i68 AHISTORYOF THE CRUSADES I 
 
 
whose last years were so difficult, and whose death was so tragic, had opened
with three decades of effective rule; he made laws at Samarkand for the Kara-Khanids
and, what Malik-Shãh had never done, at Ghaznah for the Ghaznavids.
Muliammad's death in i i i 8 made him the eldest of the Selchükid family.
Without aspiring to reunite the whole empire under his sway, he insisted
that his nephews accord him a certain primacy. His intervention at the succession
of MalimUd safeguarded the unity of the whole; Malimüd could neutralize
his brothers Tughrul and Mascüd and the Mazyadid chief Dubais sufficiently
to assist in the war against the Franks with whom Dubais was now allied,
and to participate personally in organizing a campaign against the Georgians.

 Under Malimüd's successor, his brother Mascüd (1131—1150),
the disintegration was accelerated. Six years of fairly savage warfare against
Sanjar, Tughrul, his nephew Dã'üd, the caliphs alMustarshid and
ar-Rãshid, and Dubais ended, it is true, by assuring him of victory
and a monopoly of the sultan's title. But of what did this sultanate consist?
Fars, Azerbaijan, and soon Iraq, not to mention more distant or smaller territories,
constituted autonomous principalities. Even the sultan, at the end of his
reign, was the prisoner of chieftains who shared the spoils of the empire
and from whom he could only rarely gain an illusory liberty by intriguing
to shatter their fragile coalitions. His successors would be mere powerless
wards of the atabeg of Azerbaijan whom we should hardly mention except that
the last of them, Tughrul, at the end of the century won a final pale reflection
of the glory of his ancestors by dying in battle against the troops of Khorezm.

 The emancipation of Iraq deserves special mention, because it also involved
the emancipation of the caliph. The diminution of the revenues of the sultans
had led them to consider Iraq as their last financial reserve, and thus rendered
their authority harsher to the caliphs at the same time that it became less
justified by services rendered to the Moslem community. But elsewhere, in
the rivalries of pretenders, the caliph was sought as arbitrator, and he
sold his awards high. Gradually he recovered a real measure of autonomy,
at the head of a principality in Iraq analogous to the others. Even the Turkish
soldiers, fearing the vengeance of a conqueror, entered his service. But
the winning sultan was not always the one he favored, and even when he was,
this independence of the caliph at the time that the sultan had greatest
need of the resources of Iraq necessarily led to conflict. The gravest of
these occurred (1134—1138) during the reign of Mas~üd. It