Beyond the City : Seljuq rule and textual production in the Central Deserts of Iran

Abstract

Employing a series of unconventional methodologies, this thesis explores the interaction between Seljuq rule and the marginal areas of their Empire around the Dasht-i Lut and Dasht-i Kavir. Examining the interplay between conquest, migration and elite formation, it presents a novel viewpoint on why Seljuq power in the region took on its distinctive shape.

Chapter 1 retells the narrative of the Seljuq Conquest from a local perspective, attempting to assess their disruptive impact. Specifically, it finds that Turkmen groups may have adapted their migration patterns to the inhospitable environment, likely leaving a lasting transhumant legacy in these areas even after the Conquest had ended.

Chapter 2 looks at the emergence of the Seljuq administrative elite through the lens of a poetic anthology, the Dumyat al-Qaṣr of al-Bākharzī. It concludes that rural towns took in refugee Ghaznawid bureaucrats to augment their local literary cultures, cultures which were to underpin the social system of poetic production under al-Kundurī and Niẓām al-Mulk.

In Chapter 3, the status of the vassal realms of Yazd, Kirman, Sistan, and Tabas at the turn of the 12th century are analysed, using the patronage acts we can associate with each to circumvent their marginality in the major historical chronicles. While unique conditions surrounded patronage in each realm, the competition between them and their distance from the Sultanic courts created commonalities in the patterns of patronage offered, especially in the occult sciences.

Chapter 4 handles the litterateur Ibn Funduq, discussing how the community of his home district of Bayhaq adapted to a fragmenting political landscape. By resituating his Tārīkh-i Bayhaq within his wider oeuvre, this section argues that structural features of Alid and Ismaʿili patterns of influence gave these groups ongoing strength in marginal areas even as the Seljuq state fell into chronic instability with the death of Sanjar.