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Brothers when the time comes, with good fortune from both worlds as our companion, then by one single warrior on foot a king may be with terror, though he own more than a hundred-thousand horsemen.
From an Ismaili poem in praise of the Assassins.
The year 1092 saw the murder of Nizam al-Mulk, the chief minister of the Saljuq Empire and the author of ‘The Book of Government’, a precise manual of how to captain the ship of state, by the Ismaili Assassins, a radical movement of which we will hear much more of later in our story, and the death, amidst rumours of the caliph’s involvement, of Sultan Malikshah. The sultan’s wife, grandson and other senior politicians also all died soon after. The centripetal force of Nizam al-Mulk’s government apparatus was lost and the Saljuq Empire splintered. This is was not surprising: the Saljuq Empire was, like so many other medieval enterprises, a family business, and the death of its head was enough in itself to cause immediate chaos. Turkish tradition worsened the situation, however, as each son was entitled to an equal share of the father’s possessions, and so the state was broken up. Also, whilst these sons all had the same father, often each one had a different mother. Civil war based on a pushy mother’s ambitions for her son may seem slightly absurd, but in the closing years of the eleventh century it was very much a fact in Iraq and Syria. Powerful emirs used their forces to their own advantage and formed unstable allegiances with candidates for the sultanate. In this poisonous atmosphere, regional leaders became deeply and mutually suspicious of each other and the unity of the state disappeared.
The Abbasid Caliph, al-Muqtadi, also died in 1094, but more important than this was the demise of Sultan Malikshah’s brother, Tutush, the ruler of Damascus. When Tutush heard of Malikshah’s death, he made a play for the entire Saljuq Empire. He mustered his army and, between 1092 and 1095, he conducted bloody campaigns against Aleppo and Antioch that brought Syria’s already weakened economy and agriculture to near collapse. He then challenged his young nephew Berkyaruq for the Saljuq throne in 1095. He failed in this larger enterprise: Berkyaruq marched out of Baghdad, and defeated his uncle at the Battle of Dashlu. Tutush was killed in the battle and Syria was left wrecked and rudderless, a vulnerable target for the Crusaders who were just on the point of leaving Europe’s shores.
Western Persia and Iraq then became the main theatre for the contest between the sons of Malikshah. A civil war between Berkyaruq and his half-brother Muhammad continued until Berkyaruq’s death in 1105, by which time the Crusaders had conquered Jerusalem and consolidated their position, without interference from the region’s major power. Ibn al-Jawzi wrote that Sultan Berkyaruq, during one of his brief periods in control of Baghdad and before the fall of Jerusalem, had assembled a force to challenge the Franj in Syria but that, ‘then this resoluteness fizzled out’. It is hard to contemplate how this expedition would have been funded, given the absolute exhaustion of the state treasury brought about by Baghdad having been occupied by different opposing armies some thirty times between 1099 and 1101, as well as by the constant ‘buying off ’ of emirs during the civil wars. Indeed, al-Bundari described how, later in the conflict, Sultan Muhammad lacked funds even to provide for his emirs’ daily beer allowance. Ibn al-Athir’s verdict on the Saljuq sultans’ isolation from Syrian affairs in this period seems entirely valid: ‘the sultans did not agree amongst themselves and it was for this reason that the Franj were able to seize control of the country’.