أتسز بن أوق الخوارزمي

Atsiz ibn Uwaq al-Khwarazmi, a Turkish commander in the army of Sultan Alp Arslan. Al-Salabi says that the sultan sent him to the south of Syria, where he took al-Ramla and Jerusalem from the Fatimids, but he could not take Ascalon, the gate to Egypt. ²

Damascus fell at his hand in 468 AH (1075 CE), and the khutba for the Abbasid caliph was given. He then failed in his raid on Egypt, for he was defeated by a force of Arabs before he met the army of Badr al-Jamali in Rajab 469 AH (1076 CE). ³

His affair ended with his killing around 1078 CE, a date that the source gives as approximate. ⁴

Atsiz, not Abak, was one of the Turkoman chiefs, perhaps of the Iwai tribe and perhaps established in Khwarazm at the start of the Saljuq expansion. In 1070 he followed Erisgen, a husband of a daughter of Alp-Arslan, into Asia Minor on his flight to Byzantine territory, but refused to serve in the Christian army. He answered an appeal from the Fatimid government to bring some of the Palestinian Bedouin to heel in 1071. The entry says that the brief traditional version, which makes Atsiz a lieutenant of the Saljuqs, is inaccurate. ⁵

Atsiz did not consider himself adequately paid, and occupied Jerusalem, Palestine and southern Syria on his own account; he then tried to reconcile himself with Malikshah, Alp-Arslan's successor. Cairo obtained the help of its own lieutenant at Acre, and then of the Saljuqs, the descendants of Kutlumush, who were establishing themselves in Asia Minor, against him. Atsiz defeated them in 1075, took Damascus in 1076 and attacked Egypt in 1077, where he was defeated. A revolt of the pro-Egyptian elements in Palestine followed, which he drowned in blood in 1078. He could not prevent the Egyptian army from threatening him in Syria proper, and appealed to Malikshah, who meant to give Syria as an appanage to his brother Tutush. Atsiz hoped to keep a territory as a vassal, but at their meeting Tutush rid himself of him by assassination. ⁶

The entry treats Atsiz as the first successful attempt to establish a Turkoman principality on the western confines of the Saljuq empire, directed against the Saljuq regime. The Turkomans ravaged the countryside, but once he had subdued the country he restored agriculture, though the townspeople complained of his conduct. His religious indifference is shown by these episodes, and the hostility of the pro-Fatimid urban aristocracy explains in part his good relations with the Monophysites. It argues that it is wrong to count him among those responsible for the massacre at Jerusalem in 1078. ⁷

The dates in the summary above are taken from al-Salabi: Damascus in 468 AH (1075) and the Egyptian campaign in 469 AH (1076). The entry dates the conquest of Damascus to 1076 and the attack on Egypt to 1077. Both accounts are kept; the year of the murder by Tutush is not given in the entry. ⁶