Seljuks, Crusades and Mongols: Islam, 1000–1400

Between about 1000 and 1400 the Islamic world was ruled more and more by soldiers from outside it. Turkish dynasties took power in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Anatolia; from 1055 a Seljuk sultan ruled in Baghdad beside an Abbasid caliph who kept his title and lost his power. Their ministers endowed madrasas, colleges of law, which spread a Sunni scholarly culture across the region. From 1096 the Franks of western Europe invaded the Syrian coast and held parts of it for two centuries; Muslim rulers were slow to unite against them, and the Mamluk sultans of Egypt took the last of their cities in 1291. A larger catastrophe came from the east: the Mongols destroyed the cities of Central Asia in 1219–1221 and sacked Baghdad in 1258, ending the Abbasid caliphate there. Yet within forty years the Mongol rulers of Iran had become Muslim. Meanwhile Islam was losing ground in Spain and gaining it in north India, West Africa and the islands of Southeast Asia, where it arrived with armies in some places and with traders and scholars in others. Majority

This chapter follows those changes. The scholars and law of the earlier centuries are in §6; the Sufis, whose orders took shape in these same centuries and did much to carry Islam to the new frontiers, are in §7. The view from the other side is told in Christianity §8 for the Crusades, Judaism §8 and Judaism §9 for the Jews of al-Andalus and the Crusader lands, and Hinduism §10 for India.

Timeline

The Seljuks: a sultan beside the caliph

Turks in Baghdad

By the year 1000 the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad ruled almost nothing. Since 945 the Buyids, a Shia family from the mountains of northern Iran, had governed Iraq in his name, and since 969 a rival, Ismāʿīlī caliphate, the Fatimids, had ruled Egypt and claimed the allegiance of every Muslim (§6). The power that changed this came from Central Asia. The Seljuks, a family of Oghuz Turkish chiefs recently converted to Sunni Islam, took Khurāsān in the 1030s; their leader Tughril called himself sultan, “authority”, after taking Nīshāpūr in 1037.^[5] Consensus

Tughril entered Baghdad in 1055, at the caliph al-Qāʾim’s invitation, and ended Buyid rule there. Three years later a Turkish commander, al-Basāsīrī, seized Baghdad with Fatimid backing and had the Friday sermon said in the name of the Fatimid caliph, before Tughril retook the city. In 1058 the caliph gave Tughril the title “King of the East and the West”.^[5] Consensus The pattern held for the next two centuries: a caliph who embodied the legitimacy of the Sunni community and appointed no one to anything that mattered, and a sultan who held the armies and the revenues and needed the caliph’s blessing. Muslim jurists, al-Ghazālī among them (§7), worked out a theory that justified the arrangement after the fact. Majority

In 1071 Tughril’s nephew Alp Arslan defeated and captured the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV at Manzikert, in eastern Anatolia. The battle opened Anatolia to Turkish migration; a branch of the dynasty, the Seljuks of Rūm, ruled it from Konya until the Mongols reduced it to a vassal state in 1243. Over the next three centuries Anatolia, which had been Greek-speaking and Christian, became mostly Turkish-speaking and Muslim, the process studied by Speros Vryonis.^[5]​^[23] Consensus on the outcome; Contested on how much of it came by conversion, migration or flight. The Persian poet Rūmī taught in Konya under these sultans (§7).

The madrasa

The Seljuks’ greatest minister, the Persian Niẓām al-Mulk, vizier from 1064 until he was murdered in 1092 (by an assassin the sources attribute to the Ismāʿīlī Nizārīs), founded a network of madrasas, colleges of law, in Baghdad, Nīshāpūr, Iṣfahān and other cities.^[5]​^[6] Consensus The Niẓāmiyya of Baghdad, built from 1065 and opened in 1067, became the most famous: an endowed building with salaried teachers, stipends for students, a library and a mosque. Its deed required its teachers, preachers and librarians to be Shāfiʿī in law and Ashʿarī in theology. Al-Ghazālī taught there from 1091 until he left in 1095–96 (§7).^[6] Consensus

The madrasa was not new. Teaching circles in mosques were centuries old, and endowed colleges are recorded in Khurāsān before Niẓām al-Mulk; George Makdisi showed that the form rested on the waqf, the charitable endowment, which gave a founder legal control of the institution and its appointments.^[6] Majority What the Seljuk era did was multiply it. Within two centuries madrasas were founded by sultans, princes, officers and their wives from Anatolia to Cairo, and a madrasa education became the normal path to a career as a judge, preacher or teacher. Consensus

A “Sunni revival”?

Historians long called this period the “Sunni revival”: Sunni Turkish rulers, having freed the caliph from the Shia Buyids, used madrasas to train scholars against Shiism and the Fatimids. The picture has been questioned. Jonathan Berkey argues that Sunni learning had not been in eclipse under the Buyids, that the Fatimid threat was waning by the 1070s, and that what happened is better called a “recentring” of religious authority around the scholars, the ʿulamāʾ, and the institutions that supported them.^[24] Daphna Ephrat, studying the scholars of eleventh-century Baghdad, finds that the madrasas changed less than was claimed: learning still passed from teacher to student, in mosques and homes as well as colleges, and the madrasas served their founders’ prestige and the scholars’ careers as much as any doctrinal campaign.^[25] Contested on how far the madrasas were instruments of policy; Consensus that Sunni scholarly culture became more uniform and more institutional in these centuries.

The Crusades from the Muslim side

The Franks arrive

The armies that reached Syria in 1097 found a divided region. The Seljuk sultanate had splintered after the deaths of Malikshāh and Niẓām al-Mulk in 1092; rival Turkish princes held Aleppo and Damascus, and the Fatimids had retaken Jerusalem from them in 1098. The crusaders took Antioch in 1098 and Jerusalem on 15 July 1099, and killed thousands of the city’s Muslims and Jews. Arabic sources later gave 70,000 or more; modern estimates, from a city of perhaps 30,000, are far lower, in the thousands.^[7]​^[8] Consensus that a massacre took place; Contested on its scale.

Muslim writers called the invaders al-Ifranj, the Franks, and their wars the wars of the Franks. There was no Arabic word for “crusade”: the phrase now used, al-ḥurūb al-ṣalībiyya, “the wars of the cross”, was introduced much later by Arabic-speaking Christians.^[8] Majority Many of their contemporaries saw the invasion as one more incursion by Byzantium’s western mercenaries, not as a religious war. An exception was the Damascus jurist ʿAlī ibn Ṭāhir al-Sulamī, who in 1105 preached a Book of Jihad in the city’s Great Mosque. He read the Franks’ conquest as part of a single Christian offensive that had already taken Sicily and much of Spain, blamed Muslims’ neglect of their religion and of jihad, and called on rulers to unite and fight. His call found little response at the time.^[9]​^[8] Consensus

Zengi, Nūr al-Dīn and holy war

The counter-attack was led by Turkish princes from the Jazīra and Syria. Zengi, the ruler of Mosul and Aleppo, took the crusader city of Edessa in December 1144, which provoked the Second Crusade; its attack on Damascus in 1148 failed.^[8] Consensus His son Nūr al-Dīn (d. 1174) united Muslim Syria and made jihad a programme of government. He founded madrasas and Sufi lodges, built “houses of hadith”, sponsored preachers and poets, and promoted the merits of Jerusalem as a holy city to be recovered. Around 1168–69 he had a carved wooden pulpit made in Aleppo for the al-Aqṣā mosque, a city he did not hold; Saladin installed it there after 1187, and it stood until an arsonist burned it in 1969.^[10]​^[8] Consensus Carole Hillenbrand describes this as a sustained propaganda of jihad, joining the war against the Franks to a programme of religious revival at home.^[8] Majority

Saladin and Jerusalem

Nūr al-Dīn’s Kurdish officer Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, Saladin, became vizier of Fatimid Egypt in 1169 and in 1171 ended the Fatimid caliphate, restoring the Friday prayer in the name of the Abbasid caliph in Cairo after two centuries.^[8] Consensus After Nūr al-Dīn’s death he spent a decade bringing Syria under his rule as well. On 4 July 1187 he destroyed the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at Hattin, and on 2 October Jerusalem surrendered. The city’s defenders were allowed to ransom themselves at a fixed price, ten dinars a man, five a woman and two a child; thousands who could not pay were enslaved. There was no massacre. The cross was taken down from the Dome of the Rock, and Muslim worship restored in al-Aqṣā.^[8]​^[11] Consensus The Third Crusade retook Acre but not Jerusalem; the Treaty of Jaffa (1192) left the coast to the Franks and gave Christian pilgrims access to the holy places. Saladin died in Damascus in March 1193. Consensus

Living beside the Franks

Most of the two centuries were not spent in battle. Truces were frequent, trade went on, and Muslim peasants lived under Frankish lords. The best-known Muslim witness is Usāma ibn Munqidh (1095–1188), a Syrian emir, poet and diplomat who knew the Franks in war and peace. His Book of Contemplation, written around 1183 as a book of lessons and anecdotes for Saladin’s circle, mocks Frankish medicine and law and admires some Frankish knights, and survives in a single manuscript found in the Escorial in 1880.^[26]​^[27] Paul Cobb, its modern translator, warns that its stories were shaped to entertain and instruct, not to report. Majority

The Mamluks and the end of the Franks

In 1250 the slave soldiers, mamlūks, of the last Ayyubid sultan of Egypt killed his heir and took power. The Mamluk sultanate they founded, ruled by a self-renewing elite of soldiers bought as boys from the Black Sea steppes, would last until the Ottoman conquest of 1517.^[15] Consensus Its sultans, above all Baybars (r. 1260–1277), destroyed the crusader fortresses one by one. On 18 May 1291 al-Ashraf Khalīl stormed Acre, the last great Frankish city on the mainland; the remaining coastal towns were abandoned within months.^[11] Consensus

How the Crusades are remembered

For Muslim historians of the following centuries the Franks were one episode among many. Hillenbrand argues that the crusades were a marginal matter to most Muslims compared with the Mongol invasions and the fall of the caliphate.^[8] Majority Interest revived in the nineteenth century, in the age of European empire. The Ottoman writer Namık Kemal published the first modern biography of Saladin in 1872; after the German emperor Wilhelm II visited Saladin’s tomb in Damascus in 1898, Arab nationalists recast Saladin as a hero of resistance to the West.^[11] Majority In the twentieth century “Crusaders” became a term for Western powers in nationalist and later Islamist rhetoric, and Western writers in turn spoke of a crusade against enemies in the Middle East. Both uses read the present into the Middle Ages. Political

The Mongols

The first storm, 1219–1221

In 1218 a governor of the Khwārazm-Shāh, the Muslim ruler of Central Asia and Iran, killed the members of a Mongol trading caravan at Otrār, and his master killed an envoy sent to demand redress. Chinggis Khan’s armies destroyed Bukhārā, Samarqand, Urgench, Merv and Nīshāpūr between 1219 and 1221.^[14] Consensus The historian Ibn al-Athīr of Mosul, writing a few years later, confessed that for years he had been unable to bring himself to record it, “deeming it so horrible”, and called it “the greatest catastrophe and the most dire calamity” ever to befall mankind, and the Muslims in particular.^[13] Consensus on the text. His figure of 700,000 dead at Merv, and a later Persian historian’s 1.3 million, are not credible; that the destruction was a demographic catastrophe is not in doubt.^[14] Majority

Baghdad, 1258

A generation later Chinggis’s grandson Hülegü led a second army west. It destroyed the Ismāʿīlī Nizārī fortresses of Iran in 1256 and reached Baghdad in January 1258. The caliph al-Mustaʿṣim surrendered on 10 February; the city was sacked from 13 February, and on 20 February the caliph was executed, by the usual account rolled in a carpet and trampled by horses, since the Mongols avoided spilling royal blood.^[14] Majority on the manner of death. Hülegü himself claimed about 200,000 dead; some Muslim sources give 800,000 or two million. Peter Jackson calls Hülegü’s figure “obviously inflated”, and recent work asks how far epidemic disease after the siege swelled the later totals.^[14]​^[28] Contested on numbers.

The image of Baghdad’s libraries thrown into the Tigris until its water ran black is a later literary flourish. Michal Biran has shown that large libraries were working again within two years of the conquest, and that Baghdad remained a centre of learning under Mongol rule; the astronomer Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, who served Hülegü, built the observatory of Marāgha with his patronage.^[16] Majority What did end was the caliphate in Baghdad, after five centuries. For the first time since 632 the Sunni world had no caliph at all. Consensus

ʿAyn Jālūt and a caliph in Cairo

The Mongol advance into Syria was stopped by the Mamluks at ʿAyn Jālūt, in the Jezreel valley in Palestine, on 3 September 1260; the Mongol general Kitbuqa was killed. The Mamluk officer Baybars murdered his sultan on the way home and took the throne.^[15] Consensus In June 1261 Baybars proclaimed an Abbasid survivor caliph in Cairo; when that caliph was killed later the same year leading a small force against the Mongols in Iraq, another was installed. His descendants remained in Cairo as figureheads, lending legitimacy to Mamluk sultans, until the Ottoman conquest of 1517 (§9).^[15] Consensus The war between the Mamluks and the Mongols of Iran, the Ilkhans, went on for sixty years, with Mongol invasions of Syria in 1260, 1271, 1281, 1299–1300, 1303 and 1312, until a peace was ratified in 1322–23. Consensus

The Mongols become Muslim

The Mongols ruled Iran as Buddhists, shamanists and patrons of every religion; their armies included Christians. On 16 June 1295 the Ilkhan Ghazan converted to Sunni Islam at the urging of his general Nawrūz, who made it a condition of his support in a struggle for the throne. Buddhist temples and churches were destroyed in the persecution that followed, and Buddhism did not recover in Iran.^[14] Consensus Ghazan’s vizier Rashīd al-Dīn, a convert from Judaism, compiled the Compendium of Chronicles, a history of the world in Persian, whose illustrated copies include some of the earliest surviving paintings of Muhammad (§0).^[29] Consensus

Ghazan’s conversion did not end the war with Egypt: his armies invaded Mamluk Syria three times, winning at Wādī al-Khaznadār in December 1299 and losing at Marj al-Ṣuffar in April 1303.^[15]​^[14] Consensus That Muslims were now fighting Muslims who had converted only yesterday posed a question of law, and one Damascus scholar answered it.

Ibn Taymiyya

Taqī al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn Taymiyya was born in Ḥarrān, in upper Mesopotamia, in 1263; his family fled the Mongols to Damascus when he was a child, and he became a Ḥanbalī jurist and theologian of great learning and combativeness.^[22] Consensus When the Ilkhans invaded Syria he issued fatwas that they must be fought despite their profession of Islam: on his account they ruled by the yāsā, the law of Chinggis Khan, rather than sharia, and so stood outside Islam however often they said the creed.^[30]​^[22] Majority on his argument. He took part in the campaign of 1303 and issued a ruling that soldiers could break the Ramadan fast to fight; how far he fought in person is disputed.^[22] Contested

He spent much of his later life in prison. He was held in Cairo in 1306–1307 on charges of describing God in bodily terms, in Damascus in 1320–21 over a ruling on divorce, and from 1326 until his death in the citadel of Damascus on 26 September 1328 for a treatise condemning journeys made to visit the tombs of prophets and saints, including the Prophet’s own.^[22] Consensus He held that such journeys, and the requests for intercession made at shrines, were innovations that compromised the worship owed to God alone; most scholars of his time, and the Mamluk courts, held that he had gone too far. Majority

His reputation has had two lives. His student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350) spread his ideas, and he was respected as a scholar, but historians note that he had little influence on mainstream Sunni Islam until the nineteenth century.^[22] Majority Then the Arabian reformer Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (§10), and later Salafis and some modern militants, took up his writings on shrines and on rulers who do not apply sharia. The essays edited by Yossef Rapoport and Shahab Ahmed (2010) argue for reading him in his Mamluk context rather than through his modern admirers and enemies.^[22] Political on the modern use of his anti-Mongol fatwas.

Al-Andalus: from caliphate to Granada

The Umayyad emirate founded in Spain in 756 (§5) became a caliphate in 929, when ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III took the title for himself. Córdoba was then among the largest cities of Europe, with a royal library said to hold hundreds of thousands of volumes and Jewish courtiers such as Ḥasdai ibn Shaprūṭ.^[4] Majority After civil war from 1009 the caliphate dissolved in 1031 into a dozen or more “taifa” kingdoms, rich and culturally brilliant but militarily weak, which paid tribute to the Christian kings of the north.^[4] Consensus

When Alfonso VI of Castile took Toledo in 1085, the taifa kings called in the Almoravids, a movement of Ṣanhāja Berbers from the western Sahara founded on a strict Mālikī reformism, whose leader Yūsuf ibn Tāshfīn defeated Alfonso at Sagrajas in 1086 and then took the taifas for himself. They in turn were overthrown, in North Africa by 1147 and in Spain soon after, by the Almohads, al-muwaḥḥidūn, “those who affirm God’s oneness”, a movement founded by Ibn Tūmart (d. 1130), who claimed to be the Mahdī.^[4] Consensus The Almohads abandoned the old protections for Jews and Christians and pressed them to convert; many emigrated, among them the family of Maimonides (Judaism §8).^[4]​^[31] Majority

The same dynasty patronised philosophy. Its caliph Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf asked the Córdoban judge and physician Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), known in Latin as Averroes, to explain Aristotle, and his commentaries became in Latin translation the standard guide to Aristotle in the universities of Europe, where he was called “the Commentator”. He also defended philosophy against al-Ghazālī’s attack on it (§7) and wrote a major work comparing the schools of law. He fell from favour in 1195 and was restored before his death in Marrakesh in 1198. His influence in the Islamic world was modest until modern times.^[4] Majority

The Almohads’ defeat at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 opened the south to Castile and Aragon: Córdoba fell in 1236 and Seville in 1248. The Naṣrid kingdom of Granada survived as a tributary state until it surrendered on 2 January 1492. The treaty promised Muslims their religion; within a decade, after a revolt in 1499–1501, they were forced to convert or leave, and their converted descendants, the Moriscos, were expelled in 1609–1614. In the same year as Granada fell, Spain’s Jews were ordered to convert or leave.^[4] Consensus

How tolerant al-Andalus had been is itself contested. María Rosa Menocal’s Ornament of the World (2002) presented a culture of coexistence, convivencia; others stress the hierarchy of the dhimma (§5), periodic violence and the Almohad persecutions.^[32] Contested; Political on modern uses of either picture.

The new frontiers

North India

Maḥmūd of Ghazni (r. 998–1030), a Turkish ruler of eastern Afghanistan, raided north India repeatedly for its temple treasures, and in 1026 sacked the temple of Somnath in Gujarat.^[1]​^[2] Consensus A scholar of his court, al-Bīrūnī, travelled in India in these years and completed, around 1030, a long and careful account of Indian religion, philosophy and science, written, he said, to set out Hindu teachings as the Hindus themselves held them.^[3] Consensus Romila Thapar has traced how the raid on Somnath was told and retold over the following centuries, in Persian chronicles, Sanskrit inscriptions and colonial histories.^[2] Majority

Conquest and rule came later. The Ghurid Muḥammad of Ghūr defeated a Rajput coalition at Tarāʾin in 1192; after his death in 1206 his slave general Quṭb al-Dīn Aybak ruled from Delhi, and the Delhi Sultanate, under five successive dynasties, lasted until the Mughal conquest of 1526.^[12] Consensus It repelled repeated Mongol invasions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and at its widest, under Muḥammad ibn Tughluq (r. 1325–1351), reached most of the subcontinent. Around 1200 a Khalji commander’s troops sacked a Buddhist monastery in Bihar, an event that later tradition attached to Nālandā (see Was Nalanda destroyed by Bakhtiyar Khilji?).^[33] Contested on what was destroyed.

Richard Eaton’s survey of temple desecration finds eighty reasonably certain cases between 1192 and 1729, mostly of royal temples in newly conquered or rebellious territory, which he reads as political acts as well as religious ones; and his study of Bengal finds that conversion to Islam was heaviest not near the centres of Muslim power but on the agrarian frontier, centuries later.^[34]​^[35] Majority; Political on the modern argument over both, set out in Hinduism §10.

West Africa

Muslim traders had crossed the Sahara since the eighth century, and the Almoravid movement of the eleventh began among the desert Berbers on its southern edge. Whether the Almoravids conquered the empire of Ghana around 1076 or only converted its rulers is debated.^[21] Contested By the thirteenth century the rulers of the empire of Mali were Muslim. In 1324–1325 its king Mansa Mūsā (r. c. 1312–1337) made the pilgrimage to Mecca with a vast retinue. The Cairo administrator al-ʿUmarī, writing within a generation and drawing on an official who had befriended the king, records that before his visit a mithqāl of gold was worth twenty-five silver dirhams in Cairo, and that his spending pushed it below twenty-two for at least twelve years.^[20]​^[36] Majority Modern claims that he was the richest man in history cannot be measured. Consensus The Moroccan traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭa visited Mali in the early 1350s and left the fullest description of Muslim life at its court, in the account of his travels he dictated to Ibn Juzayy at the court of the Marinid sultan in Fez.^[36] Consensus

Southeast Asia

Islam reached the islands of Southeast Asia with merchants, not armies. The earliest legible Muslim gravestone in the region, that of a woman at Leran in eastern Java, is dated 1082, but it may have been brought there later. Marco Polo reported a Muslim town on the north coast of Sumatra in 1292, and the gravestone of Sultan Malik al-Ṣāliḥ of Samudra-Pasai, on the same coast, is dated 1297: the first dated Muslim ruler in the region.^[17]​^[18] Consensus When Ibn Baṭṭūṭa called there in 1345–46 he found a pious sultan of the Shāfiʿī school. Majority

The Terengganu stone, found in 1887 on the Malay peninsula, is the oldest known text in Malay written in Arabic script. It proclaims the religion of the Prophet in the land, sets out rules of sharia for its ruler’s subjects, and is dated on a Friday in the month of Rajab; the year is damaged and has been read as anything from 702 to 789 AH, that is from 1303 to 1387. Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas argued for 1303.^[19] Contested on the date. M. C. Ricklefs’s account of how the region became Muslim, gradually and from the coasts and courts inward, through traders, intermarriage and later Sufi teachers, is the standard one; it was mostly peaceful.^[18] Majority Indonesia, now the largest Muslim country in the world, took its religion from these centuries and the next (§9).

The evidence

Primary sources

What is absent

• A Muslim word for “crusade”. Contemporaries wrote of the Franks and their wars. Majority
• A count of the dead. Medieval figures for Jerusalem in 1099, Merv in 1221 and Baghdad in 1258 are rhetorical; none comes from a census or a list. Consensus
• A ruling caliph after 1258. The Abbasids in Cairo were appointed and controlled by the Mamluk sultans. Consensus
• A single Sunni curriculum. Madrasas taught different schools of law, and much teaching went on outside them. Majority
• A date for the conversion of Southeast Asia. Gravestones date individuals and rulers, not populations. Consensus

Debates

Was there a “Sunni revival”?

The older view: Seljuk sultans and their viziers used madrasas to defeat Shiism and the Fatimids. The revision: Sunni learning was not in eclipse, the Fatimids were declining anyway, and the madrasas reorganised scholarly authority more than they fought a campaign.^[24]​^[25]​^[6] Contested

How much did the Crusades matter to Muslims?

To western Europe they were a defining enterprise. To most Muslims of the time, Hillenbrand argues, they were a regional war on the Syrian coast, less important than the Mongols; their central place in modern Muslim memory dates from the nineteenth century.^[8]​^[11] Majority; Political on modern uses.

How tolerant was al-Andalus?

Convivencia as a golden age of coexistence, or a hierarchy that was tolerable in good times and oppressive in bad ones, as under the Almohads.^[32]​^[4] Contested; Political

How did Islam spread on the new frontiers?

By conquest and state patronage in north India; by trade, intermarriage and teachers in West Africa and Southeast Asia; and in Bengal and elsewhere, Eaton argues, by the slow spread of agrarian settlement long after conquest.^[35]​^[18]​^[21] Majority on the general pattern; Political on the argument in India.

Further reading