The Turkish sultanate that ruled central Anatolia from Konya between 1077 and 1308, carved out of Byzantine territory after Manzikert and named for the Romans it displaced.
The Sultanate of Rum was founded in the chaos after Manzikert, when Byzantine authority in Anatolia collapsed not because of the defeat itself but because of the civil wars that followed it. Turkish groups moved into a vacuum that the empire had created by fighting itself.
Its first capital was Nicaea, close enough to Constantinople to be a standing insult. The First Crusade took Nicaea back in 1097 and the sultanate moved inland to Konya — ancient Iconium — where it stayed for two centuries.
It was never the only Turkish power in Anatolia and was frequently not the strongest, but it outlasted its rivals, and its defeat of Manuel I at Myriokephalon in 1176 settled the question of who would hold the Anatolian plateau.
Suleiman ibn Qutalmish, a Seljuk of the line passed over for the sultanate in Iran, established himself in western Anatolia in the late 1070s, partly by invitation: Byzantine claimants in the civil wars hired Turkish troops against each other and then could not remove them.
This is worth stating plainly because the usual telling makes Manzikert the cause of everything. Manzikert lost a battle and an emperor; it did not lose Anatolia. What lost Anatolia was the decade of Byzantine civil war afterwards, during which rival Roman generals brought Turkish forces west and gave them cities to hold.
By the time Alexios I restored order in 1081 there was a Turkish sultanate at Nicaea, and no Byzantine army capable of removing it without outside help. That help arrived, on terms Alexios had not anticipated, as the First Crusade.
The century after the crusades passed through was the sultanate's best. Konya became a genuine capital, and the Anatolian Seljuks built at a scale and quality that still defines the region: the Alâeddin Mosque on the citadel hill, the great madrasas, and above all the caravanserais, placed a day's travel apart along the trade roads and free to use for three nights.
The art was distinctively Anatolian rather than an import — mina'i and lustre tilework, figural stone relief of a kind rare elsewhere in the Islamic world, and a court poetry in Persian. The Rum Seljuks also struck figural coinage, including horsemen and a lion-and-sun device, which sets them apart from most contemporary Muslim mints.
The population they ruled was mixed and stayed mixed: Greek-speaking Christians remained a large part of it for centuries, and the conversion of Anatolia was a slow process of the following three hundred years, not a consequence of conquest. Jalal al-Din Rumi, who gives the sultanate its most famous name, took his epithet from Rum and lived and died at Konya under its rule.
Suleiman ibn Qutalmish (c. 1077–1086) founded the sultanate at Nicaea. Kilij Arslan I (1092–1107) fought the People's Crusade and destroyed it at Civetot, then lost Nicaea and Dorylaeum to the real crusade the following year and moved the capital to Konya.
Kilij Arslan II (1156–1192) is the sultanate's central figure: he defeated Manuel I Komnenos at Myriokephalon in 1176, and then made the mistake of dividing the sultanate among eleven sons, undoing much of what the victory won.
Kaykhusraw I and Kaykaus I recovered the ground and took Antalya and Sinope, giving the sultanate ports on both seas. Kayqubad I (1220–1237) is generally reckoned its greatest ruler and its high point; his son Kaykhusraw II lost to the Mongols at Köse Dağ six years later and the sultanate never governed itself again.
The defeat at Köse Dağ in 1243 turned the sultanate into a tributary of the Mongol Ilkhanate, and after about 1260 the sultans were appointees rather than rulers. The state continued to exist, mint coins and build, but the decisions were made elsewhere.
What filled the gap was the beyliks — the Turkish frontier emirates on the edges, which owed the sultan nothing in practice and were free to raid Byzantine territory on their own account. The Ottomans were one of the smallest of them.
The line ended around 1308 with no successor worth recording. By then the political map of Anatolia was the one on which Bapheus was fought: a Byzantine remnant in the north-west, a dozen beyliks, and the Ilkhanate behind them all.