaves, that crosses Anatolia en route to Egypt. His successor, Kayqawus I (1210-1219), seized the northern port of Sinope from the Greeks in 1214.
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Last modified: Mon Dec 14, 1998