This chapter describes the eastern steppe border of the Islamic world and the legacy of the Turk Khaghanate which had dominated the steppe. It argues that the Turks and Iranians had long been connected, even sharing some mythology. When Turkic nomads entered the Middle East, they employed the Persian bureaucrats of local dynasties. The chapter views the Seljukids as a group influenced by the steppe imperial tradition, and also well acquainted with the needs of settled populations. Following recent scholarship, it argues that despite the promotion of mamluk soldiers in the army, the Turkmen followers of the Seljuqs remained powerful and important. Continuing tribal immigration led to an increase of nomadic populations from Khorasan to Anatolia and the beginning of the Turkification of the western regions. The Seljuqids brought a significant cultural change by bringing the use of New Persian into western and central Iran as a language of administration and high culture, and introducing the use of a dual administration with a Turkic military and Persian administration. This Turco-Iranian synthesis became the court culture of Iran.

The fall of the great Turkmen fortress of Gök-Tepe in 1881 took place in the full glare of international publicity, but it was preceded by over ten years of skirmishing and raiding between the Russians and the Akhal-Teke and Yomud Turkmen from the shores of the Caspian to the Köpet Dagh mountains. In 1879 the hapless General N. P. Lomakin was defeated beneath the walls of Gök-Tepe and forced to retreat, the most significant defeat inflicted on Russian arms throughout the entire history of the conquest of Central Asia. The celebrated and sadistic General M. D. Skobelev was tasked with wiping out the memory of Lomakin’s humiliation, which he did by storming the fortress and massacring 8,000 Turkmen, women and children included. Over the next four years the Russians would annex Merv and the Panjdeh oasis, arousing Persian and British alarm, before they came to an agreement both with the Qajars and with the British on drawing what would become the new southern frontier of the Empire.

The Khanate of Khiva had a long history of cocking a snook at Russian authority. From the massacre of Bekovich-Cherkassky’s expedition in 1717 to the failure of Perovskii’s winter invasion in 1839–40, Khiva seemed the embodiment of ‘Asiatic insolence’ and intransigence. Turkestan Governor-General von Kaufman was determined to wipe out the memories of these early defeats and secure his own legacy as a great military leader. Easily securing consent from St Petersburg and brushing aside Khivan attempts to find a diplomatic solution, in 1873 he launched the most elaborate of all the Russian campaigns of conquest, with four different columns setting out from Krasnovodsk, Mangishlaq, Orenburg and Turkestan. Of these, the Krasnovodsk column ran out of water in the middle of the Qara-Qum desert and had to turn back. The Turkestan column, led by von Kaufman himself, almost met a similar fate in the Qizil-Qum, and was saved only by the skill of its Qazaq guides. Most of the fighting was done by the Orenburg and Manghishlaq columns, which reached the city of Khiva ahead of von Kaufman, who instructed them to wait until he arrived and could enter in triumph – with farcical consequences. The campaign ended on a grim note with the notorious massacre of the Yomud Turkmen by Russian forces, ostensibly designed to secure the internal authority of the Khivan Khan, Muhammad Rahim II, now a Russian puppet like his counterpart in Bukhara.