Kilij Arslan I

Kilij Arslan I was the first Muslim ruler to face a crusade, and his career fixed the Sultanate of Rum as a permanent fact of Anatolian history. He belonged to the dynasty's rival branch: his great-grandfather Qutalmish had died contesting the throne against Alp Arslan, and his father Suleiman ibn Qutalmish had carved out a sultanate in Byzantine Anatolia, taking Nicaea, before dying in 1086 in a war against fellow Seljuks in Syria. The boy was held at Malik-Shah's court as a hostage, and only the great sultan's death in 1092 freed him to return west, where he reclaimed Nicaea and his father's title.

His first encounter with the crusading movement was deceptively easy. In October 1096 his forces annihilated the People's Crusade, the undisciplined mass that had followed Peter the Hermit across the Bosporus, at Civetot near Nicaea. Judging the Franks a nuisance rather than a threat, he was away campaigning against the Danishmendids for Melitene when the armies of the First Crusade — a different instrument altogether — invested Nicaea in May 1097. He failed to break the siege, and the city surrendered to the Byzantines in June; his wife and children, captured inside, were returned by the emperor without ransom. At Dorylaeum on 1 July 1097 he ambushed the crusader vanguard with Danishmendid allies and was driven off when the main body came up. Thereafter he resorted to scorched earth across the plateau, harassing rather than confronting the Franks on their march to Syria.

The defeats were not final. Kilij Arslan moved his capital inland to Konya, and in 1101 he led the coalition that destroyed three successive crusading armies near Mersivan and in the south — victories that restored Turkish control of central Anatolia and ended the notion that crusaders crossed the peninsula at will. Confident in his recovered strength, he pushed east, taking Malatya in 1106 and even Mosul in 1107, inserting himself into the politics of the Seljuk east. There he overreached. Confronting Jawali, the sultan Muhammad Tapar's emir, near the Khabur river in June 1107, his army broke, and Kilij Arslan drowned in the river during the rout, in his late twenties. His sons continued the line at Konya, which would outlast the Great Seljuks by more than a century and seed the Turkification of Anatolia.