Four Neighbours and a Ransom

Manzikert in 1071 is conventionally filed under catastrophe: the Byzantine army broken, Anatolia opened. For Erzurum it was one more turn of a familiar wheel. Urartians, Persians, Romans, Arabs and Georgians had all taken their turn at pulling down its walls, and the city had acquired the resigned competence of a house that changes tenants often.

What replaced imperial administration was a mosaic of small hereditary principalities—beyliks, from bey, “chief,” nominally subject to the Seljuk sultans and in practice governed by whatever seemed advisable at the time. Danishmendids, Artuqids, Shah-Armens: their borders moved faster than the ink dried on the treaties that defined them.

Erzurum fell to the Saltukids, who held it from 1071/72 to 1202. They had four neighbours, all of them dangerous: the Shah-Armens to the east, the Artuqids to the south, the Danishmendids to the west, and to the north the Kingdom of Georgia—the only Christian one, and much the strongest.

A Ransom and Four Weddings

The Saltukids could fight, but they preferred to negotiate, and the record suggests they were right to. In 1153/54 İzzeddin Saltuk II was captured by the Georgians and ransomed by his allies—Sökmen II of Ahlat and the Artuqid Necmeddin Alpı—for a hundred thousand dinars. The figure tells one something about the market value of an emir, and rather more about how densely these alliances were woven.

They were woven, as such things were, out of daughters. Saltuk married four of his to the rulers of neighbouring houses: Şah-Banu to that same Sökmen II, before 1148/49; the others to Toğan Arslan of the Dilmaçoğulları and Zünnun of the Danishmendids. A principality hemmed in by four powers had made relations of three of them.

The Lady of Tercan

The fifth daughter, Mama Hatun, was not married off. On the death of her brother Nasiruddin Muhammed she ruled the beylik in her own name, from about 1191 to 1200 or 1201—an arrangement rare enough in a medieval Muslim state that contemporaries recorded it as a curiosity, which is generally how the unprecedented is first filed.

She ruled to some purpose. At Tercan, halfway between Erzurum and Erzincan, her reign produced a caravanserai, a mosque, a bridge and a hammam. All four are still standing, and all four still carry her name.

The end has a shape no novelist would risk. In 1201 Mama Hatun wrote to the Ayyubid al-Adil asking him to find her a husband of suitable standing. The correspondence alarmed the Seljuk sultan Süleymanshah II; in 1202 her nephew Alaeddin deposed her, and in the same year Süleymanshah took the beylik for himself. The name Saltuk does not appear in the sources again.

It is tempting to file her as a forerunner of the valide sultans—Nurbanu, Kösem, and the rest of the sixteenth-century cast. The temptation is worth resisting: four centuries separate them, with no institution passing between, and the models do not match. A valide ruled as the mother of a sultan; Mama Hatun ruled as herself. The closer parallel is Hürrem, who was never valide at all—she died eight years before her son came to the throne—and who ran a good deal of the empire regardless, from no office whatsoever.

The Stone Code

The capital’s chief monument is the kümbet of Emir Saltuk, whose shape and disputed name we have already discussed. What repays a second visit is the carving: eight niches around the drum, no two alike.

A bull with a human face between its horns. Frequently called the dynastic emblem of the Saltukids, though no inscription supports the heraldry. The more cautious reading places it with the snake, the bat and the eagle in the neighbouring niches, as figures from the animal cycle of the Central Asian calendars.

An eagle with a hooked beak. An emblem of authority in two traditions at once, Byzantine and Seljuk. For a principality wedged between them, the choice looks less decorative than diplomatic.

A bird in a shell. The soul at rest beneath the vault of heaven; the shell itself a motif inherited from the Iranian and late antique conch niche.

Vegetal ornament. Persian inheritance, undiluted—the same consignment that brought the word.

Manzikert destroyed an imperial system without interrupting a tradition. The Saltukids did not begin from a blank page; nobody in these parts ever has. Each new owner worked over somebody else’s draft: the Turks took what was Byzantine, seasoned it with what was Persian, and wrote the result in a hand of their own.

The kümbet is the title page. The book of Erzurum in stone begins after it.