126 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Masud himself was a formidable specimen of a man. Too heavy for most
horses, he customarily rode an elephant, of which he had a whole battalion
penned up in the marshy canebrakes along the Helmand River. Make no
mistake, however, his great girth was all muscle. He went into battle with a
sword only he could swing and a battleaxe so huge, no one else could even
lift it. Even the great Sultan Mahmud reputedly feared his boy.
When the father died, Masud happened to be in Baghdad. The
courtiers proclaimed his brother the new king. Masud came rushing back,
gathering up an army along the way, dethroned his brother lickety-split,
and put out both his eyes to make sure he would never try anything like
that again. Then he took over the Ghaznavid Empire and, like his father,
welded art and war into a potent cultural combination of grandeur and
gold and savagery. At that point, it must have seemed like Ghaznavid do-
minion would last forever.
Yet four times during Masud's reign, rugged Oghuz Turks from the
north stormed across the Oxus River to attack Ghaznavid realms. Led by
a family called the Seljuks, they made their way into Khorasan (eastern
Iran, western Afghanistan). Four times Sultan Masud sallied forth to meet
them on the field of battle. Three times he beat them back, but in the
fourth battle, his forces got hammered. In 1040 he lost Lashkargah and
his western strongholds to those Seljuks. I've described the dread de-
meanor of the frightening Masud; now imagine what kind of men it must
have taken to beat him. Masud retreated to the city his father had built
and lived out his reign, but the glory days of the Ghaznavids were done.
The Seljuk era had begun.
The Seljuks moved west, nibbling away at the empire based in Baghdad.
These chieftains couldn't read or write and saw no point in learning. A
strong swordsman could command enough gold to hire a hundred tallow-
faced clerks to read and write for him. They sacked cities and exacted trib-
ute, but preferred to live in tents, which they furnished as gloriously as was
possible for a people constantly on the move. (In time, they also funded the
construction of wonderful architecture in their major cities.) Once they
crossed the border, they dropped their ancient shamanistic religion and
converted to Islam, but it was a rough-and-ready Islam that didn't concern
itself with doctrines or ethical ideas very much: it was more a rah-rah
locker-room ideology that marked off Us Guys from Them Guys.