ABSTRACT
In the course of this expansion and consolidation of Seljuk power, Tughril and Chaghri Beg, and their Seljuk successors, all represented their actions and their leadership—despite its nomadic, Turkish, violent, and Inner-Asian origins—as part and parcel of the symbolic world of the post-Abbasid trans-regional order. Under Tughril Beg himself, but mainly under his direct successors, his nephew Alp Arslan and the latter’s son Malik Shah, Seljuk trans-regional leadership was not only defined and explained in post-Abbasid terms. A related aspect that marked this highly personalized, patriarchal, and unstable dynastic leadership of Seljuks and Seljuk Malikshahids is the practice of appanage. This 12th-century empowerment of Seljuk atabegs was directly related to the emergence, from the mid-11th century onwards, of non-Turkmen agents and more organized mechanisms of Seljuk power and authority around the different members and branches of Seljuk regional and trans-regional leadership.
