Work, Markets and Leisure in the Seljuk World

At Dandanaqan, in the desert between Merv and Sarakhs in present-day Turkmenistan, Seljuk forces defeated the Ghaznavids in 1040, opening Khorasan to Great Seljuk rule. A separate branch, the Seljuks of Rum, first centered its Anatolian sultanate on Nicaea, modern İznik, which became its capital around 1081. The Byzantines took Nicaea in 1097, and a Seljuk ruler established himself at Konya in 1109. Across Iran and Anatolia, work connected household production and workshops with markets, while courtly recreation, public baths and urban associations gave people other ways to gather. The examples span the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, when Seljuk political control shifted between different dynasties and cities.

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Work behind the markets

Households combined production with food preparation and care, while craft workers also took commissions and traded through local markets. Town markets brought rural produce and manufactured goods into contact with buyers: growers brought produce in, traders stored goods for later sale, and local workshops sold goods nearby or to merchants on longer routes. A finished object could pass through several hands, from acquiring materials to making and transporting it.

The Persian traveler Nāṣer-e Ḵosrow visited Isfahan, a city in central Iran, in 1052 and described a busy commercial quarter. Its bazaar included 200 moneychangers; one street held fifty caravanserais, commercial lodging houses where merchants could stay with their goods. The district brought currency exchange and merchant lodging together, supporting the storage and sale of merchandise.

Building commissions created another kind of working relationship. On prestigious projects, master craftsmen moved from one site to another when a commission ended, and elite patrons paid for their work. A later account describes the construction of Karatay Han, a caravanserai in Anatolia, before 1240 and how the patron Qarāṭay responded when the project’s books showed spending above the craftsmen’s estimates: he burned the accounts rather than force the master craftsmen and trusted agents into debt. Craftsmen supplied estimates for materials and could be held responsible for a deficit, so the story shows how a patron’s decision affected the people who organized and carried out a building project.

Market oversight and working associations

Markets required standards buyers could use. A market inspector, called a muḥtasib, oversaw commercial conduct and public order. Historian Christian Lange describes a distinct Seljuq profile for this office. His chapter contrasts it with early Umayyad and Abbasid inspectors, who checked scales, measures and food quality. The Syrian jurist al-Shayzari, who died in 1193, wrote a handbook for an appointed inspector with chapters on weighing, prices and tricks used by merchants. The questions were practical: did the measure hold the promised quantity, and did the goods match the seller’s claim?

Craft and marketplace life also drew on futuwwa, an ethical tradition that praised charity, restrained greed and encouraged legitimate ways of earning a living. The Abbasid caliph al-Nasir, ruler of the Islamic state (r. 1180–1225), brought futuwwa into courtly life and invited the Anatolian Seljuk sultan Kaykawus I (r. 1211–1220) to join through an emissary and symbolic gifts. Futuwwa later shaped Anatolian akhi brotherhoods, associations whose manuals connected ethical conduct with professional crafts and the marketplace. Some groups built hospices, shared places where members met and guests received hospitality. After the Seljuks’ defeat by Mongol forces at Kösedağ in 1243, akhi groups became more prominent as political power fragmented across Anatolia.

Bathhouses and social gatherings

A hammam was a bathhouse that heated water for washing, and keeping one open required a continuing supply of water and fuel. In Konya, the Seljuk vizier, or chief minister, Sahib Ata Fahreddin Ali founded a complex whose paired bath was probably built between 1258 and 1279. Its northern half served men and its southern half women. Each side led from changing rooms through cooler and warm rooms to a heated bathing area. The complex also had a water reservoir and a furnace to supply the bath.

Baths provided a setting outside the home for washing and meeting. Other gatherings were tied to religious occasions, weddings and hospitality. A dish from Kashan, a city in central Iran, dating to the first quarter of the thirteenth century shows a wedding procession clustered around a veiled woman, probably a bride, carried in a litter.

Games, music and courtly hunting

Chess offered a game of tactical competition. Persian chess, or shatranj, used an eight-by-eight board, with each side commanding a king and counselor, an adviser piece, elephants, horses, chariots and foot soldiers. Players took turns moving one piece at a time. The counselor moved only one square diagonally; the elephant leapt two squares diagonally over the intervening square, while the horse moved in the familiar knight’s L-shaped jump. These pieces made attacks develop more slowly than in modern chess, where the queen can travel across the board. Players sought to checkmate the opposing king, leaving him unable to escape capture. A twelfth-century set from Nishapur, a city in northeastern Iran, shows the pieces in abstract forms: thrones for king and counselor, a knobbed horse, tusklike projections for the elephant and a rectangular chariot. The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates it to the twelfth century and identifies it as molded and glazed stonepaste, a fine ceramic material.

Music and hunting also appear in objects made for elite settings. A famous lute player from Khorasan performed at the court of Great Seljuk Sultan Sanjar in Marv during his reign (1118–1157). A late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century Iranian bowl depicts two women playing lutes, plucked string instruments with necks and rounded bodies, and possibly singing beneath a garden pavilion. Another bowl shows an enthroned ruler surrounded by horsemen hunting with falcons and trained cheetahs. Falconers trained birds of prey and flew them after game; trained cheetahs rode with handlers on horseback and hunted hares and gazelles. An eleventh-century Nishapur ewer, or pouring jug, shows a man and a saluki hunting dog pursuing a hare. These objects connect music and animal-assisted hunting with princely recreation.