reasingly relied on foreign military castes drawn from the nomadic tribes of central Asia and slave troops to maintain themselves in power. They were replaced by the Seljuk Turks who in the 11th century seized power in Mesopotamia, Iran and Syria and advanced into portions of Byzantine Anatolia. Successive conquerors followed as the political unity of the Arab Empire in Western Asia fragmented. The Crusaders in the late 11th and early 12th centuries took major cities in Palestine and Syria until they were beaten back by the forces of Saladin and his Mamluk successors in the late 12th and 13th centuries. The Mongols defeated the Seljuks and conquered most of the northern tier of Arab states in the 1240s. Tamerlane laid waste much of the region between 1380 and 1402.
Agriculture suffered because of war and the Black Plague in the 13th and 14th centuries and increasing tax burdens. Hodgson says that "for the peasants, the problem was how to escape disaster from increasingly arbitrary exactions" (Vol. 2 102). The result was chaos in the countryside, less land under cultivation, lower agricultural production, the concealment and with
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