Nizam al-Mulk and the Siyasatnama

Nizam al-Mulk (1018–1092) was a Persian administrator from Tus who served as chief minister of the Seljuk sultans Alp Arslan and Malik Shah for nearly thirty years, from 1064 to 1092. He ran the empire’s government, founded the Nizamiyya colleges in Baghdad, Nishapur and other cities, and wrote the Siyasatnama, a Persian book of advice on ruling; his assassination in 1092 was one of the turning points of Seljuk history.

A secretary from Tus

Hasan ibn Ali was born in 1018 near Tus, in a family of dehqans, the Iranian landholding class that had carried Persian culture through the early Islamic centuries. His father worked as a tax official for the Ghaznavids. The young Hasan studied Shafi’i law and trained as a secretary, the career path of educated Persians who staffed the offices of whatever dynasty ruled Khorasan.

When the Seljuks took Khorasan after Dandanaqan, he moved into their service, working in the administration of Chaghri and then of his son Alp Arslan, who governed the east. When Alp Arslan won the throne in 1064, he made Hasan vizier of the whole empire, with the title by which he is known.

Running an empire for Turkish sultans

The Seljuk sultans were steppe warlords whose followers expected land and plunder. Nizam al-Mulk’s task was to turn that into a state that could collect taxes, pay soldiers and keep order across very different provinces. He controlled the central offices, the divans, appointed governors and judges, and placed his sons and clients in posts across the empire. He developed the use of the iqta, the assignment of a district’s revenue to a commander in return for military service, which became the basis of military pay in Iran for centuries.

Under the young Malik Shah his power reached its height. Contemporaries say that the vizier, not the sultan, decided most business, and he behaved almost as a ruler himself, with his own large guard of slave soldiers. That made him indispensable and, in the end, resented.

The Nizamiyya colleges

Nizam al-Mulk’s best-known foundations are the colleges named after him. The first and most famous, the Nizamiyya of Baghdad, opened in 1067. Others followed in Nishapur, Isfahan, Herat, Balkh, Merv, Amol, Mosul and Basra. Each was supported by endowments that paid teachers’ salaries and students’ stipends and kept a library.

The colleges taught Shafi’i law and, alongside it, Ash’ari theology, the school favoured by the vizier. Their professors included some of the leading scholars of the age: al-Juwayni at Nishapur, and his pupil al-Ghazali, who taught at the Baghdad Nizamiyya from 1091. Historians used to describe them as the first state universities and as a deliberate weapon of a “Sunni revival” against Ismaili and Shi’a propaganda. More recent work, such as George Makdisi’s, points out that colleges of this kind existed earlier and that Nizam al-Mulk was also building patronage networks of scholars loyal to himself.

The Siyasatnama

Toward the end of his life Malik Shah asked his officials to write down how a kingdom should be governed. Nizam al-Mulk’s answer, the Siyasatnama (“Book of Government”), also called Siyar al-muluk, was written around 1091–92 in clear, plain Persian. It is a mirror for princes in about fifty chapters, full of stories about kings: the Sasanian Anushirvan, the Abbasid caliphs, Mahmud of Ghazni.

Its themes are practical. A king must do justice himself and hear complaints; officials must be watched and changed regularly; the ruler needs a network of spies and messengers to know what governors are doing; Turks should not be given civil offices, and heretics should not be given any. The later chapters warn at length against religious rebels, from the Mazdakites of Sasanian times to the Ismailis of his own day, whom the vizier saw as the greatest danger to the state.

The book is valued today both as a historical source and as Persian prose. Its stories are not always accurate as history, and parts were probably revised after the author’s death, but it shows how an experienced Persian official thought a Turkish monarchy should work.

Enemies at court

By 1092 the vizier was old and his enemies were many. The sultan’s wife Terken Khatun wanted her young son made heir, against Nizam al-Mulk’s support for the elder prince Barkyaruq. Her ally Taj al-Mulk wanted the vizierate. Malik Shah, tired of his minister’s power, is reported to have threatened to dismiss him, and Nizam al-Mulk is said to have replied that the sultan’s crown and the vizier’s inkpot were bound together.

Assassination, 1092

On 14 October 1092, on the road from Isfahan to Baghdad near Nahavand, a man dressed as a Sufi approached the vizier’s litter with a petition and stabbed him. Nizam al-Mulk died the same day. The killing was claimed by, and is usually attributed to, the Ismailis led by Hasan Sabbah, who had seized Alamut two years earlier and whom the vizier had tried to suppress (see Hassan-i Sabbah and the Fortress of Alamut). Some contemporaries suspected that Malik Shah, Terken Khatun or Taj al-Mulk had encouraged it; this cannot be proved. The sultan himself died a month later, and the empire fell into civil war.

The legend of the three schoolfellows

A well-known story says that Nizam al-Mulk, Omar Khayyam and Hasan Sabbah studied together as boys in Nishapur and swore to help whichever of them rose first. It reached Western readers through Edward FitzGerald’s introduction to his translation of Khayyam. The dates make it impossible: Nizam al-Mulk was born in 1018, while Khayyam and Hasan Sabbah were born a generation later. It is a legend that joins three famous Khorasanis of the same age into one plot.