ABSTRACT
‘Hence the evils caused by the Turks began.’ 1 With these words John Scylitzes, a prolific writer of the early Comnenian period, commenced his account of one of the most far-reaching political and ethnic upheavals that had afflicted Eastern Christianity and the Islamic world since the Arab conquests of the seventh century. In the first half of the eleventh century the Turkic Oghuz tribes and their leading clan, known as the Seljuk dynasty, left their homelands in the steppes beyond the Oxus River and within a few decades created a vast empire reaching from the eastern Iranian fringes to the shores of Palestine and the highlands of Anatolia. The Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad submitted to a new secular overlord replacing the Shiite Buyids. A military elite of Turkish descent and Persian cultural identity established itself in the urban centres of the Arab-Islamic world, creating a highly fragmented hegemonial group of rival minor dynasties and local lordships. Large parts of the Byzantine Empire’s eastern provinces, which for centuries had successfully resisted the Arab raids, were gradually transformed into Turkish-Islamic principalities, a historical process that in retrospect came to be known as the Turkification and Islamization of Asia Minor. 2 Contemporary eyewitnesses, both Muslim and Christian, were fully aware of the historical implications of these events, as can be seen, for example, in the very structure of the Syriac universal chronicles written by Michael the Syrian and Bar Hebraeus, who considered the Seljuk expansion the starting point of a new historical era. 3
