ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to an examination of the Oghuz Turkic peoples, who became known as Turkmen in the Islamic world and who founded several great Turkic empires in West Asia and the Middle East: the Oghuz, the nomadic group that inhabited the Aral and Caspian steppes during the ninth and tenth centuries CE; the Seljuks, who founded a Sunni Muslim empire that stretched from Transoxiana through Iran to central Anatolia in the eleventh century CE; the Ottomans, the Turkic and Turkicized people of the Ottoman empire (1299–1922), which was one of the largest and most powerful empires in history; the Turkmens, who founded the Qara Qoyunlu and Aq Qoyunlu states in eastern Anatolia and Iran and formed the military elite of the Safavid, Afsharid, and Qajar states in Iran.
