242 chapter four
we would bring our tents from anatolia and settle there.’ the emperor
acceded to his request and gave him the land he had asked for in Dobruja.
‛Izz al-Dīn secretly notified his men in asia Minor, who travelled to Üskü-
dar, under the pretext that they would winter in Iznik, and crossed the
sea to rumelia. the dervish Saru Saltuq Dede led the refugees, and “since
then there have been two or three Muslim towns in Dobruja and thirty
or forty turkish villages. they fought the emperor’s enemies and wiped
them out.”394
‛Izz al-Dīn and his courtiers stayed near Michael VIII’s court.
there is no doubt that these events took place after the Byzantine
return to constantinople in summer 1261. this was the period of treaty
negotiations which set up the Sarai-constantinople-cairo axis,395 when
the strategy of the anti-Ilkhanid party was to restore ‛Izz al-Dīn to his
father’s throne, currently held by his brother as a client of hülegü. Success
here would remove the Seljuk sultanate from the persian orbit and add it
to the ranks of those arrayed against the Ilkhanate, and would necessarily
cut Ilkhanid access to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean via anatolia—
creating an immense advantage for the Volga horde in the commercial
war between the two chinggisid states.
Berke was tempted by the prospect and, as his successors on the throne
at Sarai would do after him, adopted ‛Izz al-Dīn’s cause enthusiastically,
sparing no effort to recruit emperor Michael VIII and Sultan Baybars for
the purpose. In a letter of May 1263 the khan sets out his proposals for
military alliance against hülegü, and goes on to recommend ‛Izz al-Dīn
to the Sultan at cairo, requesting that Baybars support the ex-sultan as
worthy to be included among the “four brothers in jihād.”396
Berke’s request merely emphasises that he was of one mind with Bay-
bars about the Seljuk situation, since the Mamluk Sultan had protected
the exiled prince long before the khan. although there is little informa-
tion about the meeting of the allies at cairo in mid-1261, tartar, Mamluk,
Byzantine, Seljuk and Genoese,397 in the light of the aforesaid we might
suppose that the tartar and Mamluk delegations offered ‛Izz al-Dīn’s
ambassadors considerable support.
394 Ibid., p. 171.
395 See chapter 3.3.1.
396 cf. Işiltan, Seltschukengeschichte, p. 55, Decei, “problema,” p. 184.
397 See chapter 3.3.1.
