ABSTRACT
The history of Isfahan over the two centuries prior to the Mongol conquest provides an answer to a question of considerable historical importance: to what extent can we speak of a local political stage in the cities of the pre-modern Muslim East? Isfahan’s local political field was determined by questions of identity and interest. The particular identity of the urban environment appears clearly in the Ghaznavid and Saljuq conquests of the early fifth/eleventh century. If religious allegiance was indeed the dominant factor at the time, the Isfahani elites, overwhelmingly Sunni, should have supported the Turks, heralds of a ‘Sunni restoration’. The Saljuq princes and their latter-day successors had a very distant relationship with the urban environment. They lived under tents outside the city, and had little contact with its inhabitants and little interest in establishing such contact. This spatial differentiation is an essential factor in establishing the meaning of their rule.
