Gone Medieval - The Seljuk Turks

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

How did a nomadic people from the Steppes become one of the great powers of the medieval Middle East?Matt Lewis is joined by Dr Nicholas Morton to explore the rise of the Seljuk Turks, the nomadic horsemen who carved out a vast empire, toppled old powers, and helped reshape the world of the Crusades. Along the way, they ask how the Seljuks conquered so much so fast, why mounted archers were so hard to defeat, and how a nomadic confederation became an empire.MOREThe First Crusade: the Road to JerusalemListen on AppleListen on SpotifyIbn Fadlan: An Arab Among VikingsListen on AppleListen on SpotifyGone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early access, ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

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Find out who we really were. We've gone medieval. In the fertile lands between the gushing rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, a lowly goat herd spies a plume of dust, billowing dark against the noonday sky. Weathered by Sunbeam and worked hard by his grazing flock, he takes little notice. Couriers on horseback often pass by, traversing me. Mesopotamian arteries of spice and silk, whipping up stale dirt as they race ever onward. But the plume doesn't fade like it does most days. Instead, it darkens and grows, rippling outward to blacken the sky,

the harbinger of a nameless storm, edging ever closer to the goat herd's pastures. The earth begins to quake, shards of rock, reed and willow rattle and writhe upon the ground. all instruments in the rising symphony of chaos and disorder. And then the thunder comes. Iron-shod hooves pound the vast carpets of tilled soil and verdant grassland. The primal screams of warhorses bred for their agility in battle, merge with the guttural cries of riders adorned in gold-threaded caftans and barbed conical helms.

Each rider carries a bow, deftly curved to enhance its deadly fire. power and a razor-edge cimeter that arcs like a breaking wave. Age-old stories from long ago once told of a fearsome horde of horsemen descending from the north. They were called the Huns and they ravaged Mesopotamia's rich floodplains before being repelled by the mighty Persian Empire. But these new riders are of a different breed. They are the Seljuk Turks.

Said, they're created in the shape of lions to ascend high mountains, ride in the face of danger, raid narrow abysses and go deep into unknown lands. And unlike the Huns, they will not be turned back. I'm Matt Lewis and this is Gone Medieval. Today, we're going to trace the story of these lesser-known Middle Eastern horsemen, the Seljuk Turks. From the middle of the 11th century, these irrepressible Turkic nomads uttered, transformed the political landscape of the medieval Middle East,

carving out an empire that stretched from the Indian Ocean to the Black Sea, subsumed the glittering Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, and locked horns with sworn enemies like the Fatimid Caliphs of Egypt and the Frankish Lords of Crusade, both considered barbarians on the fringes of the Seljuks' ordered world. How did the Seljuks do it? Why were they so extraordinarily successful? How did they govern their newly won territories?

And were they always at odds with their sworn enemies? Or was there more fluidity in the maelstrom of Middle Eastern politics than there is at first glance? To help me answer those questions, I'm joined once again by Dr Nicholas Morton, Associate Professor of History at Nottingham Trent University, whose new book covers exactly this. It's called Crusader Storm, a global history of the wars for the Middle East.

A very warm welcome back to God Medieval Nick. It's great to have you with us again. It's great to you're back on the show. Matt, thanks for having me. Absolute pleasure. I'm really looking forward to digging into your new book, Crusader Storm. And we're going to pay particular attention to one of the groups of people that you talk about in this period, the Seljuk Turks. So I wonder if you could give us, kind of give us the headline, give us the tagline here.

Who are the Seljuk Turks and why should we care about them? We should really care. I think the easiest way to explain this is. is that in the 21st century, it's not common to see people rushing down the streets shouting the nomads are coming. We don't do that. And if someone did, we might think it was a bit strange.

But that's actually quite a recent phenomenon. Up to about 1600, that is a very serious concern for many, many communities all the way across Eurasia. And so we can think of the Huns invading the Eastern Roman Empire in the 5th century. Or we could talk about the Magyars or the Petchenegs in the 8th and the 10th century. Or the Mongols in the 13th, we could talk about the creation of the many iterations of the Great Wall of China and the other fortifications built to defend China against the Central Asian step. We could talk about the fortress cities created in the Islamic world specifically to keep out the nomads.

So this is a primary concern for so many communities all the way across history right the way up to the modern era. And what we're looking at in the invasion of the Seljuk Turks into the Middle East is one particularly significant episode that will shape the history both of the Middle East, but also neighbouring regions as well. I've done a social media video before now, hiding in a bush in my garden saying, quiet, the Mongols are coming. I haven't quite run down the street saying the nomads are coming,

but I have to help people to be quiet if the Mongols are coming. What you're doing in your privacy of here at home, Matt? That's fine. Maybe I should keep that to myself. Where does the name Seljuk that we know this group by? Where does that come from? What does it mean? Yeah, so the Seljuk dynasty itself wasn't,

that they didn't necessarily control, the entirety of the mass migrations into the Middle East that mark the Seljuk conquests. What you've got is around the turn of the 11th century, so around the year 1000, a little bit afterwards, you have the sudden movement of large numbers of nomadic communities south and then west into Persia, that's modern-day Iran, and then moving west towards Iraq and Syria. Now, many of those groups are unaligned, but the Seljuk family acquires control over many of them. So it's never fully in command, but it has more control than most. And the Seljuk family itself, they look back to Seljuk, who is a deep ancestor,

who lived around the turn of 11th century, but most of the major conquests of the Seljuk dynasty are carried out by Seljuks' descendants. Interesting. So it's similar idea to kind of the Capetians in France being descended from Hugh Cappet. It's kind of a family name. Absolutely, yeah. Similarly with Saladin's dynasty, a couple of centuries later,

Saladin's dynasty is called the Ayubid dynasty named after his father, Ayub. So it's quite a common practice. And do we have any sense of what causes, what sparks this particular movement of the Seljuks from the steps into the south and the west? No. And that's very interesting because this happens from time to time, because for hundreds of years, nomadic communities, they're not necessarily fighting huge wars the whole time. They may well spend their year going from winter to spring grazing every single year, living in a fairly narrow area, moving from one area of grassland to another, taking their flocks and herds with them. They might find the quite the occasional neighbouring war with, another nomadic group, but that's it. But what causes them to suddenly weld together into a confederation big enough to tackle, say, the fortifications along the line of the Chinese border or the border to the Muslim world?

And we don't know. There are various theories. Some people talk about maybe a leader united them or there were some of council where they all came together. Another quite thought-provoking explanation which to some extent has been done. disapproved, but it still remains in orbit around this question, is it's climate change? Because if the temperature on the Central Asian step drops, maybe that will make it harder for herds to graze, which will mean the population will starve. So they have no alternative. You move south, where it's warmer. So maybe it's that that's driving people south towards the

Muslim world. But we're not told for certain. The stories we've... got and the sources we've got for this early part of Seljuk history, often they tell the story in quite a mythologised term, and it terms we don't have much from the actual period. Yeah. And I guess to some extent, if you're living in that area in the 11th century, it kind of doesn't really matter why they're coming. The fact is there's a bunch of people coming down from the steps, and that's a pretty scary moment for anybody. Why were, I mean, I guess the Seljuks in particular in this instance, but even more broadly, the nomen. Mads from the steps. Why are they always such a kind of disruptive and an unstoppable force?

Yeah, I'll answer that with a bit of a comparison, actually, because we're talking about the era of the 11th and 12th century. And often when, say, military historians discuss this period, we might talk about the Knights Templar or the Crusader Knights, and they will get deeply involved in a conversation about chain mail and couched lances and various. types of helmet and things like that, what made them so effective. And Crusader Knights were very effective. But here's the point that really, this is not the era of the Crusader Knight. It's not the era of the Byzantine or Islamic heavy cavalrymen at all.

This is the era of the nomadic horsemen. In across so many battlefields, across so many wars and campaigns, and you see exactly the same thing with the Mongols in the following in later centuries. The ability for a nomadic society to mobilize tens of thousands of warriors who are exceptionally hardy require virtually no logistics can move incredibly fast, raised from birth to ride and shoot and coordinate for large-scale hunts. These are all military skills. And compared to agricultural societies,

where people are born and raised to till the earth. Well, sure, they might be healthy and strong from doing that, but they won't have that same military training. And when they put together armies, they'll have big convoys and logistics trains, which can so easily be cut. A nomadic army is exceptionally difficult to stop. And so one of the points I make in Crusader Storm, really,

is this is not the era of the crusading knight or any other equivalent from an Eastern Christian or Muslim, society. This is the era of the nomadic light horsemen. And there's something about all the way through this period, isn't there? Mounted archers from the steps being utterly devastating. Nobody really finds a way to deal effectively with them. It's not a tactic that anybody else seems to pick up across Europe, but they also never managed to kind of crack the code of how do you deal with an army of mounted archers. Yeah, it's exceptionally difficult. One of the biggest problem is, one of the biggest

problems is that unless you have all your cavalry very heavily armored, then the nomadic archers simply will ignore the heavily armored knight or Mammuluk warrior on their back and shoot down the horses. And then your movement is curtailed and they will just ride around you and carry on shooting until you go down. So it's very hard to stop a mounted nomadic army. The only one of the reasons why the First Crusade commanders are effective on the battlefields, they do find one way of doing this, which they try and repeat in later decades with mixed success, which is that when you know you're about 20 or 30 kilometers away from a nomadic army, what you don't do is simply set out your army for a pitched battle.

You don't do that because you're going to lose. what you do instead is very quietly and fully aware that you're probably being watched so you're going to have to be very careful about how you execute this. You get a large number of heavily armored knights to lead out their horses just as it gets dark. And then very, very quietly, you march them across the hills and crags until they're within a few hundred metres of a Seljuk or nomadic army. and then literally just as the sun crosses the horizon, just as you can see your hand in front of your face,

you charge straight into the enemy camp. So they have no opportunity to evade you whatsoever. You're already in their midst before they can respond. And so for a short while at least, that's how the crusaders managed to defeat the Seljuk Turks in battle. But there are many tactics that will bring about that kind of victory. and in other contexts, Crusader Knights,

like so many other societies from this era suffer very badly in encounters with nomadic like cavalry. Yeah, I'm definitely going to store that tactic up for next time I'm stuck in a bush in the back garden. I'll keep that to myself from now on. And as we move through, we're going to talk more about the conquests

of the Seljuks and things like that, but as we move through the establishment of their kind of empire, are they bringing a nomadic culture with them, or do we see them sort of adopting Persian cultures as they conquer people? Yeah, like so many nomadic conquerors, it's a bit of a mixture really. So the Seljuk Turks originally invade from the beginnings of 11th century and they conquer large areas of Persia, Iraq, and Syria.

And within that process, as you say, there's a lot that they pick up. If you look at the surviving material culture, so the, the artwork or the ceramics or the other items that have survived from that era, they're very much within the Persian tradition. So they do borrow or make use of a great deal. The bureaucracies are very similar to what they had been previously, because like most conquerors, it's easier to extract tax from people if you use the existing tax systems and you govern using the existing bureaucracies.

But they do bring their own cultures with them. There is a slow movement, particularly among leading elites, away from their previously nomadic way of life through to a more settled way of life. But there are also huge numbers of what become known as Turkmen or Turkmen groups who carry on living that nomadic way of life. And often they will force off local nomadic groups such as the Bedouin away from their grazing natural because they want them themselves. And like many other conquerors, they will have things their own way. So if they do want to change institutions or laws or the way they manage things, they will do so. And they speak Turkish, not either Persian or Arabic or indeed Greek in many of the areas that they conquer. And for many people, that's a major change because they no longer speak the language of the ruling elites.

Yeah, so again, not dissimilar to the Norman invasion in England. You're seeing a change at the very top and a change of language, but actually a lot of the structures are remaining very similar. There's a lot of continuity. Most conquerors who want their conquest to stick and are good at doing that, they will normally adhere to a fair number of existing processes because it's just easier that way. Sometimes I'll change things a bit in the long term, but in the short term,

you just want to get things stable as quickly as possible so you can hold down what you've conquered. Yeah. Wow. So now I know how to avoid a nomadic army and now I know how to make a conquest stick. I feel like I'm going to be in trouble. after this episode. Core life skills. So if we get into the beginnings of the Seljuk advance, where does it start?

Your book opens with the Battle of Dandakan. Is that kind of the first big victory that they have? Yeah, that's a very big victory. Before that, you've already got the movement of large numbers of nomads moving south and west, sometimes violently, sometimes less so. but that battle is a crucial battle against the existing authority in Persia, which is the Ghaznavid Empire, and that does open the floodgates for the Seljuks to, they continue their advance westwards, moving towards the big Persian cities like Isfahan, and then beyond that to places like Baghdad and into Syria. And they, I mean, they're occupying Baghdad by 1055, aren't they? So then they're into Abassad territory.

So kind of what's going on with the Abbasid Empire that makes them, I guess, relatively easy picking for the Seljuks? So there was a time before the Seljuk invasions, maybe a century before when the Abbasid Empire was huge, extending across much of North Africa, indeed all the way to the step borders. But politically, it began to fragment. There was civil war.

There was unrest. There's fighting at the centre. and the various provinces began to go their own separate ways. And so when the Seljuks invade politically, the Middle East is a bit of a mosaic with various different Arab or Kurdish. The Ghazdavids themselves are from Turkish background themselves. And indeed, beyond that to the north, you've got Anatolia, which is the eastern districts of the Byzantine Empire.

So it is a mixture of different territories. And of course, if you're invading, defeating a series of small territories is a great deal harder often than trying to defeat a few really big ones. Yeah. Yeah. And then, as you mentioned there, the Byzantine Empire kind of gets drawn into all of this as well. In 1071, we have a battle at Manzika. Can you talk us through a little bit about what happens there? And again, a little bit about why the Greeks, the Byzantines are kind of vulnerable at this time as well. Yeah. So it's really difficult to keep out nomadic raiders. if you sort of visualize that sort of map of Turk or Anatolia as it was then,

what happens is you have the infiltration of various nomadic groups, not necessarily under Seljuk leadership, just moving into an area, raiding it, and then pulling away and getting out before reinforcements can arrive, and doing that all the time. And so already there's a process of wearing down, setting in. And when the Seljuks invade a region, They don't necessarily invade with a soldier army.

What normally happens is there's a bow wave of unaligned or semi-aligned nomadic Turkmen groups who go in there first, and they're raiding, attacking small towns, undefended settlements, and other targets that seem attractive to them. And they're doing it all the time. So in 1071 at the Battle of Manzikert, by Zantanatoly, has already been suffering from a great deal of attrition for several decades. as you say, the big battle that is from the most famous one of these wars is Manzikert in 1071. And the background to this is you have the rise of a new emperor in Byzantium called Romanus the 4th Diogenes.

And he's determined to restake the border and to defend himself against the incoming Turkmen groups. And so in the late 1060s he wages a series of campaigns, not particularly effective, but enough to show that he can make his military count. And then in 1071, there is a really large invasion. And unusually, this invasion is led by the Seljuk Sultan called Alp Uslan. And so Romanus puts together the largest army he can. There's a big historical debate around the effect. of the troops within this army,

but it seems to have handled itself reasonably competently in terms of its overall organisation. And Romanus IV met Al-Paslan in battle, probably holding the upper hand in terms of numbers. But again, when you've got a largely infantry army, dependent on logistics, lots of contingents moving by separate roads, and trying to unify that, a force that hasn't fought together much previously.

And on the other side of the battle, you've got a very experienced nomadic army. It's smaller, but it's exceptionally mobile. It can cut your communications and logistics really easily. And the Turks themselves are very famous for their use of feigned flight tactics. So giving the impression that you're running away, luring your enemy into a pursuit, and then you've got them in an ambush. The exact course of the battle, again, it's quite content. tested. There are various interpretations. Some interpretations put emphasis on the miscommunication

within the Byzantine army among its command structure, which then caused a route. Other people talk about the defection of forces, but ultimately this did lead to the route of the Byzantine army and the capture of Emperor Romanus. Now, in itself, yeah, it's a big defeat. And of course, when we talk about a battlefield defeat, it's not just the army that we need to talk. about it's the effect of that on morale, on all the various other power brokers saying, well, who's going to win this? Which side do we gently sort of begin tilting towards? So there's always bigger repercussions from this. But a really important one is not the Seljuk could vats. Al-Paslan doesn't follow up his invasion, but the Turkmen nomads do.

And they continue to move westwards, conquering cities and towns. And to compound matters, the Byzantine court devolves into infighting, and that civil war lasts so many years. And in that civil war, it creates enough disorder for much of eastern and central Anatolia to fall to these various Turkish groups, and that's where much of Byzantine Anatolia is lost. Interesting. So it's not so much a Seljuk conquest as the Seljuks kind of weakening the Byzantines enough that other Turkic groups can move in. And it gets even more complicated than that because the Byzantines, some of the various factions

fighting this civil war, actually recruit Turkish warriors in large numbers. So it's not, like so many wars in the Middle East, it's not quite as simple as well. In this case, Turkmen nomads on one side and the Byzantines on another. You may well have Byzantine armies with Turkmen auxiliaries fighting alongside them.

Like so many wars from this period, it becomes very mixed very quickly. Yeah, yeah. We do tend to fall into traps, don't we, of thinking all of this period is, or at least the Crusades that are coming, is always Muslim against Christian, and this will always be Byzantine against Turk.

And the lines are never quite that clear, are they? Yeah, I think understanding the complexity of the Middle East in this era or indeed any era, even like the way up to the present, it's always important to grasp just how complex the region is and how many different groups, communities, religions, trade routes, interests and individuals who are involved in shaping events.

One of the other groups that the Seljuks are going to come up against is the Fatimids, who are also significant power in this region as well. So at this point, at the time of the arrival of the Seljuks, who are the Fatimids and how much territory are they holding? Yeah, sure. So we've mentioned the Abbasid caliphate. That's the Sunni Muslim caliphate. But in Egypt, there is a North African, a Shia religious movement,

which ultimately leads to the conquest of Egypt, which establishes the Fatimid Caliphate. This is a Shia Islamic caliphate. And that emerges in the 10th century. And Egypt's always important because Egypt is, well, a key factor in many people's heads is just how wealthy Egypt is. This is the region which intersects with the spice routes from India and Southeast Asia, the amber roots from all the way from north of the Black Sea region across Anatolia down to the Mediterranean, the Silk Roads from Central Asia and China,

the Trans-Saharan gold routes, the Mediterranean trade, and of course the fact that the Nile Delta and is exceptionally fertile farmland produces a good chunk of the Middle East arable crops. So Egypt always valuable, it always has been, and the Fatimids control it. And they're the great opponents previously of the Abadid Qadipate, but then when the Seljuk Turks overthrow much of Syria, Iraq, Persia, and create the Seljuk sultanate,

they try to invade Fatimid Egypt. And unlike so many other power brokers from across the region, this is where the Seljuk advance is held. The Seljuks invade Egypt, I think it's 1077, but the invasion fails. The Fatimids are able to keep them out. And so a new frontier of war develops. And to the southwest, you have the Fatimids who control Egypt and then much of the Holy Land region. And then to the northeast of them, you have the Seljuk Sultanate and the frontier between those societies passes through Jerusalem, and that's important. So the Fatimids are the ones who are finally strong enough to stand up to the Seljuks

and halt their advance a little bit. As the Seljuks are taking control of all of this new territory, what is the kind of structure of the way that they rule? Because we've talked about a Seljuk Sultan. We've also talked about how loosely aligned they can often be, and that there's lots of more independent Turtman groups around. So is this a an empire with a solid centre around a sultan, or is this much more of a loose grouping of people?

Yeah, the central hub of the Seljuk Sultanate is the Seljuk Sultan himself. His main cities are mostly in northern Persia, places like Isfahim, but also Baghdad's

very important as well. So, well away from the region to be impacted by the Crusades, for example. And many of the surrounding territories under Turkish rule are commanded either by members of the Seljuk Imperial family or indeed by favoured regional governors. And so that's at a very high level. That's the structure and all those various different commanders and governors and family members will then rule and try and impose their control. And it's not easy because there's plenty of people, as with so many

invasions, people that certainly want to be invaded, and so there's a fair amount of resistance to the Seljuk Turks from early on, or at least people looking for an opportunity to rise up against them. But that's the broad structure. Yeah, yeah.

I guess we're reaching the point now where Frankish crusaders, European crusaders are going to start arriving into the Holy Land. And to what extent, the first crusaders always remembered as this huge success in a way that it probably shouldn't have been. So to what extent should we think about the success of the First Crusade being reliant

on kind of rebellion and division amongst the Seljuks, but also the fighting that's going on amongst these different communities in the region at the time, with the Fatimids and the Abbasids and the Byzantines kind of fighting each other in the area as well? Yeah. So when the Crusaders begin their advance into Turkish-ruled territory, which at the end to Turkish territory near the city of, well, at the city of Nysseer, which they recapture for the Byzantine Empire. It seems that they acquire at least a broad understanding of the political geography of the region fairly quickly. Most importantly, they know or they come to learn that the

Fatimid Empire is a firm opponent of the Seljuk Turks, and the Seljuk Turks, they're well aware, are their primary opponent. So that means several things. The first thing it means, it means is that the Crusaders send ambassadors down to Egypt from a very early stage. They have no objection whatsoever to fight to forming an alliance with the Fatimids against the Seljuks because this is the principle of my enemy's enemy is my friend. As for the Seljuk Turks themselves, only a few years before the arrival of the First Crusade, you have the assassination of the Seljuk Sultan Malik Shah, following which all those various family members and governors

who command all the various districts of the Seljuk Empire turn on each other and fight a massive civil war which lasts for around a decade. And that's more than enough time for the first Crusaders to move into the region and benefit from the chaos that creates. So the Crusaders advance across Anatolia and into Syria. And so in some respects, they are beneficiaries of this ongoing Seljuic civil war, and yet

many of the regional governors near to the Crusader's line of advance, they do realise just how big a threat the Crusaders are. And so they lead big armies against the Crusaders, which are then defeated. So, yes, the Seljuks are fighting amongst themselves, but there's still a lot of resistance being offered to the Crusaders as they advance moving southwards from the Byzantine border. order. And while this is going on, the crusaders are talking to the Fatimids and they want to create an alliance with the Fatimids. But things there are complicated because the Fatimids can

see that their Seljuk opponents are really struggling in the face of the Crusaders advance and their own infighting. And so one year before the Crusade reaches it, the Fatimids take Jerusalem. And so a Fatimid army marches out from Egypt and takes Jerusalem. And that creates a problem in the negotiations for an alliance between the Crusaders and the Fatimids. And the Crusaders, their best offer to the Fatimids is they say, we'll offer you every city the Seljuks have ever conquered from you. If in return we can have Jerusalem. the Fatimids counter-proposal to them is they say to the crusaders,

we will allow you to visit Jerusalem. You can visit, you can conduct your prayers and your acts of reverence to all the various locations that you might want to in the Jerusalem area, but then you're going home. You can't keep it in the long term. And it's on that point that the negotiations hinge, and it's on that point that the negotiations break down. and so in 1099, one year after the Fatibids took the city for themselves,

the crusaders conquered Jerusalem in, as is well known, exceptionally brutal siege. But it is interesting to see that the battle lines of the First Crusade are complex, and it should be pointed out that as many Islamic sources tell us from this era or a little bit later, that there are various Bedouin groups and indeed some smaller Turkish rulers, who ally with the First Crusaders from a very early point. So the back lines are often very complicated. Yeah, yeah. It's so interesting, such an interesting patchwork.

We've covered the Crusades a fair bit. We've got a wonderful series on the Crusades, which people can go back and listen to to find out more about what really happens during the First Crusade and all of the other ones too. But for now, if we think about the First Crusader's success, takes Jerusalem, the Crusader states are established. What does this do to the Seljuk,

I mean, does it force them to get over their own divisions and infighting? Yeah. So it's worth taking a sort of thinking about what the Crusade, what the Crusade estate would have looked like from the Seljuk Empire. Because the Seljuk Empire is vast. It's from Afghanistan and the East all the way to the Mediterranean seaboard at its greatest extent. And the Seljuk Empire has a lot of problems. It's not just the Crusaders who are invading their very new empire.

There are many other societies doing that, not to mention their own internal divisions, which are serious and probably their main concern. And then you have the fact that the First Crusade seems to have triggered a series of rebellions, not against the Crusaders, against the Seljuk Turks, because they are themselves, recent invaders. And one of the other priorities that the Seljuk Turks are facing at the time of the First Crusade is their attempts to suppress a sheer Islamic community known as the Nizaris. And the Nizaris are often known today as the assassins.

And they're very worried about the Nizarees. And there's an intense persecution of the Nizarez across Seljuic territory, which plays its own part in these events. So my point is the Crusades are not necessarily the biggest show in town. There are lots of concerns occupying the Seljuks, and we shouldn't fall into the trap of assuming that the Crusaders are all they're thinking about. There's a lot of other things going on. So it takes a long time for anyone other than the regional governors

who are having to deal with them directly, for the Seljuk Empire as a whole, to respond to the advance of the Crusaders. And the Crusaders' establishment of, well, essentially four European countries in the Middle least that we now refer to as the Crusader States. And so it's really unique to get to about 1110. So that's over a decade after the first crusade that the Seljuk Sultanate is coherent enough internally to send big armies out to try and suppress the Crusader states. But even then, in a six-year period from 1110 to 1115, the Seljuk Sultanate sent out a lot of armies.

to try and suppress the Crusader states. But one of the biggest problems they have is not the Crusader states themselves. It's their own regional governors. Because they're regional governors in cities like Damascus and Aleppo. When they see the advance of the Seljuk Sultan's army, their concern is, well, is this army going to replace me?

Is it going to impose a new Seljuk governor because I haven't been particularly loyal to the Seljuk Sultan over the years? So am I going to be viewed as an enemy? And so these armies sent to defeat the Crusader states. Often they meet, yes, the armies raised by the Crusader states, but often the Crusaders themselves enjoy a degree of support right the way up to substantial military support

from regional Turkish governors who are afraid of losing their position. So just to add to the mix, we've now got kind of Seljuk governors joining with the Crusaders against the Seljuk Empire. So little bits of infighting internally as well. Do we get, I mean, we've talked a lot about people allying with people you might not expect them to, in particular against the Seljuks. I mean, do we have any examples of the Franks and the Seljuks looking to ally, you know, if it's the Fatimids who are in Jerusalem and they're the problem?

Not so much the Seljuk Sultan, but you have lots of other groups who are, they're curious of the Crusaders. I mean, they don't know who they are. When the First Crusade arrived, most people have a very thin understanding of who these strange people are. Yes, you get pilgrims going to Jerusalem from Western Europe in fairly large numbers, but beyond that, there's not much experience of interacting with Western Europeans. And indeed, the Western Europeans, in many cases, have very little idea where they're going. You have one account that says they get halfway through Germany and say, okay, where's Jerusalem then?

They just aren't the maps. So there's a lot of curiosity. Clearly the Crusaders are violent because they've been behaving very violently, but then that's not particularly unusual for this era. But there's lots of interactions. Can we do trade with the Crusades or the Franks as they become known? The answer to that is nearly always yes. Could treaties and alliances be formed with them? And now the answer to that, it depends on the various interests shaping those alliances. But we have lots of dynasties who do fight with the Crusader Estates. And we have also a fair number of people who flee or go into exile or even migrate into the Crusader States looking for a safe haven. For example, the assassins in 1129. There is a major wave of movement from the Nizari community into the Crusader States where they're looking for a safe haven. It wasn't especially safe for them, but it was safer than where they had been previously. So there's always these sorts of complexities that shape the map. And the key point, I think, for me at least, is the causes of war are various. They're about the struggle

between nomadic peoples and agricultural peoples. They're about the control over trade routes. They're about individual personal ambition. They're about forming alliances so that you don't become too weak facing and another alliance that's forming on the other side of your border. They're about family rivalries or disputes. They're about internal civil wars. And yes, also they're about holy war as well. And so it's that ecosystem of conflicts. That creates all sorts of constellations of alliances and certainly any faction that refuses to ally with other ethnic or religious groups on principle. they are not going to prosper or have any chance of prospering because that's just not how it works.

And to what extent should we think about this? It seems like, you know, incessant infighting and division amongst the Seljuk Empire and its governors. To what extent is that the undoing of the empire? Because it doesn't feel like a very effective way for an empire to be functioning. One of the key issues here, and it's a problem, but it does bring advantages to the Seljuk Empire in some respects, is the Seljuks practice partable inheritance. So we're familiar with primogeniture in Western Europe, whereby the eldest son inherits,

and people talk about how unfair that is, etc., because only one child, normally the male, gets more or less everything. And yet there is a stabilising quality to that, because the alternative is you split up the inheritance between everyone. And as people with large numbers of siblings, I'm sure will be aware that the idea of spitting things up like that when you have an entire empire at your disposal that can create problems. And so this is what happens in the Seljuk Empire.

They still view it as an empire. We are still the Seljuk Empire, but different regions are ruled by different members of the family, which inevitably leads to feuds and wars and internal conflicts. And every now and again, you get a ruler who's powerful enough, has enough support to provide a degree of unity. But actually the moment when the Seljuk Empire is a single empire under a single ruler, that's quite a fleeting phase. So most of its history, the Seljuk Empire is a sort of a mixture of different dynasties,

all who have a reasonably clear shared idea of Seljuk authority. That does not mean that they're in agreement over who should be in charge. Yeah, they're all reading the same book, but they're maybe on different pages. at different times. I should say that this is not simply a negative because there are problems. If, for example, sticking with primogeniture, if you have the eldest son inheriting,

then whatever that eldest son's personal qualities, you are going to inherit those qualities as your leader. Are they strong? Are they weak? Are they clever? Are they not? Are they effective? Are they unwise?

Whatever that son's qualities, you're going to feel it, whatever happens next. One of the advantages of partable inheritance is, yes, it may well lead to almost instantaneous civil war, but whoever arises at the end of that civil war, whoever is able to forge a degree of unity, there will be no weaklings among those people because they've been through every possible challenge and confrontation in order to achieve that primacy. Yeah, yeah, that's a really interesting aspect of that. And to what extent do we begin to see kind of the Atabegs who are kind of under Seljuk control,

but they seem to suddenly become a bit more kind of independently minded, almost as if they're trying to set up as their own independent power bases. How does that come about? Yeah, so over time, and we're talking about the 12th century now, so we're moving into sort of the 1120s, 1130s, 1140s, that sort of period. The Seljuk Sultan never really gets over its internal. wars. Moments of semi-unity, but then they quickly fall apart as the next round of infighting kicks in until there are so many factions, it just becomes impossible to maintain any semblance

of order. But within that, you have regional dynasties that begin to emerge, often starting life as governors appointed by the Seljuks, but then as the decades pass and they have no oversight from the centre, they go their own way. And you have a lot of the centre. And you have a this with the rise of the Zangid dynasty. And the Zangid dynasty is important because this is a dynasty that will pose substantial opposition, or you might even say decisive opposition to the crusader states in the mid-12th century. The dynasty itself starts off because there's a very effective warrior called Zangi. And he proves himself as a leader and commander in general under the leadership of one of the various claimants to the Seljuk Empire.

And he's given the city of Muzul, a long way away from the Crusader States, but he has that city to govern. And he very rapidly expands on that basis. Now, he's not necessarily disloyal to the Seljuk Sultan. It doesn't intend to be anyway, but as the Seljuk Empire begins to sort of collapse and fragment, his part of that empire remains very strong. and gets stronger until the Zangid dynasty becomes a great deal more powerful than the Seljuk centre itself.

And so this is the next stage in the evolution of the Seljuk Empire as various different regions, their governors become semi-independent, moving to become fully independent. And just as of join the dots, often it's those governors and their descendants that are encountered by the Mongols when they invade in the 13th century. Yeah, when the nomads next come in a big way. To what extent then should we think about people like Zanghi and the Zangir dynasty, are they Seljuk or would they have considered themselves something different? Are they setting up a new dynasty distinct from the Seljuks or might they still have

considered themselves Seljuk, but trying to survive in a world where the Seljuks have less and less control? One of the problems we have with the Seljuk Turks is they wrote virtually nothing themselves. We trot out platitudes like the history is always written by the victors well actually it's not. Not always. The Seljuk Turks wrote very little about themselves and neither for that matter did the Mongols. Often the histories we've got are written by courtiers

to the Seljuks and later on to the Mongols and yeah they're going to want to present history in a way that will not upset or antagonize their overlords but it's not quite the same thing as them writing their own history. So what I'm offering here is my best guess, basically. I think the notion that the Zangidz had become disloyalty to the Seljuk Sultanate would have appalled them. I think they would have seen themselves very much as being loyal to the Seljuk Sultan's, and yet there are underlying realities here.

The Celtic Sultanate is not working. It is not coherent. It is falling apart. It is crumbling. and so the realities will then bring about a shift until they're independent, really, essentially. Yeah, yeah. And is that, you know, is that what we should think of as bringing about the end of the Seljuk Empire, this fracturing and it's slowly splitting into pieces that sort of drift apart?

And kind of, is there a date that we can put on the end of it, or is it kind of a slow, torturous death? I think it's just a slow fragmentation. and a sort of, what was like a sort of tectonic shift of plates with the plates just moving slowly apart until really their new and separate continents, politically speaking. Yeah. And are there, I mean, we've talked about the Zangid dynasty. Are there other significant dynasties that then kind of rise out of the ashes of the Seljuk Empire?

Yeah. And one of the most interesting of these dynasties, which again is the dynasty I talk about quite a lot in my book, because this is Saladin's dynasty. And Saladin is unusual because most of the ruling elites across much of the Seljuk Empire are Turkish. But Saladin's dynasty isn't. Saladin himself is from a Kurdish family

and his father, Ayub, and his uncle, Shurka. They began their careers or much of their career was conducted as warriors in the employ of the Zangid dynasty. So they're warriors serving Turkish rulers. That's their origins. And Saladin, as he grows older and achieves adulthood,

he then follows his uncle and father into that employ. And then Nuraldin, Zenghi's son, so the Zangid ruler of Syria, he sends Shurka with a large force of Turkish cavalry into Egypt to try and take control. And after a series of wars, Shurker achieves it and then promptly dies, leaving his nephew in command. And these are the origins of Saladin's empire. So Saladin is from a Kurdish family and Saladin has his family around him and he

gathers many Kurdish warriors around him in Egypt. But he's also leading a very large number of Turkish troops and in many ways his empire is a successor state from the Zangid. So there are all those sorts of cultural mixed qualities in his empire. Following that foundation in Egypt, Saladin then reconquers Syria from his master's family until he's built up this huge territorial bloc. So, yeah, it's another very interesting dynasty that is in its way a successor state to the Seljuk Empire,

albeit one under Kurdish rule rather than Turkish rule. Yeah, fascinating. And so interesting to think that so many of the, as you mentioned before, so many of the leaders and the structures that the Mongols will encounter a century or so later were their nomadic predecessors, forms of control still lingering in the Near East and the Holy Land? I think so. And I think one of the reasons for that is that when the Seljuk Turks first invaded the Middle East, they were in the early phases of a very long-term conversion to

Islam. So many of the practices of the various groups that make up this confederation of Turkish peoples would sort of practice step shamanism as their forefathers would have. And even at the time of the first crusade, we have accounts describing Turkish warriors burying their dead with grave goods to serve them in the afterlife. These are sort of step practices that they're reporting here. And the Seljuks then converted to Islam until by the time we get to sort of the late mid-day, to late 12th century, that conversion process is in the advanced form. And then the Mongols arrive a few decades later. And they've got a lot in common with the Seljuk Turks.

In fact, one missionary to the Mongol said that the way you can tell the difference in a Mongol warrior and a Turkish warrior is the Mongols tie up their robes on one side and the Turkish warriors tie up their robes on another. But if that's the biggest distinction he can find, that shows how similar they are. And I says, what my feeling in this is the Seljuk Turks, because they're from such a similar cultural origin to the Mongols, that they provided almost a sort of a slipstream and a cultural religious template, which the Mongols could then follow in the 13th century. Yeah, fascinating.

Oh, Nick, this has been absolutely incredible. Once again, you know, what this book does, like all of your books do on this region in particular, is kind of blur all of those lines that we think are so fixed between all of these groups and we imagine this is always Christian against Muslim or Franks against Seljuks and your books are so good at bringing in all of the other players that are in a region and giving us a picture of just how, I don't know, flexible some of those alliances could be how people were willing to join with people who on paper look like their enemies if it was what benefited them in the short term. So I hope listeners have enjoyed this. I hope they're going

grab the book and learn a bit more about the complexities of this period. Thanks so much, Matt. It's been great being on the show. Thanks very much, Nick. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. Nicholas's book, Crusader Storm, A Global History of the Wars for the Middle East, is out now if you'd like to explore the world of the Seljuk Turks in more detail. They also pop up as major players in our gripping four-part crusade series

released earlier this year. Please do go back and have a listen to that if you missed it. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I, for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family

that you've gone medieval. You can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.