The fame of Seljuk, the founder of a united Turkish state in Central Asia, is almost mythical. Under his son, the Seljukian house became great by crossing the Oxus and effecting the conquest of Khorassan. Under his grandson Togrul Beg, the Seljukians became the greatest power in Asia. Togrul first broke up the power of the descendants of Mahmoud of Ghazni, and then attacked the Bowides, and conquered Persia. In 1055 he crowned his career by the occupation of Bagdad, where he was welcomed as the deliverer of the phantom Caliphs from the tyranny of their Bowide Ameers, and was solemnly invested by them with their temporal power. Henceforth Togrul, the Sultan of East and West, posed as the defender of the faith, and the protector of the successor of Mohammed.
After the conquest of Bagdad, Togrul Beg attacked Armenia and threatened the Byzantine frontiers. He died in 1063, and in the very next year Alp Arslan, his nephew and successor (1063–1072), completed, by the capture of Ani, the capital, the subjugation of the unhappy Armenians. The Georgians were next enslaved; and, master of the Christian outposts of the East Roman realm, Alp Arslan turned his arms against the Empire itself.
The occupation of the rich plains of Asia in no wise changed the character of the Turks. They remained as they had ever been, soldiers and nothing more. Their old religions had died away as they came into contact with Islam, and in embracing the Mohammedan faith they obtained religious sanction for their ferocity and greed. But they never, like the Arabs, entered into the spiritual side of the faith. They rather received and retained the new religion, as a faithful soldier keeps the word of command of his general. They had no eyes for the brilliant fascination of Arab civilisation, such as was at that very time attaining its highest perfection in Mohammedan Spain. They appropriated what had gone before, but they never assimilated it or added anything of their own. The statecraft of the Arabs had no more attraction for them than the poetry, the romance, the lawgiving, the architecture, or the busy commercial life of Semitic Asia. [Sidenote: Contrast between Turks and Arabs.] When they had conquered they carelessly stood aside, and contemptuously allowed their vassals to live on their old life, save when, in occasional fits of fury, they taught that they were masters by hideous violence or promiscuous massacres. But their hardiness won an easy triumph over the soft and effeminate Arabs, and was soon to win fresh laurels at the expense of the lax and corrupt Christians of the East. It was a day of ill omen for East and West alike when the capture of Bagdad made the Turkish soldier the type of Mohammedan conquest. In the centuries when the Arab was the typical representative of Islam, the desolation of Africa and Syria showed how great were the evils that followed in the wake of Mohammedan conquest of Christian lands. But in East and West alike the triumphs of the Turk were unmixed evils, and the strife of East and West assumed a new aspect when a barbarous and unteachable soldier, mighty only in destruction, became the chief agent of Eastern advance. It was no longer the continuance of the struggle between Eastern and Western civilisation that was as old as Marathon. Henceforth it was a strife between the only possible civilisation and the most brutal and hopeless barbarism. Yet the superior military efficiency of the Turk put an irresistible weapon into his hands. Since the days of Leo the Isaurian and Charles Martel, the relations of the Eastern and Western worlds had been almost stationary. A new wave of Eastern aggression now set in, to be followed in its turn by a period of Western retaliation. The Seljukian attacks on Armenia and the Empire brought about the Nemesis of the Crusades and the Latin kingdoms of the East.
