The Turco-Mongol Invasions and the Lords of Armenia in the 13 ...

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Presumably many of them Islam!zed. Subsequently, after
the establishment of Saljuq political control, other
Armenians converted, be they the young Armenian boys,
gulams. absorbed into the Saljuq military schools, or the
skilled Armenian bureaucrats and artisans who dominated
numerous important positions within the various Turkish
states, and who figure prominently in Turkish epic liter-
ature (see below) .
The upshot of this conversion, forcible or voluntary,
was the creation with time of a distinct group-virtually
excluded from the Armenian sources as "renegades", but
apparently not yet fully accepted by their new Muslim
eo-religionists either, who in their sources usually style
Uostadi bi-Amr Allah Abu Muhammad al-Haaan ibn Yusuf ibn
Hostakid (d, 1180), p. 222 and n. 50. The fact that
succession in the Caliphate tended to pass hereditarily
from father to son meant that throughout the ll-12th
centuries, many of the Caliphs were of some Armenian
descent. However, it must be underlined that Armenian
extraction did not necessarily mean that the individual
identified with the Armenians, or even that he or she
was aware'of the relation.
1
DMH pp. 240 ff. Also on the gulams see Sp. Yryonis,
" Seljuk Gulams and Ottoman Sevsnlrmes", Per Islam. XLI
(1965) PP. 224-52.
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