5. The Byzantine Empire’s Turkish Nemeses
For a while in the ninth and tenth centuries, it seemed as if the Byzantine Empire had caught a break when its chief rival, the Arab Abbasid Caliphate, went into decline. During this period, the Byzantines experienced a revival, and reached a medieval peak of cultural and military might during the reign of Emperor Basil II (circa 958 – 1025). Unfortunately for the Byzantines, the decline of the Muslim Arabs presaged the rise of the Muslim Turks, who eventually put an end to the Byzantine Empire.
The Turks had been subjugated by the Arabs in the eighth century, but they eventually supplanted their overlords as the dominant power in the Islamic world. In the eleventh century, a branch of the Turks established the Seljuk Empire. Reducing the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad to a figurehead puppet, Seljuk sultans ruled a vast Islamic state that absorbed other Turkic principalities, and dominated the heart of the Muslim Middle East.
