The Battle of Kose Dag

The Sultanate of Rum, the state of the Seljuk Turks in Anatolia, had reached in the early thirteenth century a height of power, wealth and culture, its cities adorned with mosques, madrasas, hospitals and caravanserais and its lands prosperous and well-governed. But in those same years the Mongols, having overrun Iran and the eastern Muslim lands, were pressing westward, and in 1243 a Mongol army under the general Baiju advanced into Anatolia. The Seljuk sultan Kaykhusraw II met them with a large army, swelled by allies and mercenaries, at Kose Dag, a bare mountain upland east of Sivas. The battle was a catastrophe for the Seljuks: the sultan's host, though far more numerous, was badly led and its young sultan lost his nerve, and when a Mongol feint threw the Seljuk vanguard into confusion the great army broke and fled almost without a real fight, abandoning its camp and treasure. The defeat shattered the prestige and the power of the Sultanate of Rum at a stroke. The Seljuk sultans were forced to submit, to pay tribute and to rule thereafter only as vassals of the Mongols, and over the following decades, as Mongol overlordship and the weakness of the Seljuk house allowed central authority to crumble, Anatolia fragmented into a patchwork of independent Turkmen principalities, the beyliks. Out of this fragmentation, from a small frontier principality in the north-west, the house of Osman would in time arise to build the Ottoman Empire. Kose Dag is therefore remembered as a turning-point: the fall of the Seljuks of Rum and the opening of the long age that would lead, by a winding road, to the Ottomans. This scene depicts the two armies facing each other at Kose Dag; the violence is shown without gore.