Tutush I

Abu Sa'id Taj al-Dawla Tutush (Arabic: أبو سعيد تاج الدولة تتش السلجوقي; died 25 February 1095) or Tutush I, was the Seljuk emir of Damascus from 1078 to 1092, and sultan of Damascus from 1092 to 1094.

Years under Malik Shah

Tutush was a brother of the Seljuk sultan Malik-Shah I. In 1077, Malik-Shah appointed him to take over the governorship of Syria.¹ Later that year, Tutush reached Aleppo, then ruled by the Mirdasid emir Sabiq ibn Mahmud, and began a three-month-long siege of the city.²

In 1078/9, Malik-Shah sent him to Damascus to help Atsiz ibn Uvaq, an independent Turkish warlord who had taken the city in 1076, who was being besieged by the Fatimid forces.³ After the siege had ended, Tutush had Atsiz executed and installed himself in Damascus.³ He later expanded his realm by annexing Sidon, Gibelacar, Tiberias, Ramla, Jaffa and Jerusalem, which he granted to Artuk Bey, another Seljuk commander. He later returned to besieging Aleppo and called for reinforcements from Malik-Shah, yet his reinforcements were ambushed and routed by a coalition of Arab tribesmen led by Kilabi chief Abu Za'ida at . This forced him to leave Aleppo and to pursue the tribesmen who fled into the desert. Meanwhile, the Aleppines raided Tutush's camp outside the city walls, killing the guards he left behind and seizing all of its provisions. Tutush consequently withdrew to where he spent the winter. In 1080, Tutush determined to capture Aleppo by force, in which he wanted to strip it from its nearby defenses; hence, he seized , Hisn al-Faya (at modern-day al-Bira), and . He later influenced Sabiq to cede the emirate to the Uqaylid emir "Sharaf al-Dawla".