War and Game

From the mid ninth century, these hardy nomad warriors were valued troops of Muslim rulers throughout the Middle East. Many of them were purchased as slaves from the Central Asia or the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Caucasus. But these were no ordinary slaves, powerless chattels to be ordered around. From an early date, these slave soldiers, often known as mamelukes (which simply means slave or owned man) began to acquire power and influence. In the Ghaznevid kingdom which flourished in the area now known as Afghanistan at the end of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century, we hear of a regular system of education and promotion of these nomad recruits. According to the great Seljuk vizier, Nizam al-Mulk, writing in the 1080s, the system worked like this:

After a young man [the word used is ghulam, another word for slave soldier] was bought he was obliged to serve for one year on foot at a rider's stirrup ... and during this year he was not allowed to ride a horse in private or in public. If he did so and was found out, he was punished. After a year the tent-leader spoke to the chamberlain on his behalf and he was given a small Turkish horse with a saddle in untanned leather and a plain bridge and stirrup leathers. After serving for two years with a horse and whip, in his third year he was given a belt to gird on his waist [perhaps with the implication that he now carried a sword]. In the fourth year he was given a quiver and a bow-case [and presumably a bow] which he put on when he mounted. In his fifth year he got a better saddle and bridle with stars on it, together with a handsome cloak and a mace which he hung on the mace ring ... In the eighth year they gave him a single-apex, sixteen-peg tent and put three newly purchased young soldiers in his troop. They gave him the title of tent-leader and dressed hin1 in a black felt hat decorated with silver wire and a cloak made at Ganja [a town in the Caucasus].

Eventually, the writer goes on, he might be an Amir and governor of a province.

The account is certainly idealized and it was most unlikely to have been as systematic as Nizam al-Mulk claimed: he was after all, presenting a model to his master, the Seljuk sultan Malik Shah (1072-92), rather than writing objective history. It does show, however, how a young man from a Turkish nomad background could be brought up and groomed to be both a military leader and an urbane court functionary. All such boys, it is implied, started from the same point. As chattel slaves, they had no tribal or family connections and promotion was based on merit and talent. It was indeed a real meritocracy in which advancement depended on ability and hard work.

There was another side to the employment of these Turkish boys. With their round moon faces and black hair and eyebrows, many sultans and amirs found them sexually desirable. The cruel beauty of the slave boy, whose eyebrows were like bows and whose eyes flashed like arrows, was a key image in the emergent Persian love poetry of the era. In this complicated world, such a Turkish boy might at one and the same time be his owner's slave, his soldier, his bedfellow and, in the game of love, his cruel master.

All these Turks entered the Muslim world as individual slaves. From around 1040 however, a new pattern began to emerge. At about this time Ghuzz Turks of the area to the east of the Aral Sea (modern Kazakhstan), led by the Seljuk family began to migrate westward en masse, women, children, flocks and all, in search of grazing. They were impoverished and desperate and asked only for space. The then Ghaznevid sultan dismissed their entreaties with contempt and they were virtually forced to confront his army. At Dandanqan, near Merv in Turkmenistan in 1040, this ragged band of nomads defeated the largest and most effective army in the Middle East. Now the defences were down, they swept on through Iran, taking Baghdad in 1055.

The year 1040 marks the point at which the settled governments of the Middle East lost control to the Turkish nomads on their borders. From this point until the consolidation of the Safavid Empire in the sixteenth century, nomad warriors dominated the political life of the eastern Islamic world. It was, in a real sense, the heyday of the nomad warrior.

The strengths of nomad armies were demonstrated once again at the battle of Manzikert on 24 August, 1071 when the Seljuk nomads under the command of the sultan Alp Arslan (1063-72) - 'Hero Lion', a wonderfully evocative name defeated the Byzantine army led by the emperor Romanus IV Diogenes (1067-71) in eastern Turkey to the north of Lake Van. Unlike many battles of the period, we have full descriptions of what happened at Manzikert, notably an eye-witness account by a Byzantine official, Michael Attaleiates, travelling with the army. Thus we can see more clearly than usual how a nomad force, though probably smaller and certainly less well equipped than their opponents, could none the less humiliate them in battle.