Towns, Villages and Pastoral Life under the Seljuks

From the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, Seljuk life joined towns to villages, cultivated land and grazing grounds. The Great Seljuqs ruled from Iran and neighboring regions, while the Seljuqs of Rum governed much of Anatolia. In both settings, urban households depended on people who grew food, raised animals and moved goods. Rural and pastoral communities, in turn, used towns to exchange produce, pay taxes and seek protection or patronage.

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Markets and their rural hinterlands

In the Iranian evidence, a town could serve as the place where villagers delivered crops and paid taxes. Market towns drew food from the surrounding district and sold manufactured goods back into it. Larger cities also connected these local exchanges to longer routes and gathered rulers, tax officials, religious institutions and traders in the same urban space.

Nishapur, in northeastern Iran, was one such center. Its location on the overland routes helped bring merchants and craftspeople, while its surrounding countryside supplied food and materials. At Qanat Tepe, excavators found small residences, a mosque near an underground water channel, a bathhouse and a pottery kiln. Sabz Pushan was a separate residential quarter of ordinary houses and small alleys, considered in more detail below. These excavated districts show that Nishapur’s urban life extended beyond palaces and citadels.

Isfahan shows how rulers and residents responded when conflict interrupted this exchange. The Great Seljuq ruler Toghril Beg besieged the city in the mid-eleventh century. A famine preceded its surrender. When the traveler Nasir-e Khosrow visited in 1052, he reported that Toghril had appointed a new governor and remitted taxes for three years; people who had left were returning. Nasir also described busy commercial streets, including one with fifty caravanserais, city inns used by merchants, and many money changers who exchanged coins.

Konya and an Anatolian court

Konya became a major center in central Anatolia after the First Crusade captured Nicaea, now İznik in northwestern Anatolia, in 1097. The Seljuqs of Rum did not recover the western city, and their political center shifted toward Konya, amid settlements with earlier Byzantine histories. In the thirteenth century, Konya stood on routes running across Anatolia in both east-west and north-south directions. Its mosque and palace stood on a central hill, beside tomb towers that served as mausoleums for the ruling family. Merchants, scholars and officials added other kinds of urban life.

The sultans did not remain in one city throughout the year. By the late twelfth century they moved among Konya, Aksaray and Kayseri, and seasonally to the southern coast. These centers all supported court activity, but their fortunes depended on local roads and surrounding districts. Konya’s position as a political center therefore sat within a wider network of Anatolian towns.

Homes, courtyards and household water

Nishapur offers unusually concrete evidence for domestic space. In Sabz Pushan, a residential quarter occupied from the ninth to twelfth centuries, houses were built of sun-dried brick and covered with white plaster. Most had three or four rooms arranged around a central courtyard and opened onto small alleys. At nearby Village Tepe, residences of similar form included underground storage chambers supplied with water from a canal. These excavated homes show how storage, circulation and household access to water were built into an urban neighborhood. In the twelfth or thirteenth century, kilns occupied areas that had previously held houses, evidence that some parts of Nishapur shifted from residential to craft use.

Water also connected cities and villages to larger systems of maintenance. In arid parts of Iran, a qanat carried groundwater along a gently sloping underground tunnel, then brought it to the surface for distribution to settlements and fields. Yazd, a town in central Iran, shows rural settlement expanding around an established urban center. In 1051, Toghril Beg took Isfahan from the Kakuyid ruler Abu Mansur Faramarz and granted him Abarquh and Yazd as revenue assignments. Faramarz’s successors continued as local rulers for several years. Under them, new villages were built and qanats dug near Yazd. The Atabegs, regional rulers who succeeded them in the late twelfth century, continued this development. Saljuq-era accounts describe qanats near Qazvin and work on dams and canals in other provinces. Provincial governors and officials who administered assigned revenues were responsible for maintaining irrigation works, roads and bridges. For a village household, a functioning channel could determine whether crops and livestock had enough water; for a city, the same infrastructure sustained its food supply.

Pastoral movement and town life

Oghuz, Turkic-speaking pastoral groups, moved westward into Khorasan, the northeastern Iranian region and adjacent lands. In the 1020s, some crossed the Oxus River, now called the Amu Darya, and later groups searched for new pasture as they moved through the region. A group associated with the Saljuq family used winter pasture near Bukhara and summer pasture in Sogdia, around Samarkand. Other Oghuz groups settled in or passed through places such as Isfahan and Ray. Flocks could supply towns with meat, milk products, wool and animal skins, while herders needed access to pasture beyond the cultivated belt around towns and villages.

In Anatolia, Turkmen groups also sought grazing along the frontier with Byzantium. Seljuq rulers increasingly distinguished their court from the activities of these tribesmen, over whom they had limited control. Mobile herders and town residents therefore occupied connected but sometimes competing landscapes: pasture supported herds, cultivated fields supplied grain, and market centers brought the products of both into exchange.