Время Анны Комниной - стр. 4

century), who wrote in Persian and, according to V. F. Minorsky, relied on the lost Parthian knight’s novel[8].

As A. Yu. Mitrofanov shows, Anna Komnena, being a memoirist, not only created a gallery of portraits of prominent representatives of the Byzantine imperial dynasties, such as her father – Emperor Alexios Komnenos, her mother – Empress Irina Dukena, her grandmother – Anna Dalassena, the mother of her fiancé, her mother in-Law – Empress Maria of Alania, but, she, being a historian, outlined a number of ethnographic and political problems, which were faced by the Byzantine Empire at the end of the XI^>th century. One of these problems was the arise of the power of the Great Seljuks, who conquered under the standard (Bunchuk) of the sultans Togrul-bey (1038–1063), Alp-Arslan (1063–1072) and Malik Shah (1072–1092) Khorasan, Iran and vast areas from the Mediterranean Sea to Kashgaria, from the Caucasus to Yemen. Although the result of the Seljuk conquests was the appearance of the Seljuks in Byzantine Asia Minor and the rapid conquest of the peninsula, however, the feuds between the great Sultan Malik Shah and the Anatolian Seljuks pushed the Emperor Alexios Komnenos into an alliance with Malik Shah against the Sultanate of Rumia. Moreover, Alexios Komnenos had already used the help of the Seljuks during the war against Roussel de Bailleul – a rebellious Norman knight who tried to create his own principality on the territories of the ancient Byzantine “Armeniac” Theme in 1074.

A. Yu. Mitrofanov raises the question of the possible Mongolian origin of the Great Seljuk dynasty in the light of the military and political influence of the Khitan Liao Empire in Turkestan in a new way and gives interesting arguments in favor of this assumption. One of these arguments is the author’s thesis about the deliberate ignoring of the role of the Mongolian factor in the history of Central Asia, an ignoring which is characteristic of Soviet Oriental studies. This thesis of the author particularly is based on the opinion of the excellent archaeologist, ethnographer and artist M. V. Gorelik. Another argument of A. Yu. Mitrofanov is the original assumption that there is a literary influence of the Abulqasem Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh” on the history of Seljuk from the “Malik-nameh” – a Seljuk epic of the XI^>th–XII^>th centuries, which has been preserved in fragments thanks to the work of Mirkhond and some other late Eastern historians. For this remarkable discovery A. Yu. Mitrofanov also refers to the works of G. V. Vernadsky, who noted the spread of the Christianity among some Mongolian tribes in the XI