The last ruler of the Great Seljukid State, Sultan Sanjar took the Seljukid throne after defeating
his nephew Mahmud in H. 513/1119 C.E. However, he did not come to Isfahan, the capital of the
Sultanate and establishing a new administrative region in the west of the state, he appointed his
nephew Mahmoud as its ruler. Thus, the Seljukid Sultanate of Iraq was founded. As the sole ruler of
the state, Sanjar made Merv the new capital of the Sultanate. Later, Mahmoud, the Sultan of the
Seljukid Sultanate of Iraq, transferred the capital from Isfahan to Hemedan and it stayed as the
capital of the state until it collapsed. In addition to the above mentioned narrative, some orientalists argued that Sultan Sanjar established another administrative unit called Kurdistan during his
reign. This argument depends on the information that Sanjar gave the administration of this
province with its capital Bahâr to his niece Suleimanshah even though no source whatsoever was
given to support it. Since the reliability of such information is debatable, its content (the names of
persons and locations as well as the date) should be tested in the light of extant sources. This article
aims to examine the content of the above mentioned information by asking questions such as
whether or not Suleimanshah Abûh was the same person with Sultan Suleimanshah or was the date
of the event in accordance with the known chronology of the Seljukid Empire. In this paper, these
questions will be answered in the light of information in the other sources.
Primary Language | Turkish |
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Journal Section | Articles |
Authors | |
Publication Date | September 26, 2018 |
Published in Issue | Year 2017 Issue: 6 |
Selçuk University Journal of Seljuk Studies is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY NC).