Mahmud I

Mahmud I was a sultan of four, an instrument of his mother's ambition and the first casualty of the succession crisis that broke the Great Seljuk Empire. Born in 1087 to Malik-Shah I and Terken Khatun, the sultan's powerful Karakhanid wife, he was her chosen candidate for the throne against the older sons of other mothers. When Malik-Shah died suddenly in Baghdad in November 1092, weeks after the assassination of Nizam al-Mulk, Terken Khatun moved at once, concealing the death long enough to secure the treasury and the army's commanders.

She extracted the caliph al-Muqtadi's recognition of the child as sultan — reportedly conceding that the khutba, the Friday sermon naming the sovereign, would be read in Mahmud's name while real authority rested with her and her allies. It was an unprecedented arrangement, a woman ruling the Seljuk state through an infant, and it provoked immediate war. The faction of the murdered Nizam al-Mulk rallied behind Berkyaruq, Malik-Shah's eldest surviving son, a boy of about twelve, and proclaimed him in Rayy.

The two child-sultans' armies met near Burujird in early 1093, and Terken Khatun's forces were defeated, though she fought on from Isfahan, offering her hand and her treasury to other Seljuk princes willing to take up the cause. The war ended not by battle but by mortality: Terken Khatun died in 1094, and shortly afterward Mahmud, aged about seven, died of smallpox in Isfahan. Berkyaruq, who by some accounts had been captured and was in danger of blinding when the news came, was left the acknowledged sultan.

Mahmud's nominal reign of under two years left no acts of government to assess, but its consequences were large. The precedent of rival khutbas, partisan armies, and provincial commanders choosing sultans outlasted him, and the atabegs and emirs who picked sides in 1092 never fully returned the power they had taken. The fragmentation that admitted the First Crusade into the Levant a few years later began at his accession.