Nizam al-Mulk

For roughly three decades in the eleventh century, the Persian administrator Abu Ali Hasan of Tus, known by his title Nizam al-Mulk, "Order of the Realm", ran the government of the Seljuk Turks. While the sultans fought, he built the bureaucracy, the tax system and a network of colleges that held their vast conquests together, and later Persian writers held him up as the model of the wise vizier.

He was born in April 1018 in Radkan, a village near Tus in north-eastern Iran, into a family of landowning gentry, the dehqans. He was trained in Shafi'i law and Ash'ari theology. His father was a revenue official of the Ghaznavid Empire, and when the Seljuks beat the Ghaznavids at Dandanaqan in 1040 and took Khorasan, the family fled to Ghazni, where the young Hasan first held office. After three or four years he changed sides, joining the Seljuks around 1043, and by 1059 he was running the whole province of Khorasan.

When the first great Seljuk sultan, Tughril, died without children, a succession struggle followed. Hasan backed Alp Arslan, who defeated his rival Kutalmish and secured power in 1064, then made Hasan his vizier and gave him his famous title. The division of labour was clear: the sultan led the army, the vizier ran the state. Hasan expanded the iqta, a system of assigning the revenue of land to soldiers and princes, which let the Turks support a large standing army from the taxes of a settled population. He travelled with the sultan on most campaigns, including the capture of Ani in Armenia in 1064, and in 1067 took the fortress of Estakhr in Fars on his own account. He missed the great victory over the Byzantines at Manzikert in August 1071, having been sent away with a supply convoy.

After Alp Arslan was killed in 1072, his son Malik-Shah I succeeded and Nizam al-Mulk became the real power in the Seljuk Empire for some twenty years. The sultan's uncle Kavurt challenged him and was defeated near Hamadan in 1074; he was later poisoned, presumably on the vizier's orders. Seljuk armies under this regime held the Ghaznavids at bay, pushed back the Fatimid Caliphate in Syria and kept the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad politically powerless. Malik-Shah reportedly called his old tutor "father".

His most lasting work was a chain of madrasas, called Nizamiyyas after him, in Baghdad, Isfahan, Nishapur, Mosul, Basra, Herat and other cities. They trained Sunni scholars and officials for the state. He is also traditionally credited with the Siyasatnama, or Book of Government, a treatise written at the sultan's request that uses historical anecdotes to advise rulers on justice, administration and the use of spies; it is often compared with Machiavelli's The Prince.

His final years were troubled. Malik-Shah's wife Terken Khatun wanted her small son Mahmud to succeed, while the vizier backed the older prince Berkyaruq, and she allied with the official Taj al-Mulk to undermine him. In 1091 Isma'ili rebels led by Hassan-i Sabbah seized the castle of Alamut, which Nizam al-Mulk besieged without success. On 14 October 1092, travelling from Isfahan towards Baghdad near Nahavand, he was stabbed by a man disguised as a Sufi, in the usual account an agent of the Nizari Isma'ilis, the so-called Assassins. A popular tale makes him, Hassan-i Sabbah and the poet Omar Khayyam boyhood schoolfellows, but the historian Bernard Lewis judged it unlikely, given the gap in their ages. His twelve sons went on to hold high office under later sultans.

Our 1100 map shows the Seljuk Empire shortly after his death, stretching from Anatolia to Central Asia; Iran, where he was born and killed, lies at its heart.