Significant Developments in the Nature of Islamic States

Decline and Collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate

By the mid-10th century, the Sunni Muslim Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258) with its capital in Baghdad woolly examine over Egypt, which was ruled from 969 to 1171 by Fatimids of the dissident Ismaili sect, atomic number 7 Africa and Spain. Even in Mesopotamia itself and in Persia, Lapidus says that "by 935 the regime had lost overtop of virtually all of its provinces except the region close to Baghdad" (132). The Abbasid caliphs became the prisoners of foreign war machine elites which they imported from Central Asia. As central authority disintegrated, public works such as irrigation decayed and trade declined. Lapidus says that in the East "everywhere the come acrossd landowning and bureaucratic elites lost their authority and were replaced by new military and political elites composed of nomadic chieftains and slave soldiers," such as the Buwayhids in western Iran and Iraq, the Saminids in Eastern Iran and Transoxania and in the easy 12th century the Ghaznavids, Afghan tribes who ruled Khurasan in youthful Afghanistan and parts of Northern India.

The chaotic conditions within the Abbasid Caliphate and the decline of the gnarled state in Anatolia opened their northern and eastern frontiers to migrations and incursions by nomadic peoples from the steppes around the Caspian Sea, most(prenominal) notably the Seljuk Turks who defeat the Byzantines in two major

Lapidus, Ira M. A History of Islamic Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1988.

fragmentation and Reunification in the West

Holt, P. M. The Age of the Crusades The Near East from the ordinal Century to 1517. Harlow, Essex: Addison Wesley Longman, 1986.

As Mongol government agency receded and despite their net defeat at the hands of Tamerlane in 1402, the Ottoman Turks gradually during the late 13th and fourteenth centuries expanded their zone of control in Anatolia and established a bridgehead across the Dardanelles into the Balkans afterwards their victories at Kossovo in 1389 and Nicopolis in 1396 (where they defeated a have papal-Venetian fleet). Their motives for leaving the steppe were easy to understand: "veneration of the chiefs . . .

the desire to square off rich pasturage, gather booty and win victories against the infidels" (Holt 304). Under a series of remarkably gifted Sultans in the 13th and 14th centuries, especially Bayazid I 1389-1402, the Ottomans learned how to sustain sedentary civilizations term at the same time preserving their martial ardor and favorable position over their foes in battle, a balance that became difficult to handle centuries later. Under the Ottomans, the Islamic world was destined to achieve a power and a unity it had not enjoyed since the days of the Arab conquest.

battles in Anatolia in 1071 and 1176. The Seljuks converted to Sunni Islam and during their periodic control over Mesopotamia after they first captured Baghdad in 1055 acted as Sultans wielding effective power under nominal Abbasid Caliphs.

The principal areas in contention in the West in the 13th century were Syria, Egypt and Palestine. According to Holt, "when the Crusaders approached Syria in the autumn of 1097, they had before them a politically fragmented land, where the rulers were for the most part men of narrow vision and little experience" (15). Three outstanding Muslim rulers led the counteroffensive. First, the Seljuk atabeg or family ruler Zangi recaptured Edes
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