Five

The Expansion of Europe (c.1050–c.1150)

Europeans flexed their muscles in the second half of the eleventh century. They built

cities, reorganized the church, created new varieties of religious life, expanded their

intellectual horizons, pushed aggressively at their frontiers, and even waged war over

1,400 miles away, in what they called the Holy Land. Expanding population and a

vigorous new commercial economy lay behind all this. So, too, did the weakness,

disunity, and beckoning wealth of their neighbors, the Byzantines and Muslims.

The Seljuks

In the eleventh century the Seljuk Turks, a new group from outside the Islamic

world, entered and took over its eastern half. Eventually penetrating deep into

Anatolia, they took a great bite out of Byzantium. Soon, however, the Seljuks

themselves split apart, and the Islamic world fragmented anew under the rule of

dozens of emirs.

FROM THE SULTANS TO THE EMIRS

Pastoralists on horseback, a Turkic people called the “Seljuks” (after the name of

their most enterprising leader) crossed from the region east of the Caspian Sea into

Iran in about the year 1000. Within a little over fifty years, the Seljuks had allied

themselves with the caliphs as upholders of Sunni orthodoxy, defeated the Buyids,

taken over the cities of Iran and Iraq, and started collecting taxes. Between 1055 and

1092, a succession of formidable Seljuk leaders—Toghril I, Alp Arslan, and Malik

Shah I (see Genealogy 5.1: The Early Seljuks)—proclaimed themselves rulers,

“sultans,” of a new state. Bands of herdsmen followed in their wake, moving their

sheep into the very farmland of Iran (disrupting agriculture there), then continuing

westward, into Armenia, which had been recently annexed by Byzantium.

Meanwhile, under Alp Arslan (r.1063–1073), the Seljuk army (composed precisely of

such herdsmen but also, increasingly, of other Turkic tribesmen recruited as slaves or

freemen) harried Syria. This was Muslim territory, but it was equally the back door

to Byzantium. Thus the Byzantines got involved, and throughout the 1050s and