urkish expansion in
the mass. Azerbaijan is the nearest region to us in which Turki blood
predominates, and the westernmost province of the true Turk homeland. All
Turks who have passed thence into Hither Asia have come in comparatively
small detachments, as minorities to alien majorities. They have invaded as
groups of nomads seeking vacant pasturage, or as bands of military
adventurers who, first offering their swords to princes of the elder
peoples, have subsequently, on several occasions and in several
localities, imposed themselves on their former masters. To the first
category belong all those Turcoman, Avshar, Yuruk, and other Turki tribes,
which filtered over the Euphrates into unoccupied or sparsely inhabited
parts of Syria and Asia Minor from the seventh century onwards, and
survive to this day in isolated patches, distinguished from the mass of
the local populations, partly by an ineradicable instinct for nomadic
life, partly by retention of the pre-Islamic beliefs and practices of the
first immigrants. In the second category--military adventurers--fall, for
example, the Turkish praetorians who made and unmade not less than four
caliphs at Bagdad in the ninth century, and that bold _condottiere_, Ahmed
ibn Tulun, who captured a throne at Cairo. Even Christian emperors availed
themselves of these stout fighters. Theophilus of Constantinople
anticipated the Ottoman invasion of Europe by some five hundred years when
he established Vardariote Turks in Macedonia.

The most important members of the second category, however, were the
Seljuks. Like the earlier Thu-Kiu, they were pushed out of Turkestan late
in the tenth century to found a power in Persia. Here, in Khorasan, the
mass of the horde settled and remained: and it was only a comparatively
small section which went on westward as military adventurers to fall upon
Bagdad, Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor. This first conquest was little
better than a raid, so brief was the resultant tenure; but a century later
two dispossessed nephews of Melek Shah of Persia set out on a military
adventure which had more lasting consequences. Penetrating with, a small
following into Asia Minor, they seized Konia, and instituted there a
kingdom nominally feudatory to the Grand Seljuk of Persia, but in reality
independent and destined to last about two centuries. Though numerically
weak, their forces, recruited from the professional soldier class which
had bolstered up the Abbasid Emp