Page 142

 142 A HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES I 
Mas~üd. At last the Selchflkids dared to attack. In 1040 at the battle
of Dandanqan in the province of Merv the Ghaznavid army was annihilated.6
Mas'ud fled to India. Khurasan was lost, and the Iranian plateau was wide
open. The evolution of the Iranian and Turkish worlds had led the former
to admit the Turks into its own~ bosom. Like that of the Germans in the Roman
empire, the conquest by the Turks, from then on, was accomplished from inside.
 Among the simple yet powerful ideas which the Selchukid chieftains found
in Iran was that of the scandal involved in the oppression of the caliph
by the heretical Buwaihids. Already Malimüd aud Mas~üd had spoken
of going to his relief, had begun the subjection of the Buwaihids of Iran,
and had persecuted heretics. A "crusade" was in the air, and it can scarcely
be doubted, from the course of ensuing events, that Tughrul-Beg promptly
decided to profit from it. He immediately received the support of the orthodox
notables of Khurasan, both for ideological reasons and for the sake of the
profits they expected from exercising administrative control over the new
conquests. For naturally it was through them that the Selchükids, whose
Turkomans had had no administrative experience, would have to govern their
territories. In certain respects the entry of the Turks into Baghdad would
reproduce the earlier Khurasanian conquests of the ~Abbasids over the Umaiyads
and of al-M&mün over al-AmIn. 
 At the same time, the occupation of Khurasan allowed the Selchükids
to add to their Turkoman bands an army of the traditional Moslem type, supplied
with weapons suitable for taking cities, which the men of the desert had
lacked. Moreover, this army diminished their dependence on their Turkomans.
The latter remained, nevertheless, their basic force, which required almost
no pay and alone assured their superiority over their adversaries. The main
problem of the Turkomans was the locating of new pastures. In religion their
attitude was that of the ghazi, which was not that of the orthodox against
the heretic but rather that of the Moslem of every description against the
unbeliever; and they remained opposed to any Selchflkid domination over them
except the purely military. 
 In some respects the two attitudes might in practice coincide. This may
be seen in the division of tasks which Tughrui and Chagri agreed upon following
Dandanqan. Chagri retained, in addition to most of Khurasan, the Selchükid
homelands, to' be defended against the Kara-Khanids and the Ghaznavids. He
accomplished 
6 B. Zakhodar, "Dendanekan," Istoricheskii Zhurnal, III—IV (s~~), 74—78.