SN (vii)

The author of present work, Nizam al-Mulk, was for over thirty years the chief minister of two successive rulers of the Seljuq tribes. They came of a race of wiry and relentless warriors inured to the hardships of life in the Kirghiz steppes, whence in the tenth century a.d. they descended upon the softer and more fertile lands of the Oxus. There they embraced Islam with all the fervour of their uncouth souls, as Stanley Lane-Poole puts it, and participated in the struggles between other tribes of recent conversion for supremacy and spoil.Eventually, one Seljuq chieftain, Chaghri Beg accumulated horses, men and equipment enough to venture on an invasion of the huge Persian province of Khurasan. His son and grandson, Alp Arsalan and Malikshah successive masters of Nizam al-Mulk swept onwards,while his brother Tughil beg expanded his conquests in neighbouring territories, until at last the sSljuq empire covered all the lands from the borders of Chinese Turkestan and India to the confines of Egypt, and rubbed against the frontier post of the byzantine empire.

The Seljuq Empire was presided over by warrior chiefs,whose slaves commanded the armies which kept it in subjection. these slaves were Mamluks, bought as children and reared in the chieftains own families, so that their fidelity could be relied upon, whereas that of free man might be tainted with personal ambition. it was to cope with such conditions as these that Nizam al-Mulk compiled his manual.he had been compelled at the outset of his career to construct a civil service capable of administering great tracts of territory,sparsely dotted with inhabited towns and villages.Like the Arabs before them in Persia, the Seljuqs employed the local Dihqans, small landowners familiar with the ancient systems of taxation, to perform the only governmental task that mattered to them,namely that of collecting revenue.