Four Myths about the Crusades

First Principles ^ | 4/21/11 | Paul F. Crawford

[muawiyah]

You forgot the Gallatians ~ in central and eastern Anatolia ~ and they may have been more important in the grand scheme of the Turkish takeover of Anatolia. The top commanders had Gaelic names ~ readily translated into meaningful phrases.

Something obviously happened during that period when the residual Gallatian tribes in Anatolia met up with the Seljuk Turks. I'm thinking some perky redheads made up a matched set for the Grand Sultan's harem ~ and that was that. They never looked back.

The Turks were both assimilative and adaptable ~ hardly primitive barbarians. This same group was not terribly different than the groups who'd invaded the Indus from time to time over the centuries.

[Cronos]

I doubt these were redhead Gallatians -- there is no mention of these. however that doesn't mean that there weren't of course!

The Turks in Turkey are hardly Turkic -- I doubt they have more than a drop of Turkic blood in them.

[muawiyah]

I've been trying to figure out the mechanism whereby you had a generation of Turks showing up to invade Anatolia and they actually had what are clearly Gaellic names ~ the use of a harem by a local prince is a viable way.

What he'd do is assemble the girls and award them to the strongest leader among the closest Turks. Nature would yield positive results.

I did find that the Gallatians came in as an invading leadership elite themselves back in something like the 4th century BC, and stayed that way ~ and were presumably still that way down to the 8th and 9th centuries. They did not do well with "others".

[Cronos]

you had a generation of Turks showing up to invade Anatolia and they actually had what are clearly Gaellic name

Interesting. I think that slipped me by -- can you give me examples, please?

Perhaps he got Gaellic allies? Of course the harem bit does work, but then why give them GAellic names? Later Sultans and Pashas were mostly European by blood, yet of course had Moslem names (the Pasha of Egypt in the 1800s was Albanian, Suleyman the Magnificent's mother and grandmother were Ruthenian etc)

I think the Gallatians power was broken by Alexander and later by the Romans.

[muawiyah]

We don't know all that much about the Seljuks when you get right down to it. The Moslems claimed that they'd converted them from paganism, so they probably weren't Christians or Buddhists, but maybe they were Mithrists. Islam had a lot of luck with those guys.

As Mithrists they'd be well within the pale of Western Orthodoxy when you think of rules of law and status of women.

Islam itself involved a substantial elevation of women from their former status as abject slaves and property among the Arabs.

This is still early in that part of history, not the 1100s and later when lines got harder.

The Gallatians St. Paul wrote to back in the first century appear to have been less well established after the climate disaster of 535-41 (and later), so they'd be in a position to "negotiate" all sorts of things ~ tribal mergers, national coalitions, swapping women ~ entire harems!

Having lent a little more to the proposition, please note that in many societies the mothers have a say in naming the kids ~ plus they pass on their own language to those kids ~ Fur Shur the Turks had just picked up writing from the Arabs so we may be missing some of the subtle nuances we'd see if the version of their Turkish language had been rendered out in Latin letters first.

Let me give you an idea of what we face in dealing with the Seljuks ~ they didn't have writing. They may have been like the Sakha/Yakuts in India who departed there in about AD200 only to show up in Japan about AD560 (with more coming for the next century).

When the Sakha left India they could read and write and appear to have had a high degree of literacy. Sometime in their sojourn in Siberia they lost all that but they kept their version of their "Annals of the Kings of the Yakuts" ~ or whatever they called themselves. The Russians figured out how to translate that stuff in recent years and discovered, lo and behold, these are the folks who'd lived in India and spawned Buddha.

The invaders in 560AD brought Buddhism with them, and not just any Buddhism but full blown Zen Buddhism (based on studies of their forms and beliefs). That group was quite literate ~ and that means the guys left behind tending the sheep, goats, horses, reindeer, muskox and brahmin cattle were, as they seemed to be, illiterate herdsmen. Interesting that they also had a record of their national history.

This seems to be the source of the primary element in Japanese language ~ a full blown Turkish language.

The group in the West who turned into the Seljuks is believed by many archaeologists to have been in Western India and spoke a Turkish with a different source than the Eastern Sakha that went to Japan and disappeared.

The Easterners traded women like they traded their herd animals. The Westerners were not culturally similar in that regard, but were certainly into the practice of swapping women to seal tribal contracts.

I've been looking for some materials (in English) to guide me in comparing and contrasting Seljuk Turkish with Sakha/Yakuts Turkish but it's not out there yet. I'm sure the Russians will produce it eventually, but will it be in English?

[muawiyah]

Oh, almost forgot, ALL Moslems GET Moslem names if they don't already have them. It's part of the deal.

Duqaq, Radwan, Kerbogha ~ as in Rooster (modern Breton still has this one), and kerbogha is just a tad more Gaellic than Carvajal ~ , while Radwan has literary references in Gaellic languages centuries older than the Arabic language references.

These three names are quite common among the Seljuks. They became even more popular in later centuries as the Seljuks extended their authority over the other folks in the Middle East.

The three Seljuk principals with those names are within the same family ~ I believe cousins at one remove (or did they marry their sisters too?).