Sultanate of Rum

A branch of the Seljuk Turks founded the Sultanate of Rum in Anatolia, on land taken from the Byzantine Empire, and governed much of the peninsula from 1077 until the early fourteenth century. Its name came from Rum, a name for the Roman, or Byzantine, world. Ruling first from Nicaea and then from Konya, its sultans built a court culture steeped in Persian letters, and historians treat their state as the start of Turkish history in Anatolia.

Turkish herders had been crossing the Byzantine frontier since the 1030s, and after the Seljuk victory at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 the flow became a flood. Suleiman ibn Qutulmish, a distant relative of the sultan Alp Arslan, took Nicaea between 1075 and 1081 and set up his own state around 1077. For some years it was nominally a Byzantine client, and the Seljuk Empire recognised it as a subordinate realm only in 1084. Suleiman died in 1086 after a failed attempt on Aleppo.

His son Kilij Arslan I defeated the People's Crusade in 1096, but the armies of the First Crusade beat him and drove him into the south-central interior, where Konya became the capital. Later sultans fought rival Turkish dynasties as much as Christians. Mesud I, who died in 1156, held most of central Anatolia, and the armies of the Second Crusade were defeated as they crossed his lands. His son Kilij Arslan II absorbed the Danishmendid emirate and in 1176 routed the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos at Myriokephalon. Konya was briefly occupied in 1190 by the Holy Roman Empire's forces on the Third Crusade, but the state recovered.

Seljuk power peaked under Kaykhusraw I and his successors Kaykaus I and Kayqubad I in the early thirteenth century. Kaykhusraw captured the Mediterranean port of Antalya in 1207, Kaykaus took Sinop on the Black Sea in 1214 and made Trebizond a vassal, and Kayqubad extended the southern coast and even sent troops across the Black Sea to Crimea. The eastern frontier reached Lake Van. About a hundred caravanserais were built along the trade routes; the largest, the Sultan Han between Konya and Aksaray, dates from 1229.

Though the dynasty was Turkish, its sultans took old Persian royal names, such as Kay Khusraw and Kay Qubad, and Persian was the language of the chancery, history and poetry. Refugees fleeing the Mongols in the thirteenth century strengthened this Persian character. Greek nobles and peasants, Armenians, Kurds and Turks also lived under Seljuk rule, and Greek women were prominent in the royal harem. The sultans presented themselves as champions of Sunni Islam and filled Konya, Sivas, Erzurum and other cities with mosques and madrasas. The poet and mystic Rumi took his name from the land.

In 1243 a Mongol army under Baiju crushed Kaykhusraw II at Köse Dağ, and the sultanate became a vassal of the Mongols and later of the Ilkhanate. The realm was split among rival brothers, and real power passed to Mongol officials and regents. Local Turkish lords founded small principalities, the beyliks, that slipped out of Konya's control. By the 1280s the sultans directly ruled little beyond Konya. Mesud II, sultan in Kayseri from 1303, was murdered in 1308, and his son Mesud III soon afterwards. One of the beyliks, the house of Osman, would go on to build the Ottoman Empire.

Our 1279 and 1300 maps show the sultanate in its final, Mongol-dominated phase, alongside the Byzantine Empire in the west and the Ilkhanate to the east.