Agriculture, Land and Pastoralism under the Seljuks

Agriculture in the Seljuk world joined several ways of making a living. In Iran and Iraq, farmers worked river valleys, irrigated districts and rain-fed fields; in Anatolia, much of modern Turkey, villages combined grain fields, gardens, orchards and animal keeping. Crops and livestock sustained households and towns, while rents and assigned land revenues also supported military and religious institutions. The balance varied by place: the cultivated oasis around Merv in modern Turkmenistan depended on canals and dams, while herders in upland and steppe districts moved to find pasture.

Fields and herds were connected through labor and resources. A plough needed draft animals, manure returned nutrients to the soil, and herds supplied meat, milk, wool and skins to towns. At the same time, pasture routes could cross cultivated zones or land already used by other herders. Seljuk rulers and local landholders therefore relied on the work of settled farmers and mobile communities, while access to fields, water and grazing could bring them into conflict.

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Fields, harvest and storage

For a farmer, the year moved from preparing the soil to sowing, tending, harvest and storage. In twelfth- and thirteenth-century Anatolia, historical accounts describe oxen pulling ploughs to break and turn the soil before seed was sown. Rumi describes a garden divided into separate plots for onions, garlic and other vegetables. The range grown in Seljuk Anatolia included wheat, barley, rye, millet and rice, as well as lentils and chickpeas; grapes and fruit trees supplied additional food and market produce.

Harvesting grain did not end with cutting the stalks. Farmers took the crop to a threshing floor, where oxen pulled a rough wooden sled called a döven over the stalks to loosen grain from straw. They then tossed the mixture into the air to winnow it. Wind carried away the lighter chaff, leaving heavier grain to be gathered for storage. The same wind was needed to winnow, so a delay could hold up the work after harvest.

Storage protected the grain for food and future sowing. A 1277 account mentions grain warehouses in Kayseri, central Anatolia, and an Amasya property deed records an underground grain store among a village’s assets. Grain could also be kept in sacks or sealed storage pits. Straw was stored separately for animal fodder, linking the harvest back to the livestock that would pull ploughs and provide manure in the next agricultural cycle.

The stakes of weather appear in a story about Konya preserved by the fourteenth-century writer Ahmed Eflaki. He recounts a year when rain failed, food became expensive and townspeople repeatedly sought rain; when it finally came, runoff from the hills flooded the plain. The episode connects rainfall to both crop and pasture conditions, and shows why storage mattered when harvests were uncertain.

Waterworks and maintenance

Rain-fed fields could prosper in wetter seasons, but much of the Iranian plateau was too dry for reliable cultivation without irrigation. Farmers and water users depended on channels, dams and underground galleries, and these works required regular clearing and repair. A qanat, also called a kariz, carried groundwater to the surface through a gently sloping tunnel. Gravity moved the water downhill to the outlet, where channels distributed it to fields and gardens.

Seljuk-era records name public works in several districts. The governor of Fars in southern Iran, Chavli Saqao, repaired dams there in the early twelfth century. Rulers also enlarged dams and canals along the Murghab River, which watered the Merv oasis, while the historian Hamdallah Mustawfi later listed qanats made in Qazvin, in northwestern Iran, by the Seljuks. Such construction had to be followed by upkeep: a blocked canal or broken dam could interrupt water to fields downstream.

In Anatolia, a different device raised water from rivers to nearby gardens. A wooden waterwheel turned as the current pushed its rim; buckets fixed around the wheel lifted water to the top, where it poured into a trough and then ran through channels to plots. Thirteenth-century poems describe wheels watering orchards and vegetable gardens. The wheel moved water only as long as its river kept flowing and the wooden frame and buckets remained in working order.

Water access could also become a local political issue. Historian Vanessa Van Renterghem’s study of eleventh-century Baghdad documents disputes over everyday access to shared water during the late Buyid and early Seljuk periods. Near Mosul in Iraq, two documents cited by Lambton show another kind of pressure: an official who held an assigned district had taken private estates, and orders demanded their return to their owners. These cases show why maintaining water and protecting cultivators’ rights mattered to the same communities that supplied officials and cities.

Land, dues and assigned revenue

A field’s cultivator, owner and revenue recipient could be different people. Private estates and land belonging to religious endowments existed alongside state interests. The Seljuk iqta was an assignment of revenue or administrative authority attached to a district, not automatically a transfer of every field to the official who received it. A holder might collect a specified tax or due from cultivators, while ownership of a private estate remained with its former owner.

This distinction shaped what a farmer owed and to whom. The Seljuk vizier, or chief minister, Nizam al-Mulk advised iqta holders to collect only the amount assigned to them and to treat the people of the district properly. He warned rulers to replace tax collectors and holders periodically so they would not build a permanent local power base. In practice, grants could include administrative duties as well as revenue, and the boundary between public authority and private possession was sometimes contested, as the Mosul estate orders show.

An iqta could also connect dispersed harvests to the moving army. Under Malik Shah, records describe revenue assignments spread across the empire so that grain, fodder and other provisions would be available along the army’s routes. The arrangement reduced the need to carry every supply from the capital, but it tied military movement to local harvests and the people who stored and delivered them. Irrigation repairs, secure roads and productive villages therefore served the state as well as the households that worked the land.

Pasture, movement and local rivalry

Mobile pastoral communities used seasonal movement to match their flocks to changing grass and water. In the 1020s, Oghuz Turkic groups moved with sheep and horses into the pasturelands of Khorasan, a region spanning northeastern Iran and adjoining lands. By about 1030, some bands were ranging west toward Ray, a city near modern Tehran, and the Jibal, the western Iranian highlands. Historian C. Edmund Bosworth reports that their herds disrupted oasis agriculture by grazing on cultivated land, while raids also disturbed caravan traffic. The episode shows how herders seeking pasture could put pressure on fields and the routes that linked rural producers to towns.

A second conflict involved established pastoral communities. Ann Lambton notes that early Oghuz bands met opposition in the Kurdish districts of western Azerbaijan in northwestern Iran and the Jazira, Upper Mesopotamia, where indigenous herders already used the grazing grounds. A separate group of 700 or 900 Oghuz crossed the Oxus River, north of Khorasan, in 1034–35 and entered Khorasan after the Ghaznavid ruler Masud refused their request to settle under his protection. The Seljuks defeated Masud near Merv at Dandanqan in 1040 and took power in Khorasan, but pasture remained a resource negotiated among mobile groups, villages and rulers. Flocks also supplied towns with meat, milk products, wool and skins, so pastoral production supported the same markets that bought village crops.

In Anatolia during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, crop growing, orchards, animal keeping and water-lifting devices appear together in village and property records. A deed might list a garden, waterwheel, mill or storehouse among the assets of a village holding. Such items were productive infrastructure: a waterwheel irrigated plots, a mill processed grain, and a storehouse carried food from one season into the next. These local arrangements helped connect farmers and herders to the towns and institutions that depended on their labor.