Byzantium and the Emergence of Muslim-Turkish Anatolia, ca. 1040-1130

This monograph concerns one of the great watersheds in the historical development of medieval Byzantium, the Turkish penetration of Asia Minor in the wake of the creation of the Seljuk Empire in the central Muslim lands and the collapse of Byzantine military and administrative structures in the empire's eastern provinces.

The permanent settlement of Islamized Turks, the emergence of new political structures, the introduction of ideological concepts, administrative practices, and religious institutions from the Muslim central lands, and the co-existence of and acculturation between indigenous Christian populations and Turkish-Muslim immigrants are some of the key issues of the transformative process from Byzantine to Turkish Asia Minor. This study focuses on the earliest stage of this process, from the first emergence of Turkish warrior groups in the Armenian borderlands in the early 1040s up to the crystallization of new frontier zones and political constellations in Asia Minor in about 1130.

Apart from the lack of full-length studies in European languages, the secondary literature presents a number of serious flaws and shortcomings and, against this backdrop, the present study intends to overcome the biased views of scholarly disciplines and opposing nationalistic concepts. Its main argument is that Asia Minor was neither conquered nor transformed into a settlement area of nomadic pastoralists due to climatic and economic changes. Rather, through an interplay of internal and external factors, there was a gradual decay of centralizing imperial structures, which gave way to the emergence of small-size regional powers of Byzantine, Frankish, and Turkish origin.

Alexander Beihammer’s research interests focus on the middle and late Byzantine period. He has published monographs on the transmission of Byzantine letters and official documents in Arabic medieval sources, and on Greek documents issued in the crusader kingdom of Cyprus. His scholarly articles address forms of communication and ritual aspects in Byzantine-Muslim relations, and institutional and social transformation in Frankish-held territories of Byzantium. He has collaborated in a major project of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences on summaries of Byzantine imperial charters and has co-edited volumes on diplomacy and ceremonies in the Eastern Mediterranean.