The Great Seljuk Empire was a Turko-Persian state that reunified the eastern Islamic world, sparked the Crusades through its Anatolian conquests, and made Persian the dominant language of high Islamic culture.
The Great Seljuk Empire fragmented in 1194 CE when its last sultan Tughrul III was defeated and killed by the Khwarazmian Shah Tekish, dissolving the central empire into regional successor states.
The leading modern scholarly synthesis of Seljuk political and cultural history.
Broad survey of Iranian history from antiquity to the present; covers the Seljuk period in its larger context of Iranian civilization. Published by Basic Books; available on Internet Archive/Open Library.
The novel's first half dramatizes the life of Omar Khayyam in 11th-century Seljuk Nishapur and Samarkand, making the Seljuk era its core historical setting even though the frame narrative extends into later centuries.