The turn of the millennium inaugurated in the originally Iranian part of Central Asia, as we have said, the rule of dynasties that issued from among Inner Asian nomads, primarily Turkic but soon also Mongol. A similar process began farther southwest and southeast, thus in the central lands of Islam and on the Indian subcontinent, where Seljukid and Ghaznavid dynasties came to power. Whereas, however, in Central Asia this process led to a permanent change and large-scale Turkicization of the populations, this did not happen elsewhere – with a few exceptions, the most notable being Turkey itself. In Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, to name just the core lands affected by this change, native dynasties or governments soon or eventually reassumed power, and the process of Turkicization, if at all noticeable, gave ground to a reaffirmation of Iranian or Arab demographic, cultural, and political realities.

The subject is relevant to our topic for several reasons. Both the dynasties mentioned originated in Central Asia, and their scions spoke Turkic; the staging area for their push into the heartlands of Islam and India was the province of Khurasan; and they had protracted and complex relations with the Qarakhanids. The Seljukids never relinquished Khurasan: they won it by 1040 in the historic battle of Dandanqan with the Ghaznavids; and the last monarch of its senior branch, Sanjar, who ruled from 1118 to 1157, chose it a century later as his home province, with Merv as his capital and final resting place.