ABSTRACT
This chapter examines an aspect of early Turkic-Byzantine relations, through a study of Turkic patterns of self-identification in the official titles of the twelfth-and thirteenth-century Turkoman rulers of Anatolia: the Danishmends of Sivas, Saltuqs of Erzurum, Seljuqs of Konya and Erzurum, and Mengujeks of Erzincan and Divrigi.2 This is an especially promising field for investigation as it represents the formative stage of a limitrophe phenomenon: an area which lies between cultural spaces. It is a well-known fact that a number of early Turkoman rulers used Greek modes of self-identification (which survive in the legends on their coinage, official inscriptions on buildings and so on) as well as Arabic and Iranian ones. Three main questions arise from this mixed paradigm of identity in Greek, Arabic and Persian languages: (1) what was its interre lation with Arabic and Iranian cultural spaces? (2) what was its relation ship with the Byzantine Anatolian substratum? and, finally, (3) what was the meaning and function of the intermediate space that it created between Byzantine and Muslim patterns of self-identification?
