Seljuk Dynasty

Succession of rulers

1. 1.Tughril Begr. 1037 – 1063
2. 2.Chaghri Begr. 1040 – 1060
3. 3.Alp Arslanr. 1063 – 1072
4. 4.Malik-Shah Ir. 1072 – 1092
5. 5.Mahmud Ir. 1092 – 1094
6. 6.Kilij Arslan Ir. 1092 – 1107
7. 7.Berkyaruqr. 1094 – 1105
8. 8.Muhammad I Taparr. 1105 – 1118
9. 9.Ahmad Sanjarr. 1118 – 1157

Rulers of the Seljuk Dynasty in order of accession.

All figures

• Chaghri Beg989 – 1060
• Tughril Beg990 – 1063
• Alp Arslan1029 – 1072
• Malik-Shah I1055 – 1092
• Kilij Arslan I1079 – 1107
• Berkyaruq1080 – 1105
• Muhammad I Tapar1082 – 1118
• Ahmad Sanjar1086 – 1157
• Mahmud I1087 – 1094
• Seljukd. 1007

See who ruled alongside the Seljuk Dynasty →

Related events

• Conflict

  Battle of Manzikert

  1071· this dynasty: Victorious power; the battle opened Anatolia to Turkish settlement

  In August 1071 the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan met a large Byzantine field army near Manzikert, north of Lake Van, in what is now eastern Turkey. The emperor Romanos IV Diogenes had marched east to recover fortresses on the Armenian frontier and to check the raids that Turkmen bands had been pressing into Anatolia for two decades. Alp Arslan, who had been campaigning toward Fatimid Syria, turned back to meet him and offered terms; Romanos refused. The battle itself, fought on 26 August, ended in a Byzantine collapse. The Seljuk forces used feigned withdrawals to draw the imperial line forward over the course of the day, and when Romanos ordered a retreat at dusk the maneuver dissolved into confusion. The rearguard under Andronikos Doukas, a political rival of the emperor, withdrew from the field rather than cover the retreat, and the imperial center was enveloped. Romanos was wounded and captured, the first Roman emperor taken prisoner by a Muslim ruler in battle. Alp Arslan treated his captive with marked courtesy, concluded a treaty involving tribute and territorial concessions, and released him after about a week. The settlement never took effect: Romanos was overthrown, blinded, and dead within a year, and the treaty died with him. The decade of Byzantine civil war that followed mattered more than the battle's casualties. Rival claimants hired Turkmen war bands and brought them across Anatolia as auxiliaries, and these groups stayed, settled, and carved out lordships. Within twenty years most of the plateau had passed out of imperial control, and a Seljuk principality, the Sultanate of Rum, was established with its eventual seat at Nicaea and later Konya. Manzikert thus opened Anatolia to Turkish settlement less by conquest than by the political disintegration it triggered.

• Conflict

  Siege of Nicaea

  1097· this dynasty: Defenders; lost their Anatolian capital

  Nicaea, a walled city on the shore of Lake Ascanius in northwestern Anatolia, served as the capital of Kilij Arslan I, sultan of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum. In May 1097 the armies of the First Crusade, ferried across the Bosporus with Byzantine assistance, invested the city. It was the crusade's first major operation, undertaken in cooperation with the emperor Alexios I Komnenos, to whom the crusade's leaders had sworn oaths regarding former imperial territory. Kilij Arslan was absent when the siege began, campaigning in eastern Anatolia against the Danishmend Turks over the city of Melitene; his treasury and family remained inside Nicaea. Having underestimated the size and seriousness of the crusader host, he returned by forced marches and attacked the besiegers' southern positions on 21 May. The relief attempt failed against superior numbers, and the sultan withdrew into the interior, leaving the garrison to its own devices. The city's western wall fronted the lake, which kept it supplied and uncaptured until Alexios had boats hauled overland and launched on the water, closing the last route in mid-June. Cut off, the garrison negotiated with Byzantine representatives rather than with the crusader princes, and on 19 June 1097 the city surrendered directly to imperial officers. Crusaders were admitted only in small escorted groups, and the city was spared a sack, an arrangement that protected the inhabitants but fed lasting resentment between the Latin leadership and the emperor. A week later the crusade marched east; Kilij Arslan attacked the leading column at Dorylaeum on 1 July and was again defeated. He abandoned the western plateau, moving his capital inland to Konya, and the Byzantines recovered Nicaea and the Aegean coastlands after sixteen years of Seljuk rule.

• Conflict

  Battle of Didgori

  1121· this dynasty: Sanctioned the coalition that was routed

  By the second decade of the twelfth century, David IV of Georgia had spent twenty years rebuilding his kingdom's army and clawing back territory from the Seljuk lordships that had dominated the Caucasus since the 1080s. He stopped paying tribute to the Seljuk sultanate, resettled tens of thousands of Kipchak nomad families from the north Caucasus steppe to serve as a standing military force, and pressed in on Tbilisi, which had been under Muslim rule for four centuries and was by then governed by its own urban elders under loose Seljuk protection. Appeals from Tbilisi and from neighboring Muslim rulers brought a response sanctioned by the Seljuk sultanate: a coalition army assembled under the Artuqid ruler Ilghazi of Mardin, a commander with a recent and considerable reputation, joined by forces from Shirvan and other regional powers. Medieval figures for its size are not credible, but it substantially outnumbered the Georgian army, which contemporary sources place at several tens of thousands, including the Kipchak corps and a small contingent of Western knights. On 12 August 1121 David met the coalition in the narrow valleys at Didgori, west of Tbilisi, where broken ground prevented the larger army from deploying its numbers. The Georgian attack broke the coalition's order early in the engagement, and the battle became a pursuit; Georgian tradition remembers it as the "miraculous victory." The strategic results were immediate and durable. David took Tbilisi the following year and moved his capital there, ending Seljuk power north of the Araxes, and the battle marks the opening of Georgia's golden age, in which the Bagrationi monarchy stood as the dominant power of the Caucasus for the next century.

  Also involved: Bagrationi (Victorious royal house; the battle opened its golden age)

See also