Seljuk Turks Take Baghdad

In 1055, the Seljuk Turkic leader Tughril Beg entered Baghdad and ended the political control of the Shia Buyid dynasty over the Abbasid caliphate. The date given here is 1054, but most historians place the actual entry into the city in December 1055, after Tughril's campaigns in the preceding years. Either way, the event reshaped the Islamic Middle East. The Abbasid caliph remained the spiritual head of Sunni Islam, but real power passed to a new Turkic sultanate that presented itself as the caliph's protector.

The Seljuks were a clan of Oghuz Turks, named for a leader called Seljuk, who had moved from the Central Asian steppe into the lands east of the Caspian in the late tenth century. They converted to Sunni Islam and served as soldiers and frontier powers along the borders of larger states. Under Tughril and his brother Chagri Beg, they defeated the Ghaznavids at the Battle of Dandanqan in 1040, which opened Iran and Khurasan to them. They took Nishapur, then Isfahan and other major cities, building a state that stretched across the Iranian plateau.

Baghdad, meanwhile, was in decline. Since 945 the Abbasid caliphs had been dominated by the Buyids, Shia emirs from northern Iran who held the city while leaving the caliph in place. By the 1050s the Buyids were weakened by infighting, financial strain, and unrest among soldiers and townspeople, including sectarian clashes between Sunnis and Shias. Caliph al-Qa'im, a Sunni, had reason to welcome a strong Sunni patron, and he is generally thought to have had dealings with Tughril before the Seljuks arrived.

When Tughril entered Baghdad, the Buyid ruler was removed and the Seljuks took over the city's administration, though not without friction. A revolt led by the Turkish commander al-Basasiri briefly drove the caliph out in 1058 and put a rival Fatimid-aligned authority in the city, but Tughril returned and restored al-Qa'im. The caliph then granted Tughril the title of sultan and king of the East and West, and the two families were later linked by marriage. This arrangement, in which the caliph conferred legitimacy and the sultan held the army and the revenue, became a lasting model.

The consequences extended well beyond Baghdad. Under Tughril's successors Alp Arslan and Malik-Shah, the Seljuks defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071 and opened Anatolia to Turkic settlement. Their vizier Nizam al-Mulk promoted Sunni learning through the Nizamiyya madrasas. The Seljuk empire later fragmented, but the idea of a sultan ruling in the name of a ceremonial caliph shaped Islamic politics until the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258.