How a Turkish dynasty from Central Asia came to rule Anatolia, built its caravan roads and colleges, and laid the foundations on which the Ottomans later rose.
Last reviewed on 27 September 2026.
Between the late 11th and early 14th centuries, most of Anatolia passed from Byzantine to Turkish rule, and the dynasty that presided over the change was the Seljuks. Two related states carry the name: the Great Seljuk empire, centred on Iran and Iraq, and the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum in Anatolia, whose capital was Konya. "Rum" means "Rome": the lands taken from the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. The sultanate's caravanserais, mosques and colleges are still scattered across central Turkey, and much of what later became Ottoman and Turkish culture took shape under it.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1040 | Seljuks defeat the Ghaznavids at Dandanaqan and take control of Khurasan |
| 1055 | Tughril Beg enters Baghdad and is recognised as sultan by the Abbasid caliph |
| 1071 | Alp Arslan defeats and captures Romanos IV Diogenes at Manzikert (Malazgirt) |
| c. 1075–1081 | Süleyman ibn Qutalmish establishes a Seljuk state based at Nicaea (İznik) |
| 1097 | First Crusade takes Nicaea; the sultanate's centre shifts to Konya |
| 1176 | Kılıç Arslan II defeats Manuel I Komnenos at Myriokephalon |
| 1207 | Antalya captured, giving access to the Mediterranean |
| 1220–1237 | Reign of Alaeddin Keykubad I, the sultanate's high point |
| 1243 | Mongol victory at Kösedağ; the sultanate becomes a tributary state |
| c. 1308 | Last Seljuk sultan disappears from the record; the beyliks take over |
The Seljuks were a leading family among the Oghuz Turks, a confederation of pastoral tribes from the steppe east of the Caspian and Aral seas, named after a chief called Seljuk (Selçuk) who converted to Sunni Islam in the late 10th century. His grandsons Tughril and Chaghri led their followers into Khurasan, defeated the Ghaznavid sultan at Dandanaqan in 1040, and within fifteen years Tughril had entered Baghdad (1055), where the Abbasid caliph recognised him as sultan — the secular protector of a caliph whose political power had long faded.
Under Tughril's nephew Alp Arslan (r. 1063–1072) and Alp Arslan's son Malik Shah (r. 1072–1092), the Great Seljuk empire stretched from Central Asia to Syria. Its administration was Persian in language and personnel. The vizier Nizam al-Mulk served both sultans, wrote a famous treatise on government, and founded the Nizamiyya colleges, the model for the state-sponsored medrese that the Anatolian Seljuks later adopted. After Malik Shah's death in 1092 the empire split among rival princes; its last major ruler, Sanjar, died in 1157.
Turkmen raiders had been pushing into eastern Anatolia since the 1040s, sacking towns such as Ani (1064) and raiding deep into the plateau. In 1071 the emperor Romanos IV Diogenes marched east with a large army to secure the frontier. Alp Arslan, who was campaigning in Syria, turned north to meet him, and on 26 August 1071 the armies met near Manzikert (Malazgirt, in today's Muş province), north of Lake Van. The Byzantine army broke apart; the rearguard under Andronikos Doukas, a member of a rival court faction, withdrew without fighting, and Romanos himself was captured — a humiliation almost without precedent for a reigning emperor.
Alp Arslan treated his captive generously and released him in return for a ransom and treaty. The real disaster came afterwards. Romanos had been deposed in his absence; on his return he was defeated and blinded by the Doukas faction, and the years of civil war that followed, in which rival Byzantine commanders hired Turkish troops against each other, left Anatolia without an effective defence. Many historians therefore see Manzikert as a trigger rather than a single decisive blow: Turkmen groups settled across the interior over the following decade, and by the early 1080s Turkish rulers held much of the plateau. In Türkiye the battle is treated as the moment Anatolia opened to the Turks, and it is commemorated each year at Malazgirt on 26 August.
The Anatolian state was founded not by Alp Arslan's line but by a cousin branch. Süleyman ibn Qutalmish, a descendant of Seljuk through a line that had rebelled against Alp Arslan, established himself in western Anatolia and made Nicaea (İznik), barely a hundred kilometres from Constantinople, his base around 1075–1081. He died in Syria in 1086. His son Kılıç Arslan I lost Nicaea to the First Crusade in 1097 and was defeated at Dorylaeum (near Eskişehir) the same year, but he destroyed the follow-up crusading armies of 1101. The sultanate regrouped on the central plateau with Konya (the Byzantine Ikonion) as its capital.
For most of the 12th century the Seljuks of Rum were one power among several. The Danishmendids, another Turkish dynasty, held Sivas, Kayseri, Niksar and Malatya and were at first the stronger; smaller Turkish principalities such as the Saltukids at Erzurum and the Mengücekids at Erzincan and Divriği ruled the east, while the Byzantines under the Komnenian emperors recovered the coasts and western valleys.
Kılıç Arslan II (r. 1156–1192) turned the sultanate into the leading power of the interior. He absorbed the Danishmendid lands in the 1170s and, in 1176, trapped the army of Manuel I Komnenos in a mountain pass at Myriokephalon, in the lakes region west of Konya. Manuel himself compared the defeat to Manzikert, and after it Byzantium effectively gave up hope of recovering the plateau. In old age Kılıç Arslan divided his realm among his sons, and in 1190 the army of the Third Crusade under Frederick Barbarossa briefly took Konya on its way south, before Frederick drowned in the Saleph (Göksu) River near Silifke.
Reunited under Kaykhusraw I, who took Antalya in 1207, and Kaykaus I, who took Sinop on the Black Sea in 1214, the sultanate reached its peak under Alaeddin Keykubad I (r. 1220–1237). He took the coastal fortress of Kalonoros around 1221 and renamed it Alaiye — today's Alanya — where the octagonal Red Tower (Kızıl Kule) and a stone shipyard of the 1220s still stand. He built a lakeside palace at Kubadabad on Lake Beyşehir, whose tiles, with their figures, birds and animals, are the finest surviving evidence of Seljuk court art; many are in the Karatay Medrese museum in Konya. In 1230 he defeated the Khwarazmian ruler Jalal al-Din at Yassıçemen near Erzincan, and his forces even campaigned across the Black Sea at Sudak in the Crimea.
The court was cosmopolitan. Persian was the language of administration and literature, sultans took names from the Persian epic Shahnameh (Kay-Khusraw, Kay-Kawus, Kay-Qubad), Arabic was the language of religious learning, and the population remained largely Greek- and Armenian-speaking Christian for generations. Scholars fleeing the Mongols in the east came west; among them was the family of Jalal al-Din Rumi, who settled in Konya around 1228 and whose tomb is the city's great pilgrimage site (see Konya).
The Seljuks' most distinctive monuments are their caravanserais (han or kervansaray), fortified inns built along the roads linking Konya, Kayseri and Sivas with the ports of Antalya, Alanya and Sinop. They were spaced roughly a day's travel apart — commonly cited as some 30 to 40 kilometres — and many dozens survive in some form, with estimates exceeding a hundred. A typical royal han has an open courtyard with rooms, a small mosque raised on arches in the centre, and behind it a great vaulted hall for winter, lit by slits and a central lantern. Sultans and senior officials built them as charitable foundations (vakıf), and chronicles and later writers describe free lodging and state guarantees for merchants' goods; how systematically this worked is harder to establish than guidebooks suggest.
Built for Alaeddin Keykubad I in 1229 on the Konya–Aksaray road and restored after a fire in 1278. The largest Seljuk han, with a monumental carved portal and a vast winter hall.
A second royal han of the 1230s on the Kayseri–Sivas road, well preserved and usually quieter. Worth a stop between Cappadocia and Sivas.
A 13th-century han near Aksaray with fine stone carving, easily combined with Sultanhanı on the way to Cappadocia.
Seljuk architecture combines Anatolian stone construction with Iranian forms and decoration. Its hallmark is the carved stone portal (taçkapı), often far richer than the building behind it, covered in geometric interlace, muqarnas (stalactite vaulting) and inscriptions. Inside, tile mosaic in turquoise, cobalt and black lines domes and prayer niches. The medrese, a college of Islamic law and theology, is typically built around a courtyard with a large vaulted hall (eyvan) opposite the entrance; some were covered with a dome in the cold climate of the plateau.
The sultanate's decline was quick. Keykubad died suddenly in 1237, possibly poisoned, and his son Kaykhusraw II faced a large religious and social rising among the Turkmen, the Babai revolt, around 1240. Then the Mongols arrived. On 26 June 1243 a Mongol army under Baiju defeated Kaykhusraw at Kösedağ, between Sivas and Erzincan. The sultanate survived but became a tributary state, paying heavy annual tribute and, after 1256, answering to the Mongol Ilkhanate based in Iran.
For the next half-century real power lay with ministers and Mongol commanders. The most important was Mu'in al-Din Süleyman, known as the Pervane, who dominated the government from the 1260s. Yet this was also a period of heavy building: Karatay, Sahib Ata and other officials paid for many of the finest medreses and hans in these years. In 1277 the Mamluk sultan Baybars of Egypt defeated a Mongol force at Elbistan and briefly occupied Kayseri; the Ilkhan's reprisals, and the Pervane's execution, followed. The last Seljuk sultan, Mesud II, fades from the record around 1308; the exact date and circumstances are uncertain.
As central authority collapsed, frontier lords and tribal leaders set up independent principalities, the beyliks. The Karamanids, based at Karaman and later Konya, claimed to be the Seljuks' heirs; the Germiyanids ruled from Kütahya; the Aydınids, Saruhanids and Menteşe held the Aegean coast; the Candarids held Kastamonu and Sinop; and in the northwest, facing Byzantine Bithynia, was the small beylik of Osman. The beylik period produced its own monuments, such as the wooden-columned Eşrefoğlu Mosque at Beyşehir (1296–99), part of a group of medieval wooden hypostyle mosques inscribed by UNESCO in 2023, and the İsa Bey Mosque at Selçuk (1375). Over the 14th and 15th centuries Osman's descendants absorbed the other beyliks one by one; see the Ottoman Empire.
The Seljuk period changed the linguistic and religious map of Anatolia. It is when the region began to be called "Turchia" by Western writers, when Turkish-speaking Muslims became, over generations and through migration, conversion and intermarriage, the majority of the population, and when Sufi orders such as the Mevlevi took root. The Ottomans inherited Seljuk institutions: the vakıf charitable foundation, the medrese system, the network of hans, and a Persianate court culture. Modern Turkish historiography gives the Seljuks a central place, and the eight-pointed "Seljuk star" and the double-headed eagle seen on some Seljuk buildings are widely used as national and regional emblems today. Historians of Byzantium, Armenia and the Crusades tell the same period as one of loss and displacement, and both perspectives are needed to understand it.
The Seljuks were a dynasty of the Oghuz Turks, named after a chief called Seljuk, who converted to Islam in the late 10th century. His descendants founded the Great Seljuk empire in Iran and Iraq in the 11th century, and a branch of the family ruled the Sultanate of Rum in Anatolia from the late 11th to the early 14th century.
On 26 August 1071, near Malazgirt north of Lake Van, the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan defeated the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes and captured him. The emperor was released, but the civil war that followed in Byzantium left Anatolia largely undefended, and Turkish groups settled much of the interior over the next decade.
After the First Crusade took Nicaea (İznik) in 1097, the Seljuks of Rum regrouped on the central plateau, and Konya, the old Byzantine city of Ikonion, became their capital. It sat at the centre of the plateau road network, and its Alâeddin Mosque and medreses still mark the city centre.
A caravanserai, or han, is a fortified roadside inn for merchants and their animals, built roughly a day's travel apart on the trade routes of 13th-century Anatolia. The largest is Sultanhanı on the Konya to Aksaray road, built for Alaeddin Keykubad I in 1229.
At Kösedağ, between Sivas and Erzincan, a Mongol army defeated Sultan Kaykhusraw II on 26 June 1243. The Sultanate of Rum survived but became a Mongol tributary, and its authority gradually dissolved into the independent beyliks, one of which grew into the Ottoman state.
No. The Ottomans descend from Osman, the leader of a small frontier beylik in northwestern Anatolia around 1300. They inherited much of the Seljuk political and cultural world, but they were a separate dynasty that rose as Seljuk power collapsed.