The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East.

• Author: Behiery, Valerie
• Position: Book review

The Seljuks of Anatolia

Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East

By A.C.S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yildiz

London: I. B. Tauris, 2013, 308 pages, ISBN 9781848858879.

THE RECENT BOOK edited by A.C.S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yildiz, The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East, demonstrates how a cognizance of historiography affords the ability to reexamine a historical period. The book, which emerged out of a workshop held in Istanbul in 2009, reinvigorates the study of the Seljuk Empire. Its authors, in order to compensate for the paucity of Muslim sources on medieval Anatolia, draw from a number of "untapped" sources such as Greek and Armenian texts, epigraphy, poetry and letters sent to the court.

More significantly, they employ innovative frameworks that test standard perceptions of the Sultanate of Rum (c. 1081-308) and emphasize its religious, cultural, and linguistic diversity. Thus, while the cited aim of the book is to "explore how court and society interacted and shaped one [anjother" moving "beyond the more purely political history that has dominated to date" (p. 4), its larger purpose of questioning entrenched views of the Seljuk dynasty and medieval Anatolia, and the methods that it uses to offer up new avenues of research make this book a benchmark in the field.

Due to the book's ambitious intent, a good introduction is critical, which Peacock and Yildiz deliver. The two medievalists succeed in outlining, for specialists and non-specialists alike, the study of Seljuk history and the caveats inherent in the field, from the lack of sources to political strife among competing dynasties or heirs. They are especially keen in rejecting the nationalist perspective that continues to underwrite modern scholarship. For example, they challenge what they see as Claude Cahen and Osman Turan's conflation of the borders of Seljuk Anatolia with those of modern Turkey, and widely-held views about the dynasty's close ties and direct historical relationship with both the neighbouring Great Seljuks and the Ottomans. In short, the introduction--and indeed the book as a whole--posits the discontinuities of history, not to prohibit any notion of a historically-forged Turkish cultural imaginary, but rather to examine the Anatolian Seljuk dynasty on its own terms.

The Seljuks of Anatolia are structured around three loosely conceived themes, namely the dynastic identity and the Great Seljuk inheritance, the royal household, and...