The Seljuks

Āl Saljūq (آل سلجوق), “the House of Saljūq,” is the Arabic name of the dynasty, standard in the historians from the eleventh century onward; Ibn al-Athīr’s universal chronicle narrates their whole arc under it, from the first crossing of the Oxus to the fragments of the house ruling Anatolia. The eponym is Saljūq son of Duqāq, the Oghuz chieftain who led his people into Islam and the Jaxartes borderlands two generations before his grandsons Tughril and Chaghri took Khurasan; the Arabic spelling fixes a Turkish name whose own vowels are variously reconstructed, and every western form, Seljuk, Seldschuk, Selgiucide, descends from this Arabic orthography.

The entry names the atlas’s clearest case of a grandfather outranking his empire. Saljūq himself never ruled a state, never crossed into Iran, and appears in history only as an ancestor; yet the sultans who prayed in Baghdad and the sultans who ruled Konya, a century and a half apart, both answered to his name, and modern historiography still files under it everything from the Oxus to the Aegean. The house had no country to be named for, having crossed into everyone else’s, so the name of the man who started the migration became the name of everywhere it reached. Among the atlas’s dynasty-names it is the purest: not a land, not a people, one dead chieftain, carried like a banner for three centuries.

Saljūqiyān (سلجوقیان) is the Persian name of the dynasty, the eponym with the Persian plural, used by the historians who wrote the Seljuks’ own official record; Rāvandī’s Rāḥat al-ṣudūr, composed around 1204 and dedicated to the Konya sultanate, is a history of the house written in the language of its own chancery. That is the entry’s peculiar situation: Persian was not a neighbor’s language to the Seljuks but their language of state, the tongue of their bureaus, poets, and court historians, so this exonym is also, functionally, the closest thing to an official self-designation the dynasty ever committed to writing.

The entry therefore hosts the page’s structural irony. A Turkish house whose own speech went unwritten adopted Persian so thoroughly that its identity survives in Persian grammar, its Turkish ancestor pluralized with a Persian suffix; the conquerors of Iran were archived by their own secretaries as a Persian word. The pattern would outlive them, for the Ottomans began the same way, Persian verse chronicles first, and the whole Turco-Persian synthesis this atlas’s eastern pages keep meeting, from Delhi’s chancery Persian to Konya’s, is present in miniature in this one plural. The Seljuks ruled in Turkish, prayed in Arabic, and are remembered in Persian; of the three, they could write only the last two, and remembrance belongs to the written.

Pérsai (Πέρσαι) is what the learned historians of Byzantium called the Seljuk Turks. Anna Komnene’s Alexiad, the great account of her father’s reign written around 1148, wars against the Pérsai of Anatolia throughout, and the usage runs through Komnenian historiography as a fixed convention; the same authors could use Toûrkoi in less elevated registers, but high style demanded the classical name, and the classical name for an empire attacking Rome from the east was Persian. The convention was archaism, not confusion: the historians knew perfectly well who the Seljuks were, and dressed them in Herodotus anyway.

The entry is the atlas’s purest specimen of a name as a literary costume. Byzantine classicism required that present enemies wear ancient names, Scythians for steppe nomads, Persians for whoever held Iran and Anatolia’s east, so the Seljuks inherited the name of the empire Alexander had destroyed fourteen centuries before them, purely because they occupied its stage. The habit has a mirror on this page’s own frontier: the Seljuks called their Anatolian realm Rūm, Rome, while Byzantium called them Persia, each side naming the other with an empire of the dead. On the eleventh-century border the ancient world’s great war was still being fought, in vocabulary; the Persians and Romans facing each other across it were Turks and Greeks who had each inherited the other’s enemy.

The Latin name of the Seljuks in the crusade chronicles, Turci, the plain ethnonym Turk carried into Latin through the Byzantine Toúrkoi. The Gesta Francorum, the anonymous eyewitness narrative of the First Crusade, uses it on nearly every page: the Turci who ambush the columns at Dorylaeum, defend Nicaea and Antioch, and rule the Anatolian interior the crusaders had to cross; Fulcher of Chartres and the rest of the chronicle tradition write the same. The Latin West knew essentially nothing of the dynasty; it named the whole Seljuk order by the ethnic name of its soldiers, and by the thirteenth century Latin usage had made the land itself Turchia.

The page’s other names all came from closer up and lasted less. Byzantine Greek, archaizing as always, called the newcomers Persai, dressing the emergency in a classical costume that died with Byzantium; Arabic and Persian named the dynasty, al-Saljūq, Saljūqiyān, names that fell with the house that bore them. The crusaders, farthest away and worst informed, reached for the crudest label available, the bare name of a people, and it is the one name on this page still on the map: their Turci in their Turchia became the Turks in Turkey. Ignorance, wanting nuance, sometimes picks the name that history keeps.