The Seljuk Turks, who took the Iranian plateau in the 1040s and held it for a century and a half, were the first of a long sequence of nomadic conquerors from the Eurasian steppe who would dominate Iran politically while remaining culturally peripheral to it. The pattern, which would repeat with the Mongols, the Ilkhans, the Timurids, and (in a modified form) the Safavids and Qajars, was that the conquering dynasty supplied the army and the throne while the Persian-speaking bureaucratic class supplied the government. The vizier Nizam al-Mulk, who served the Seljuk sultans Alp Arslan and Malik-Shah from 1063 to 1092, wrote the standard treatise on the model in his Persian-language Siyasatnameh (the Book of Government). It read for almost all subsequent Persian-speaking statecraft as a kind of Iranian Machiavelli.
The Seljuk Empire at its height (under Malik-Shah I, r. 1072–1092) extended from western Anatolia (where the victory over the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071 had opened the door to Turkic settlement in Asia Minor) to the Tien Shan in Central Asia. It was a Sunni Muslim state, founded with the express purpose of restoring Sunni religious orthodoxy after the Buyid Shi'a interregnum at Baghdad. The Abbasid caliph remained at Baghdad as the religious figurehead. The real political authority was the sultan, by Seljuk innovation a new title; the model would be exported to the Ottomans and the Mamluks of Egypt.
The Mongol erasure
The Mongol invasion of 1219–1221 is the single greatest demographic catastrophe in Iranian history, and arguably in the history of any pre-modern country. Genghis Khan crossed the Oxus in 1219 in response to a diplomatic insult — the Khwarezmian Shah, who had absorbed most of the eastern Iranian provinces in the preceding generation, had executed Mongol envoys and merchants at Otrar on the Syr Darya. The Mongol army of perhaps 100,000 cavalry advanced through Transoxiana and Khurasan over the next two years, destroying every city that resisted and many that did not. The great cities of eastern Iran — Bukhara, Samarkand, Merv, Nishapur, Herat, Balkh — were each, in turn, sacked. Bukhara was burned. Samarkand was depopulated. At Nishapur, after a Mongol prince was killed by a stray arrow during the siege, the entire population of perhaps half a million was massacred over ten days. At Merv, the Persian historian Juvayni (writing for the Mongols, who were his employers) records the deaths of 1.3 million people, a number that has been disputed but not by a factor that makes it less staggering. At Herat in 1221 the city was sacked twice: first the population that surrendered was spared, then the city rebelled and the second sacking was complete.
The Mongol conquest was completed in 1258 by Genghis's grandson Hulagu Khan, who took Baghdad after a seven-day siege, executed the last Abbasid caliph al-Musta'sim (he was, according to one tradition, rolled up in a carpet and trampled to death by horses, so that the Mongols would not have to spill royal blood directly), and destroyed the libraries, irrigation systems, and intellectual networks of the medieval Islamic world. The Tigris was said to have run black with the ink of the books thrown into it. The aggregate Iranian population loss between 1219 and 1260 has been variously estimated at twenty to fifty percent. The agricultural infrastructure of Khurasan — the qanat irrigation systems that had supported a dense population since pre-Islamic times — was deliberately destroyed and took centuries to recover.
"If they have not heard of the events of these years they should hear, that they may know the truth. Perhaps after the present time none will remain to recall this story." — Ibn al-Athir, on the Mongol invasion, c. 1230
The Ilkhans
Hulagu Khan and his descendants — the Ilkhan dynasty — settled down to rule Iran from new capitals at Maragha and later Tabriz, in the north-west. Within a generation the Mongol ruling family had been Persianised: by the conversion to Islam of Ghazan Khan in 1295, the Ilkhans were Persian-speaking, Muslim, and patrons of Persian-language scholarship. Ghazan's great vizier Rashid al-Din Hamadani — a Jewish convert to Islam, born in Hamadan — wrote the Jami al-Tawarikh, the Compendium of Chronicles, the first attempt at a world history in any language; it has a section on the Mongols, on the Iranians, on the Indians, on the Chinese (drawn from Chinese sources brought west with the Mongols), and on the Franks. Rashid al-Din was executed by his successors in 1318, his library at Tabriz was burned, and the Ilkhanate disintegrated within twenty years. The aftermath was a period of regional dynasties — the Jalayirids, the Muzaffarids, the Sarbedaran — that controlled fragments of the former Ilkhanate from the 1330s to the 1380s.
Timur
The second catastrophe came in the 1380s and 1390s in the form of Timur (1336–1405), known in Europe as Tamerlane (from Persian Timur-i Lang, "Timur the Lame"). Timur was a minor Turco-Mongol nobleman from the region of Kesh, near Samarkand, who claimed descent from Genghis Khan through marriage. He rose through the political chaos of the post-Ilkhanid period to make himself ruler of Transoxiana by 1370 and then, over the next thirty-five years, conquered everything from Damascus to Delhi. His campaigns in Iran (1381–1387 and again in 1392–1396) repeated the demographic violence of the original Mongol conquests on a smaller scale, with the difference that Timur and his court were already culturally Persianate: he employed Persian-speaking historians (Sharaf al-Din Yazdi, Hafiz-i Abru), he patronised Persian-language poets, and he made his capital at Samarkand into one of the great cities of the Persianate world. The architecture of Samarkand under Timur and his successors — the Registan, the Bibi-Khanym mosque, the Gur-e Amir (Timur's tomb) — is the most spectacular monumental architecture of the medieval Iranian world.
Timur died in February 1405 on the march from Samarkand toward China, which he was planning to invade. His empire fragmented within a generation, but his descendants — the Timurid dynasty — held Khurasan and Transoxiana for another century, with their capital at Herat. The Timurid court at Herat under Shah Rukh (r. 1409-1447) and his son Baysunghur was, for the first half of the fifteenth century, the cultural centre of the Persian-speaking world. The Herat school of miniature painting (Bihzad, c. 1450-1535, is the great name), the Herat school of calligraphy, the Herat school of historical chronicle: all produced work that defines our visual sense of the medieval Persianate world.
The Aq Qoyunlu and the Qara Qoyunlu
The western half of Iran, after the collapse of the Ilkhanate, was contested between two confederations of Turkmen tribes: the Qara Qoyunlu ("Black Sheep," 1374-1468) and the Aq Qoyunlu ("White Sheep," 1378-1503), so named after the totems on their respective tribal flags. The Aq Qoyunlu under Uzun Hasan (r. 1453-1478) briefly unified most of western Iran, Iraq, and eastern Anatolia, and conducted diplomacy with Venice against the rising Ottoman Empire. After Uzun Hasan's death the confederation broke apart in dynastic civil war. It was from inside that disintegrating Aq Qoyunlu polity that the next Iranian dynasty — the Safavid — emerged in 1501. The Safavid story is the subject of the next chapter, and the moment at which Iran becomes a single, continuous, recognisable state again, for the first time since the Sasanian empire ended eight hundred and fifty years before.
End of Chapter V