Seljuk Empire
▶ Explore on the mapThe Seljuk empire was a Turkish dynasty that ruled Iran, Iraq, Syria and Anatolia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and it changed the map of the Middle East. The Seljuks were Kipchak Turks who converted to Sunni Islam and moved south from the steppe; under Tughril Beg they took Nishapur in 1037 and Baghdad in 1055, where the Abbasid caliph invested Tughril with the title sultan, the ruler who defended the Sunni faith. His nephew Alp Arslan defeated and captured the Byzantine emperor Romanus IV at Manzikert in 1071, and the Turkish families who followed opened Anatolia to settlement, so that within a generation the plateau had a Turkish-speaking population. The empire was governed by Persian bureaucrats, above all the vizier Nizam al-Mulk, who founded madrasas and wrote a book of government for princes. After his murder in 1092 the empire split among his sons and the atabegs, and the crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099. The last sultan was defeated by the Khwarezmian ruler in 1194, and much of the dynasty's work passed to the Ottoman Turks who followed. The empire's silver coinage and its caravans linked the Mediterranean to Central Asia, and its learned men wrote in Persian.