Alp Arslan

Alp Arslan was the second sultan of the Great Seljuk Empire, the Turkic power that dominated Iran and the Middle East in the 11th century. In a reign of less than ten years, from 1063 to 1072, he pushed Seljuk rule into the Caucasus and Syria and, at Manzikert in 1071, defeated and captured the Byzantine emperor, a victory that opened Anatolia to Turkish settlement.

Medieval historians disagree about when he was born; most modern writers accept 20 January 1029, a date recorded by Ibn al-Athir. His father, Chaghri Beg, and his uncle, Tughril, were the founders of the Seljuk state. He served young at Tughril's court before learning government under his father in Khorasan. There he met the Persian administrator Nizam al-Mulk, who would become his chief minister.

When Chaghri died around 1059, Alp Arslan succeeded him as ruler of Khorasan in the east. He fought the Kara-Khanids of Central Asia, helped Tughril defeat the rebellion of his kinsman Ibrahim Inal near Rey in 1059, and campaigned in the mountains of the upper Oxus. When Tughril died in 1063, the vizier al-Kunduri tried to place Alp Arslan's brother Suleiman on the throne, while a rebellious kinsman, Qutalmish, made his own bid for power. Alp Arslan declared himself sultan, and when he met Qutalmish near Damghan the rebel's army was beaten and Qutalmish died in flight.

Setting out in 1064 with his young son Malik-Shah and Nizam al-Mulk, Alp Arslan brought Azerbaijan under control, made Armenian and Georgian rulers his vassals and took the fortified city of Ani, long held to be impregnable. The Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, al-Qa'im, honoured him with the title Abu'l-Fath, "father of conquest". He returned to Georgia in 1068, taking Tbilisi and forcing King Bagrat IV to submit.

In 1070 Alp Arslan marched west, with the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt as his eventual target. On the way he took Manzikert, besieged Edessa and received the submission of Aleppo. Meanwhile the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes marched east with a large army and retook Manzikert, and Alp Arslan hurried north to meet him. On 26 August 1071, at the Battle of Manzikert, the Seljuks drew the Byzantine centre forward with a feigned retreat and then surrounded it. Romanos was captured, the only Byzantine emperor ever taken prisoner by a Muslim ruler.

After a ritual humiliation, the sultan treated his captive courteously, and after about a week he freed Romanos on terms that included a ransom, yearly tribute, the surrender of several frontier cities and a marriage alliance. When Romanos was deposed and blinded at home and soon died, Alp Arslan declared the peace void. He and his successor encouraged Turkish tribes to move into Anatolia and settle there, and he gave Suleiman, son of his old rival Qutalmish, charge of the north-western frontier with orders to complete its conquest. The Turkish advance into Anatolia is often seen as one of the developments that led to the First Crusade.

Alp Arslan was above all a soldier. The running of the empire lay largely with Nizam al-Mulk, who developed a system of iqtas, grants of land revenue to military commanders that paid for a large standing army. The sultan was a strict Sunni of the Hanafi school, hostile to the Shia, and Muslim chroniclers praised him as pious and just; they called him Sultan al-Adil, "the just sultan".

In 1072 Alp Arslan led a great army against the Kara-Khanids beyond the Oxus. According to the chronicles, the commander of a captured fortress, Yusuf al-Khwarazmi, was brought before him and, condemned to death, lunged at the sultan with a dagger. Alp Arslan died of his wound on 24 November 1072, aged 43, and was buried at Merv. His son Malik-Shah, then 18, succeeded him and took the Seljuk empire to its peak.

Our 1100 map shows the Seljuk realm in the generation after his death, by then reaching into Anatolia, the heartland of modern Turkey; the 1000 map shows the region before the Seljuks arrived.