and enjoy some longevity. An offshoot of the Seljuk family and the House of D
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mendids and the Seljuks of R
m, both of whom sought the alliance of the Byzantine emperor or local Christian or Muslim powers when it seemed expedient, was ultimately resolved in 1177 in favor of the latter, who captured their rivals' last major holding, Malatya, and decisively reduced them to vassalage.
This feat was accomplished only one year after another Seljuk victory, this one over Byzantine imperial armies in Myriokephalon (1176). This was, in the words of one of the most prominent scholars of medieval Anatolia, “after an interval of a century, a replica of Mantzikert, which showed that henceforward there existed a Turkey which could never be further assimilated.”4 Although the word “Turchia” indeed appeared in Latin geographic designations in the twelfth century, from the point of view of the Turkish-speaking populations and polities of the area, there was no Turkey, either as a geographical or as a political entity, until the end of World War I, when the European designation was finally accepted by the locals themselves. Instead, there was a changing set of competing political enterprises, many of which were led by Turkish-speaking warrior elites but which were never organized along ethnic lines or with an eye to eventual ethnic unity. The land was known as the land of R
m, and its people were divided into different communities of religious, linguistic, or political affiliation. The Ottoman ruling class eventually emerged as a combination of Muslims (some by conversion) who spoke Turkish (though not necessarily as a native tongue), affiliated (some voluntarily and some involuntarily) with the dynastic state under the rule of the House of Osman. And “Turk” was only one, and not necessarily a favored one, of the “ethnicities” ruled by that class.
With their victories in Myriokephalon and Malatya behind them, the Seljuks looked like they had accomplished, “from the Byzantine territories in the West almost to the further limits of the East, the political unity of Asia Minor.”5 But to a student of the later and much more solid Ottoman state, like this author, the rule of the Seljuks of R
m in any period seems too fragile and ephemeral to be considered real political unity. All the major fault lines of those medieval Turkic states, built around the energies of tribal forces and ambitious warrior chieftains, were at work in the sultanate of the Anatolian Seljuks: there were many frontier zones of various sizes where the administrative apparatus hardly reached; there were many tribal groups that were not controlled; there were many ambitious warriors, some of them possibly made by the Seljuks, ready to imagine themselves independent of Seljuk authority; and when two or three of these came together, as they frequently did, they were able to shake, if not dissolve, state power. Finally, the Seljuks of R
m also continued the practice of dividing up their land among the heirs of the dynast; the same Seljuk sultan who won the two victories mentioned above carved his realm into eleven pieces for his nine sons, a brother, and a nephew. The realm could still remain united in principle, under the leadership of a “senior partner” recognized by the others, but it proved only a matter of time before some of the heirs found support among T
rkmen tribes or warrior bands, and rival foci of power emerged. As we shall discuss in later chapters, the Ottomans, as if or perhaps because they were good students of history, and under different conditions no doubt, proved themselves much more successful in confronting these fault lines and eventually steering their course clear of them on the way to creating one of the most durable states in history.
In all fairness to the Anatolian Seljuks, it must be admitted that they were approaching a firm consolidation of their power in the first four decades of the thirteenth century, and that their ultimate failure is closely related to an unforeseen external factor: the invincible Mongol armies. Even before the Mongols, however, a T
s and his followers presented a severe challenge to Seljuk authority between 1239 and 1241. It seems that the plight of the TIt seems that the plight of the T
nus Emre,
the classical poet of the newly forged Anatolian Turkish dialect, emerged in that context and produced a corpus of poems that are distinguished by the profundity with which they looked death right in the eye. In any case, continued political disarray and demographic pressure pushed many Turkish tribes and warriors further into western Anatolia, especially since the Byzantine capital was moved back to Constantinople in 1261 after having been seated in Nicaea since 1204 (the Fourth Crusade) and having brought heightened security and prosperity to the area for half a century or so. Before the end of the thirteenth century, endemic political fragmentation had led to the emergence of numerous small chiefdoms and relatively autonomous tribal domains in various parts of Anatolia.
The political turbulences and human catastrophes of the thirteenth century should not prevent us from observing the tremendous possibilities unleashed by an unprecedented “globalization” of the Eurasian economy thanks, in good part, to the Chingisid conquests and the pax mongolica. It is for good reason that it has become a commonplace to refer to the travels of Marco Polo when speaking of the Chingisids. There were signs even before Chingis that Asia Minor, once the jewel in Byzantium's crown and then having suffered a series of depredations, had regained sufficient stability to serve as a long-distance trade link (along a North-South as well as an East-West axis) and to benefit from the new commercial potential created by the mixed economies of urban, agrarian, and pastoralist populations. The outburst of caravanserai building activity, the primary area of architectural patronage by the Seljuk elite, was initiated in the late twelfth century and was to increase its tempo no matter
