Imperial Designs in Islam: Conquerors from the Desert
On that day of June in 1098, what seemed to the Christians a magnificent manifestation of providence was more likely an expression of the feebleness of the Seljuq imperial structure.
The Seljuqs were originally pagan Turks from Central Asia. After converting to Islam in the tenth century, they conquered Persia, Mesopotamia, and most of Asia Minor and Syria. After the death of Malik Shah I in 1092, the empire had been a loose hegemonic structure with members of the vast royal kin governing different regions. On paper, it stretched from the Bosporus to the Aral Sea, but it did not have a centralized organization with taxes pouring into the center and directives going out to provincial governors. The contingents that deserted Kerbogha were from rival Seljuq princes from Damascus and Aleppo who did not want the ruler of Mosul to become too powerful. The Seljuk dominion was an example of khaldunian conquest; that is, of Islamic tribes coming out of the steppes, conquering the fertile regions with their urban centers, and establishing a new state, a new kingdom in the process. The tribe was a large group of nomadic warriors organized along segmentary kinship lines, temporarily centralized under a successful warlord, and often spurred by a puristic preaching of Islam. The North African historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) saw invasions of such tribal people as the mainspring of political renewal—as simply the mechanism that made history possible. The tribesmen not only developed martial skills in a society with a high degree of military participation, they were also used to hardship, and most of all, they had a strong group feeling.[1579] (“Group feeling” was the English translation of the Arabic term asabiyyah made by Franz Rosenthal in 1967.)Ibn Khaldun was also aware that this group feeling started to corrode right after a successful conquest. After three generations, he generally predicted, the tribesmen would have lost the asabiyyah and hardiness of their forefathers and would be vulnerable to new invasions from the desert.[1580] When the Crusader army showed up in Syria, the Great Seljuk Empire was at the very point when the center had lost control of the provinces.
In the perspective of Ibn Khaldun, this was due to the corrosion of group feeling. To modern historians, the real danger to very large empires is not so much external invasion as it is internal disintegration. Group feeling or not— the Seljuq Empire disintegrated internally after 1092. The Crusaders thus faced a political web that was in some aspects not very different from the one they knew from Europe: a world of middle-sized polities with the more powerful having hegemonic aspirations (see also Bennison, Chap. 9, Vol. 1). In a more august, but not more powerful position was the caliph in Baghdad, the Abbasid who had remained in office after the Seljuq expansion. To the Crusaders, he was identified as an Islamic pope. The Gesta Francorum—one of our main sources for the history of the First Crusade—even lets Kerbogha address a letter to “The Caliph, our Pope (nostro apostolico)”[1581] This identification is rather revealing; it shows that Christian authors with some knowledge of Middle Eastern conditions considered the pope not as a classic emperor, but as an authority worthy to take advice from.
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