Islamic States and Rulership

ISLAMIC STATES AND RULERSHIP IN 13TH AND 14TH CENTURIES

This research paper discusses the most important developments in the nature of Islamic states and rulership during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (1200-1400 A.D.). By 1200 the great Arab expansion and consolidation of Muslim imperial rule which had begun in the 7th century had peaked and receded under the pressure of external military threats from the West and Central Asia and the effects of internal processes of political fragmentation and decay.

During the succeeding two centuries, that process of disintegration continued, even accelerated largely in response to the invasions of the Crusaders and the Mongols, but the first steps were taken toward the reunification of portions of the Islamic world on a new basis. That new basis varied considerably in the East and the West. In the former Persian domains and further East, the Abbasid Empire was largely succeeded by a militarized Mongol state which remained Islamic but which largely took on a regionalized hue and in which new provincial elites rose to power.

In the West alien regimes wielding power through military slave households replaced the formerly cosmopolitan empire, but succeeded largely because of the infusion of warrior elements from Central Asia, mostly Turks, in reimposing for long periods, punctuated by periods of internal disorder, Muslim unity. In the northern region of western Asia, the Turks organized states, first under the Seljuks and th

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d, which tempered the excesses of its military rule. One of its lasting legacies was its extensive tax system. Mongol administrators adopted and expanded the previous practice of granting iqtas, or the right to collect taxes on lands owned by non-Muslims in lieu of salary and granting tax farms, measures which expanded revenues, while not endearing the regime to the rural masses. Before the Persian ilkhanate finally dissolved in 1336, only to be briefly revived during the period of the conquests of Tamerlane (1370-1405), the Mongols left behind highly militarized states whose authority was respected and which had considerable regional autonomy. Fragmentation and Reunification in the West After their defeat by the Mongols in 1243, power in Anatolia was effectively divided between the Byzantines who were periodically allied with the Frankish Outremer along the Eastern Mediterranean coastal littoral and the Mongols with what was left of the Seljuks squeezed into mountainous areas between them. 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 th

Category: History - I