TURKOMANS BETWEEN TWO EMPIRES: THE ... - Bilkent University

Let us rob them together. But if you wish to be certain of collecting grain and
food for your tables in the future, I must be harsh with you. You must be thought
to reason. If you insult the ra’iyyat, take their oxen and seed, and trample their
corps into the ground, what will you do in the future?...The obedient ra’iyyat
must be distinguished from the ra’iyyat who are our enemies. How should we
not protect the obedient, allowing them to suffer distress and torment at our
hands. 160
Thomas Barfield rightfully interprets these attempts by Mongol rulers as the
beginning of the discrimination between the ruling elite and ordinary tribal basis of the
conquest: “The concern for establishing a proper administration was only the first of
many cleavages between Turko-Mongolian elites and ordinary tribal peoples in the
Middle East.” 161
This ongoing process replaces conquering tribal forces by a new governmental
organization, which is essentially derived from the previous establishment and supplies
administrative-scribal cadres to the governmental organization. The same process also
routinely supplements the tribal army with newly recruited forces, expected to be more
dependent on, and thus loyal to, the ruler. In short, tribal elements are continuously and
routinely being curbed in the newly establishing order. 162 As Lapidus observes, this was
the case for the Umayyad-‘Abbasid, Fatimid, Almoravid, Almohad, Saljuq, Ottoman,
and Safavid regimes.
Umayyad military policy aimed for almost a century at replacing the general
levée en masse of the Arabs with selected client forces, whether Arab, Berber,
Iranian, or Soghdian…The ‘Abbasids first depended on the Arab troops who had
160 This speech is reproduced in I. P. Petrushevsky, “The Socio-economic Condition of Iran under the Ilkhans”,
in J. A. Boyle, The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 5, The Seljuq and Mongol Period, Cambridge,
1968, p. 495.
161 Thomas J. Barfield, “Tribe and State Relations: The Inner Asian Perspective”, in Philip S. Khoury and
Joseph Kostiner, eds., Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford:
University of California Press, 1990, p. 174.
162 On the evaluation of Islamic polity, especially on creation of slave origin soldiers to protect the
stability of the order and the power of ruling dynasty against conqueror tribal nomads see Patricia Crone,
Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980;
John Masson Smith, Jr., ‘Turanian Nomadism and Iranian Policies’, Iranian Studies, 11, 1978, pp. 57-81.
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