Battle of Dandanaqan

The Seljuks were Oghuz Turks of the Qïnïq tribe, named after the warlord Seljuk, who had led his clan to the Syr Darya near Jend, where they became Muslims in 985. Groups of Turkmen had already been settled in Khurasan, around Sarakhs, Farawa and Abivard, under Mahmud of Ghazni; in 1035 Seljuk’s grandsons Tughril and Chaghri crossed the Amu Darya with their people into Khurasan and took refuge around Nasa, on the northern edge of the province. When Mas’ud I sent an army against them, they defeated it and made him cede Nasa, Farawa and Dihistan in return for recognising his authority; in 1037 they obtained Merv, Sarakhs and Abivard, and when they captured Nishapur (1037–1038), Tughril proclaimed himself sultan of Khurasan.

In 1040 Mas’ud took the field against them with a large army that included war elephants. The Seljuk horsemen, at home in the steppe and the desert, harassed his columns and cut them off from their supplies and from the wells. At Dandanaqan, on 23 May — in some accounts the fighting lasted three days, until 25 May — the hungry and demoralised Ghaznavid army was routed. The chief account of the campaign is that of Abu’l-Fadl Bayhaqi, a secretary at the Ghaznavid court, whose surviving volumes cover 1030–1041.

After the victory the brothers divided the conquered lands: Chaghri made Merv and Khurasan his base, while Tughril turned west into Iran, and they wrote to the caliph al-Qa’im asking him to confirm their authority. Mas’ud fled to Ghazni and decided to withdraw to India; on the way his troops mutinied and restored his brother Muhammad, who imprisoned him in the fortress of Giri, where he was killed in January 1041 on the orders of Muhammad or of his son Ahmad. The Ghaznavids kept their eastern lands and the Punjab until 1186, but the future belonged to the Seljuks: in 1055 Tughril entered Baghdad, and in 1071 Chaghri’s son Alp Arslan defeated the Byzantine emperor at Manzikert.