"The Center Cannot Hold": Center and Periphery in the Great Seljuq Empire

The Great Seljūq Dynasty ruled over the Islamic heartlands for over a century and a half (1040-1194).  This empire was historically significant for many reasons: It was the largest and strongest Muslim polity to have arisen in the Middle East since the disintegration of the Abbāsid caliphate in the ninth century; the Seljūqs were the first non-caliphal orthodox rulers to claim universal political authority over the Islamic world; and, most saliently for Islamic political history, the Seljūqs were also the first of the Central Asian nomadic invaders to conquer the Islamic heartlands; their reign thus inaugurated the beginning of a thousand-year period in which the Middle East was under the domination of a foreign Turco-Mongol ruling elite.

The Seljūq Empire was therefore a new kind of hybrid polity, one which attempted the political synthesis of two largely incompatible political and cultural constituencies and ideals: Turkic tribal nomadic steppe culture, with its "primus inter pares" ideal of political participation by tribal elites and decentralized rule; and Perso-Islamic sedentary culture, with its ideal of centralized absolutism, concentrated in the person of the ruler.

The aim of this paper will be to elucidate how and whether this uneasy melding of antithetical political models worked, and to what degree the various Seljūq Supreme Sultans actually controlled the various provinces and peoples over which they theoretically ruled.  Since A.K.S. Lambton's ground-breaking preliminary work on Seljūq administration several decades ago, no one has ever conducted this kind of analysis of Seljūq rule.  The present paper will do so through an examination of the primary sources, many of which have never before been utilized in this context, including collections of chancery documents; chronicles; local histories; Seljūq dynastic histories; and numismatic evidence.