Mesud II

Ghiyath al-Dīn Me’sud ibn Kaykaus or Mesud II (Old Anatolian Turkish: مَسعود دوم, Ghiyāth ad-Dīn Mas'ūd bin Kaykāwūs; Turkish: Gıyaseddin Mesud, Persian: غياث الدين مسعود بن كيكاوس) bore the title of Sultan of Rûm at various times between 1284 and 1308. He was a vassal of the Mongols under Mahmud Ghazan and exercised no real authority. Mesud died in 1308, the last of the Seljuks of Rum.

Reign

Mesud was the eldest son of Kaykaus II. He spent part of his youth as an exile in the Crimea and lived for a time in Constantinople, then the capital of the Byzantine Empire. He appears first in Anatolia in 1280 as a pretender to the throne. In 1284 the new Ilkhanid Sultan Ahmed Tekuder deposed and executed the Seljuq sultan Kaykhusraw III and installed Mesud in his place.¹ Ahmad's successor, Arghun, divided the Seljuq lands and granted Konya and the western half of the kingdom to the deposed sultan's two young sons. Mesud invaded with a small force, had the two boys killed, and established himself in the city in 1286.²

Mesud led several campaigns against the emerging Turkmen principalities, the Beyliks, always on behalf of the Mongols and usually with Mongol troops. Notable among these is the expedition beginning late in 1286 against the Germiyanids. The Germiyanids were a warlike band of Turkmen ancestry, settled by the Seljuqs a generation before in southwestern Anatolia to keep the more unruly Turkmen nomads in check. Mesud conducted the campaign under the tutelage of the and elder statesman, . Though there were a few successes on the battlefield, the highly mobile Germiyanids remained a significant force in the region. Mesud and his Mongol allies conducted similarly futile expeditions against the , and .