The Turks Enter Anatolia (1016-1071)

[Music] before we start this video I'd like to just give a quick shout out to my fellow history youtuber the armchair historian he's just released a video on the Ottoman siege of Vienna so I highly recommend going and checking that out if you're interested in the dynasty that eventually arose from the ashes of the Seljuk Turks in 1016 dark omens hung over the remote Christian kingdom of VAS for account nestled on the southern edge of the Armenian plateau at the foot of the holy mountain Ararat supposedly the site where Noah's Ark first made landfall some five thousand years before this was Bible country home to farmers and townspeople for almost as long as farming had existed the ruling arts Sunni dynasty held sway here for a thousand years and more surviving foreign occupation by successive regimes of Persian and Arab conquerors and now after all that history hemmed in by the increasingly mighty Eastern Roman Empire on its western side and the collapsing Abbasid Caliphate to the east the future looks bleak for this small nation [Music] the neighboring kingdom of Tao had already surrendered at the end of the 10th century becoming yet another province in the ever-growing Empire of the Byzantine Emperor basel ii ascendant from his near perpetual wars of conquest in the balkans and now a spore account was on the agenda but it wasn't to be from the west that the final death knell would come for the mountain kingdom of late shadowed horse riders have been spotted making their way carefully across the eastern border lands just a few individuals at first no threat to the multitude of fortresses and 10,000 strong arts rooney army that held sway in the region though the more astute would have noted that these outriders were merely scouting out the land [Music] lo and behold the four long seemingly endless columns of riders came thundering in across the plains raining down arrows to blot out the sky and leaving death in their wake these were horse nomads entire clans displaced from their original pasture lands on the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea by a series of violent upheavals over the previous decades then still a relatively unknown people to the Christians of the Caucasus Mountains those riders were Turks many of them were recent converts to Islam though in truth religion and little to do with their actions Christians and Muslims alike being targeted with equal ferocity the riders had nothing to lose and everything to gain by moving into the grasslands of the southern Caucasus the settled Muslims and Armenians who lived there like the Muslim residents of the caspian shore before them though adept at war had no strategy for battling this alien type of mobile warfare and no response to the deadly composite bow of the steppe owned over millenia by successive generations of hunters and herders the armenian chronicler matthew of odessa spoke of the raid in apocalyptic terms in the beginning of the year 1016 a calamity proclaiming the fulfillment of divine portents befell a Christian Edoras of the holy cross the death bringing dragon appeared accompanied by a destroying fire and struck the believers in the Holy Trinity at this period there gathered the savage nation of infidels called Turks setting out they entered the province of Aspira kin and put the Christians to the sword facing the enemy the Armenians saw these strange men who were armed with bows and had flowing hair like women they were not used to protecting themselves against the arrows of those infidels this was unheard of no step riders had been seen in the caucuses since the days of Attila and the Huns some 500 years before according to the Byzantine historian John skylit sees Basel didn't even need to persuade the last king of us for Aachen sanaka rim to give up his kingdom he willingly gave up his realm in return for lands in Anatolia he and his 14,000 retainers who headed west were safe but over the generations to come more and more Turks would head into the region in far greater numbers than before attracted by the allure of grassland and pushed westward by increasingly deadly competition to the east the vast porec and raid was simply the first hint of an unprecedented population shift to come the first trickles of a torrent from the step that would in time completely alter not just the Armenian plateau but Anatolia beyond wiping cities off the map that had thrived since the Bronze Age and transforming the region from a farming based system to a pastoralist one and culminating according to the historian Kenneth Hall and an estimated 500,000 Turkic peoples moving into Anatolia by the 1300 [Music] [Music] ask most people about the causes of the first crusade and most likely they'll either tell you it was the result of an outpour of religious fervor or greed on the behalf of Western European minor Lords but what if that wasn't strictly true what if the Crusades were actually sparked off by a much older phenomenon coupled with a very modern sounding geographical issue what if the initial catalyst for the Crusades was actually the age-old conflict between sedentary farmers and nomadic pastoralists the latter having been catapulted out of the Central Asian step into the fertile lands of the city builders by a series of climatic disturbances over a hundred year period this is the hypothesis put forward in recent years by a number of researchers Crusades scholar Steve Tibbles latest book the Crusader armies focuses on this age-old pattern of peripheral nomadic peoples coming into conflict with the settled city dwellers living on their frontier Tibble sees the entire first hundred years of the crusading period as a prolonged example of this medi evil historian Ronnie Allan bloom goes even further suggesting that this millennia old pattern dating back to the very oldest cities on earth and continuing right up until the Renaissance was in this case the result of devastating climate change in Central Asia and the eastern Mediterranean specifically a cold period in the east as evidenced by a wealth of data and a warm one in West according to Allen Bloom and other writers such as Jared Diamond all it would take for severe societal effects to set in would be a decade or two of climatic disturbances these could be droughts untimely rains or severely cold winters in the case of the eastern Mediterranean and Central Asia there is a good argument in a wealth of archaeological climatic and literary evidence for all of these taking place over a hundred year period between around 950 and 1072 [Music] conversely a period of good climatic conditions often leads to periods of great stability or growth search has happened in Western Europe around the turn of the millennium of course religion was still a hugely influential factor in the conflicts that followed this period yet initially at least as these scholars argue religion was not necessarily the prime mover at least the first 50 years of crusading conflict was not necessarily fought between Christians and Muslims but between farmers and herders Ellen Blum argues that many well-documented but seemingly unconnected events during this era may have actually been June in part to this unstable climate period droughts and famines from the Nile to the Oxus ultimately contributed to the decline of some of the most important civilizations and cultural centers of the time the Nile famine in the 1960s for example was unprecedented Egypt had been the breadbasket of the eastern Mediterranean for time immemorial and still is today in many cases a famine of a year or two wasn't unheard of but one that lasted close to a decade such as the one in the nine 60s was devastating even more catastrophic with a knock-on effects the famine had on neighboring states dependent on Egyptian grain richard boulier looks at the same phenomenon in the context of Iran specifically the collapse of the well-established sedentary powers of the region and the rise of nomadic state hoods created by victorious steppe riders the most important of these of course were the Seljuks branch of August Turks who during a period of intense cold and hunger during the made 10 30 s began to make massive inroads into around plundering and destroying cities in search for food but they weren't the first Turks had already been serving the armies of the Caliphate for generations by the time of soldier and in the midst of the unstable conditions created by the earlier years of the climate crisis a dynasty of slave generals known as the ghaznavids that are risen to power thus opening the floodgates from the staff and ushering in an era of nomadic supremacy over the settled people of the region for Allen bloom and bully a the resulting deluge of steppe nomads from the Central Asian plains formally kept in check by the Abbasids and their successors which reached its peak during the intense cold and hunger of the mid 1040s thus set into motion that epic chain of events which still reverberates the world over today we know it as the Crusades [Music] far more than a simple war between Crescent and cross the conflicts that eventually became known as Crusades initially at least were more akin to a struggle between settled and nomadic people's contrary to the popular narrative Christians regularly fought in the armies of settled Muslim populations and Muslims regularly fought for Crusader Lords perhaps most importantly the still nomadic Turks many of whom wouldn't truly settle down to a sedentary lifestyle for hundreds of years to come and still looked to astrologists for guidance well into the Ottoman period were very recent converts to Islam significant numbers of them still practicing a folk version well outside the mainstream faith preached and backed out and still laced with the ten greatest way of life of their forefathers by the mid 12th century Frankish historians such as William of Tyre noted that Turks still sometimes buried their debt with grave goods a distinctly non Islamic tradition reflecting the life of the steps just like the Huns before them and the Mongols afterwards mares milk formed part of their staple diet and writers from both sides stressed the Turks love for alcohol practice strictly prohibited by Islamic law grisly traditions such as scalping enemies and staking captured prisoners to the grounds to be pelted full of arrows still abounded and like the a VARs and pechenegs before them and the humans after the tradition of creating skull cups from defeated enemies still prevailed in short the belief system and culture of the Turks in the first half of the 12th century similar to Scandinavian Christians of the 9th and 10th centuries reflected a culture in transition and one completely at odds with the settled Arabic Kurdish Armenian Greek and Syriac elements already existing in Syria Anatolia and the Levant a hundred years earlier at the turn of the millennium it was even more so a culture of the steppe a culture with no respect for the bureaucracies and laws of settled life and even less regard for the political boundaries of the city builders to the south and the east of the steppe in Armenia Iraq Syria and the Byzantine Empire alike the sedentary kingdoms and empires and no idea what was about to hit them the origins of the August Turks from whom the seljuq dynasty originators like far to the east of Anatolia and the remote valleys of the seer Daria river of Central Asia nomadic peoples have been making a living here for thousands of years and by the 9th century many of them were loosely unified into a confederation by a ruling clan of Aguas Turks themselves likely having originated even farther to the east during the time of the dr. carnate hundreds of years before some Argos had served the khazar khaganate and others later aided in their downfall yet faced with the intense food shortages that beset for step in the mid 10th century it wasn't long before a new dynasty arose to threaten the power of the August Abdo rulers led by a war leader named seljuq this ambitious and a newly ascendant clan who followed the model of various other Turkic peoples before them and headed south to convert to Islam at the end of the 10th century before defeating their former overlords and leading many still mostly pagan clans of Argos to scatter in all directions faced with Islamic powers on all sides to the south and the influence of wandering Islamic mystics taking hold like the ruse with Eastern Orthodoxy and the Vikings with Roman Catholicism many of these August clans did eventually convert to Islam becoming known as Turkmen to the south and the East Islamic powers most notably the ghaznavids one of the first of the Islamic nomadic state hoods mentioned by ellen bloom former slave soldiers of the Caliphate and the kara car needs another Turkic Empire had already taken the best pasture lands for their animals particularly after the fall of the last sedentary power in northern Iran for salmonids needing the Seljuks to fight a lengthy war against the ghaznavids to seize control for the rest of the augurs if they wanted to retain their autonomy the West was the only way to go as early as the 10th ends nomadic groups of August such as the Iraq iya ventured out across the Middle East to seek new pastures with the brutal Iranian desert on one side and the Caspian Sea on the other they simply kept going until they came to the grasslands of Azerbaijan [Music] the caucuses are several large areas of step like grasslands nestled between mountains and it isn't too far away from the step lands to the north should they need to flee or migrate again these people have little to do with the seljuqs or Baghdad they simply continued their lives as they had done before though these Turkmen were now often Muslim themselves having converted partly for political reasons local Muslims on the western shores of the Caspian Sea were harassed just as much as the Christian Armenian and Georgian mountain Lord's the Turks didn't discriminate they needed control of the grasslands to continue their way of life and they were prepared to fight for it the settled people of the region could do nothing against the recurve bows of the nomads and their superior fighting ability it was these groups fleeing from persecution from other tribes and looking for real estate that first came to the borders of Anatolia at the beginning of the 11th century most of Anatolia is a large central plateau though this was mostly farmland up until the 11th century it was well suited for pastoralist life almost a continuation of the vast Central Asian steppe the daunting Anatolian plateau had presented a bulwark against the Arabs for over 300 years yet it was exactly what the nomadic Turks were looking for for now the ascendant Byzantine Empire the most powerful state in Europe with the ability to call on hundreds of thousands of soldiers from all nations had its business there though all things must come to an end and soon enough these desperate Turkmen would be unified into an empire of their own one of the largest the world had ever seen succeeding where the Byzantines had failed in conquering their age-old enemy in Baghdad and forging the most successful yet of Elam blooms nomadic state hoods though nominally Muslim the Seljuk tribal leadership have been converted partly for political reasons towards the end of the 10th century when they headed south when grain themselves within the political situation of the ailing salmon it and ghaznavid empire the latter being a state also established by Turkic steppe nomads after the collapse of Abbasid power in reality tribal animist beliefs still often took precedence for the rank and file soldiers unique 10 Griest beliefs of the steppe merging with the three Abrahamic religions to create a uniquely Turkic folk Islam prior to this arrival into the Islamic world the August Turks from whom the seljuq dynasty had arisen may have served the khazar khaganate to the north of the Black Sea one of the foremost powers amongst the steppe tribes at the time like the Khazar aristocracy the ruling class of the augo's may have converted to Judaism for a time rather than taking aside with the Romans or the Arabs while still allowing themselves the same preferential treatment given to fellow people of the book the Abrahamic names of Seljuks sons such as Moses and Michael hint at this unusual situation and he himself may have originally been an officer in the Khazar army though like the Khazars the vast majority of the population probably remains tang Griest in their belief system and by the time the cargo net collapsed in the 10th century under the onslaught of the kiev on roofs in alliance with some elements of their August and pecheneg subject populations this Jewish influence seems to have largely disappeared at first just like when serving the Khazar many high-ranking or especially pious Turks probably fully accepted all or most of the tenants of Islam though the rank-and-file merely adapted their existing animist beliefs as they tended to live out in the plains rather than in cities or towns their culture was one in flux still firmly rooted on the Central Asian plains their ancestors had inhabited for millennia but forced to adapt to the new world they became a part of for the Seljuk rulers and for their Turkmen generals often the heads of similar clans to the Seljuks whose military power relied heavily on their nomadic roots first and foremost in their list of priorities was finding adequate pasture lands for their animals religious dogma would come later however much the first great seljuq ruler his grandson Tyrell had instilled discipline in his men in order to portray themselves as liberators rather than conquerors after they overcame that gasps Naveed rivals to march into the cities of persia in the ten 40s and finally bagged at in 1055 good behavior toward settled populations was by no means the norm and as the decades went on this newfound mixing bowl of cultures and ethnicities often threatened to explode into violence and chaos faced with a difficult situation and a horde of step riders on his doorstep the Abbasid caliph of baghdad alcaine his position wants the political head of the Islamic world now little more than a spiritual figurehead akin to the Pope of Western Europe was able to make an uneasy alliance with a paramount seljuq ruler Tokra himself the first in a triumvirate of tribal leaders alongside his brother Shagari and various other family members luckily for the Abbasids the Seljuk aristocracy at least seemed to have been especially devout Muslims however the shrewd politician alkine managed to turn this potential disaster into an opportunity luckily for him the Seljuks were adherents to Sunni Islam and in return for legitimizing them as the new political leaders of the Sunni world Tyrell agreed to make war upon the mortal enemy of the Abbasids the perennial threat to alkanes earthly power the Shiite Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt Terral had succeeded in unifying the Sony world into a political hole though he and his warriors for the most part remains nomads utilizing the tax revenues from their subject people's to maintain a permanent army of veteran warriors ever backed up by the legions of Turkmen tribesmen now roaming far and wide across the Islamic world as they began to war against the Fatimids for control of Syria however it became apparent that the Egyptians had allies to the east and Roman Byzantine Empire had enjoyed good relations with the Shiite Fatimids of Egypt since the reign of Basel the bulgar Slayer in the early 11th century and though the Romans themselves weren't likely to provide direct military support due to their own internal problems since battles reigned they could easily lend economic support turgor el wanted to wrestle Syria the Levant and eventually Egypt from his Shiite enemies and in order to do so he instructed his loyal Turkmen to head into Anatolia to harass and distract the Byzantines riding hard and fast into the interior these newcomers to the region joined the other Turkmen and August clans who had already been active there for decades as much as Terrell might have wanted to portray himself as the sole ruler of the new state and the unifier of the Sunni Islamic world it's entirely possible that as far as the various Turkmen clans and tribes people were concerned his brother Shagari ruling over the easternmost portions of the Empire and several other family members were just as high-ranking as he was it was one of these family members who in 1048 seven years before Tyrell and his men triumphantly marched into Baghdad who launched the first large-scale campaign into the Byzantine Empire ibrahim yin al had been on a rampage since the mid 1040s sacking the cities of ray and ramadan in a search for food whilst amassing more and more tribal warriors around him directly from the cold riddim step in 1046 and 10:47 operating entirely independently from torille he and his tribe began raiding along the south coast of the Black Sea coming within 15 days march of Constantinople by 1048 on the eastern shores of Black Sea in the theme of Iberia annexed from the Georgians during the time of basil ii a joint georgian roman army rode out to meet them in a brutal night fight the christian army managed to drive off the turks their historians recording the battle as a victory though not before the georgian commander was captured and according to the arab chronicler eben ha'la'tha the turks made off with a hundred thousand prisoners and a vast hoard loaded onto the backs of 10,000 camels a decade later Ibrahim was dead personally strangled with a faux string butter Grill in Baghdad now increasingly consolidating power around himself and furthering his numbers by recruiting nomads directly from the steppe the next major blow to the byzantines themselves beset by a long series of internal issues brought on by the immense success of basel ii rain came in 10:57 seemingly out of nowhere deep into the interior of the empire a Turkish army appeared to sack the provincial capital of melih teen from then onwards nearly every single year saw bands of Turkmen riders heading deep into the plateau to sack Byzantine lands the increasingly beleaguered government in Constantinople could do little against these raids which only served to embolden and empower regional magnates to rival the power of the Emperor upon her girl's death in 1063 his nephew ALP Arslan quickly seized control killing the other major player his uncle Ketil mich in the process every bit the general the turtle was ALP Arslan was also younger ambitious devout and just as determined to take Egypt though the Byzantines post little threat to the Seljuk campaigns towards Egypt ALP Arslan was taking no chances just like her girl had done before him he sent his loyal Turkmen clans to raid across the border ostensibly in order to keep the Byzantines occupied and unable to provide logistical assistance of any kind but also to keep the Turkmen from plundering his own newly won lands elsewhere in his vast empire not all of the Turkmen were loyal to the cell jerks in particular ALP Arslan seems to have been concerned about a group called the nikaya like the Iraqi er before them these were aristocratic ogress Turkmen independent of even nominal seljuq Authority most had converted to Islam in order to get by in the kingdoms and States they came into contact with during the 11th century some had even found service in the armies of the Fatimids the Byzantines and other local Syrian Levantine and Iranian powers already active in the region for many decades these Turks had no desire to fall under the sway of the sell jokes in 1064 hot off the heels of consolidating his newfound position as Sultan of Baghdad ALP Arslan himself came thundering unto the Anatolian border Lance the head of his battle-hardened riders destroying the Armenian city of anni potentially home to 100,000 people and reducing the surrounding regions into pasture lands for his men the next year he sent his Turkmen deep into Asia Minor to attack Caesarea the year after that they attacked Iconia what had begun as distraction tactics has now escalated its a full-scale invasion in a search of new grazing lands meanwhile back in Constantinople the new Byzantine Emperor Constantine Ducasse was preoccupied with invasions on his European side the Normans in Italy had began seizing lands in earnest and two other turkic tribes the pechenegs perhaps pushed out of central asia by the same climatic events as the august and the u.s. who may actually have been Argos Turks Turkmen continued their attacks far and wide into Anatolia some under the direct command of ALP Arslan others merely being opportunists capitalizing upon the chaos the Byzantines didn't take too kindly to these attacks electing a new emperor to the throne Romano's diogenes a throwback to the age of the generals during the 10th century his entire reason for being put on the throne was to definitively defeat the seljuqs accordingly he raised a colossal multi-ethnic force to combat them invades 1071 near the town of man's occurred in eastern Anatolia the two armies met for one of the most momentous and for the Byzantines devastating battles in history ALP Arslan forces winning the day the cumin and ooze mercenaries fighting for Romano's at man's occurs almost immediately betrayed him by going over to the seljuq side their distant relatives and likewise many other Turkmen groups already active in the region were consolidated into a hole by ALP Arslan victory the two leaders conversed at length with ALP Arslan apparently being a noble host to the Roman Emperor content that Romanoff's was no threat to his own ambitions in Egypt the emperor was returned to Constantinople unscathed and a peace treaty was made [Music] almost immediately upon his return to the capital Romano's was deposed and blinded by his political opponents the next year ALP Arslan was himself killed far to the east thus rendering the peace agreement between the two null and void faced with the inevitable power struggle that always followed the death of a seljuq Sultan tens of thousands of ambitious Turkmen tribesmen led their warriors out onto the Anatolian plains finding there a wide-open landscape well suited to the pastoralist lifestyle of their clans their families would follow soon afterwards permanently shifting not only the demographics of the region but the landscape - over time molding the farmlands of Asia Minor into a microcosm of the Central Asian steppes to the east the ten 70's saw the first hints of a massive population movement the first trickling of a torrent of Turkic migration that would continue for centuries to come many of these people were simply nomads with nowhere else to go others however represented a major threat to the Seljuk authorities perhaps one of the greatest of these threats was unleashed during the confusion following ALP Arslan death [Music] before ALP Arslan son Malik Shah could fully cement his authority as the new Sultan for imprisoned sons of the long deceased cattle mich who had once vied for power with ALP Arslan managed to escape into Anatolia there after making alliances with various Turkmen leaders they would gradually begin to consolidate power under the rule of the lead brother Suleiman this was the very first beginnings of the sultanate of rûm a cousin state of the seljuqs that would outlive the Sultan's of Baghdad by centuries and eventually give rise to the Ottoman Empire perhaps the most impressive advances in Anatolia were made by Turkmen groups such as Suleiman's whose relation to the Sultan in Baghdad remained ever ambiguous according to Islamic sources Suleiman initially became a leader of the nokia that same clan that had proved such an issue for al parcel and to deal with though many others existed too [Music] these were family-run operations with hereditary Chiefs akin to the seljuqs themselves far from offering undying loyalty to the Sultan of Baghdad these Turkmen were characterized by opportunism pragmatism and localized self-interest many individual warlords were theoretically under the control of Malik Shah but almost always they put their own interests first and as we shall see engaged in a highly fluidic set of allegiances the Byzantines continued to fight on tooth and nail though for close to a decade more often than not they fought amongst themselves more than the Turks by the late 1070 s as the threat from the Turks finally began to become clear the historian Anakin naina laments the unfortunate position the Empire found itself in the Empire was reduced to its last man Turkish infiltration had scattered to the eastern armies in all directions and the Turks were in almost complete control of all the districts between the Black Sea and the Hellespont yet nonetheless the Empire would survive partly due to the actions of Anna's father Alexius a new breed of general turned emperor who would fight alongside the Turks as well as against them the conflicts and wars that followed over the next twenty five-year period culminating in the arrival of the warriors of the First Crusade in the mid 1090 s are some of the most epic yet tragically unknown in all of history the Byzantines would continue to maintain a presence within Anatolia for close to 400 years to carve yet like it or not the world had changed the Turks burn out here to stay if you'd like to hear more first-hand accounts from this period check out our second channel voices of the past we've just covered part of an akan minas Alexia and we'll be doing much more in the future you

Channel: History Time

Views: 659,135

Keywords: turks, turkmen, seljuk, seljuks, tughril, byzantines, manzikert, romanos, byzantine empire, anatolia, asia minor, oghuz turks, oghuz, pechenegs, khazars, khazar khaganate, steppe tribes, steppe nomads, crusades, crusaders, crusader states, first crusade, pastoralists, nomadic states, nomads, pastoral nomads

Id: YirWYMurJn4

Length: 42min 4sec (2524 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 28 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/AshinaTR]

I especialy enjoyed the Ilghazi video of him. I knew next to nothing about him but he explained in detail the his life and the impact he made in history.

[u/DoquzOghuz]

Video about Turks and them migrating to Anatolia

Begins the video by talking about Armenian history and Byzantines and continues talking about Armenians

OKAY

[u/DoquzOghuz]

Atalarımıza kurban olum.