The Great Arab Conquests

According to what claims to have been an eyewitness account, Qutayba arrived from Iraq in the capital Merv just as his predecessor was reviewing the troops before leading a raid across the river. He immediately took command and addressed the soldiers, urging them to the jihād. ‘God has brought you here so that he may make His religion strong, protect sacred things through you and through you to increase the abundance of wealth and mete out harsh treatment to the enemy.’ He stressed that those who fell in the jihād would be still be alive, quoting the Koran:¹ ‘Count not those who are slain on God’s path as dead but rather as living with their Lord, by Him provided.’ He ended with a brisk exhortation: ‘Fulfil the promise of your Lord, get yourselves used to travelling the greatest distances and enduring the greatest hardships, and beware of looking for easy ways out.’ The nature of the appeal was clear; there was no mention here of tribal or ethnic solidarity: this was going to be a campaign for all Muslims, Arab and non-Arab alike. He promised the classic combination of serving God and getting rich. We will never know how many of his listeners responded with lively excitement to the new opportunities for wealth and spiritual rewards, and how many of them heard his words with sinking hearts, dreading the hardships and dangers that lay ahead.²

We have a detailed picture of his army in the year 715 at the end of his period in office.³ At this time Qutayba is said to have commanded 40,000 troops originating from Basra in southern Iraq. They were organized in their main tribal groups and brought with them the sense of tribal solidarity that served them well on the battlefield, but also the tribal rivalries that could easily erupt into violence. In addition there were 7,000 troops newly arrived from Kūfa in central Iraq and 7,000 who are described as mawāli, non-Arab converts, who had enrolled in the Muslim forces. They were led by a man called Hayyān al-Nabatī. One of the reasons for Qutayba’s eventual success was that he attracted the loyalty of these local troops, who, if the figures are to be believed, comprised around 12 per cent of his forces. They seem to have fought as hard as any of the Arabs, and their local knowledge must have made them especially useful, but not all Arabs were prepared to accept them as equals and this tension lay just below the surface. Perhaps the most important reason for Qutayba’s success was that, until things went wrong, leading to his tragic end, he was able to manage these disparate groups and give them a common purpose, expanding the lands of Islam into Transoxania and perhaps eventually as far as China.

Qutayba began campaigning immediately, leading his men up the Oxus to Tukhāristan. Here his main objective was pacification rather than conquest. He paid a state visit to Balkh, where he was welcomed by the local landowners. He then crossed the river and was met by the king of Saghāniyān, with gifts and a golden key as a symbol of his submission. In return he was offered protection against the next-door king of Shūmān, which was Qutayba’s next stop. Here again the king hastened to make peace and hand over tribute. Having secured his southern flank with this show of force and diplomacy, Qutayba returned to Merv for the winter.

He began the next year, 706, by settling some unfinished business in the south. The most powerful of the local princes, the Buddhist Nayzak, maintained his independence in the mountainous area of Badhghīs, north-west of Herat. He had captured some Muslims and kept them prisoner. Qutayba sent a messenger to him, who warned him about provoking the new governor. Nayzak was induced to free the prisoners and go in person to see the governor at Merv. The people of Badhghīs made peace on the understanding that Qutayba would not enter their lands.⁴ This sort of live-and-let-live arrangement characterized much of the nature of the Arab conquest in the remoter areas of Transoxania.

Then he turned his attention to his real objective, the rich cities of Soghdia in the Zarafshan valley. At the beginning of spring he crossed the river to Paykand, the nearest of them and the first on the road from the river crossing at Amul. The site of the city now lies wasted and deserted about 60 kilometres west of Bukhara, but in the early eighth century it was a great trading centre, whose merchants regularly visited China along the overland Silk Road. It lay at the very end of the fertile lands of the Zarafshan valley, surrounded by desert. It was a very tempting prize, but the city was well protected by great mud-brick walls and an inner citadel with only one gate.⁵ It was so strong that it was known simply as ‘the Fortress’ or ‘the Bronze Fortress’, and the inhabitants had no desire to submit to the financial demands of the Arabs. The initial conquest seems to have been fairly quick, the defenders being forced back behind the walls and then asking to make peace. This was granted in exchange for tribute, and Qutayba was on his way back to the Oxus when he heard that the citizens had risen in revolt and killed the governor he had left in charge; there was, as so often, a story about how an Arab had tried to take advantage of the daughters of a powerful local man and had been stabbed as a result,⁶ but it is just as likely that the inhabitants felt that now the Muslim forces had withdrawn, they no longer needed to pay the tribute they had been forced to promise.

Qutayba was determined to teach them a lesson that would be learned by all the people of Soghdia. After a month of blockade, he set workmen to dig a mine under the walls of the city and prop up the roof with wood. He had intended that they should burn the props and that the wall should then collapse. Things did not work out quite as planned; the wall fell down when they were still propping it up and forty of the unfortunate workmen were killed. The technique of digging a siege mine is well attested in western European warfare from the time of the Crusades on, but this seems to be the only recorded example of its use in the early Islamic conquests, and it is possible that it was a technique Qutayba had learned from the local troops recruited into his army in Central Asia. Though things clearly turned out very badly for the unlucky workmen, the mine achieved the desired result - the Muslims forced their way in, not without great difficulty, through the collapsed portion of the wall. Once the city had been taken by force, its inhabitants and their wealth were at the mercy of the conquerors. All the fighting men were systematically killed, the women and children taken into captivity, the town deserted. Many of the merchants were said to have been off on a trading expedition to China. When they returned they searched for their women and children, ransomed them from the Arabs and set about rebuilding the city.⁷ In reality, it seems that Paykand never really recovered from the sack, and it was soon completely overshadowed by the growth of neighbouring Bukhara.

The Arab sources remember the conquest not for the human misery it caused but for the wealth of the booty acquired. One captive attempted to ransom himself with 5,000 pieces of Chinese silk, the equivalent of a million dirhams.⁸ They found a silver statue in a Buddhist shrine (butkhāna) weighing 4,000 dirhams and other treas ures, including two pearls the size of pigeons’ eggs. When Qutayba asked where the pearls had come from, he was told that two birds had come and placed them in the temple with their beaks. For Muslim writers, this charming tale was simply evidence of the obvious wrong-headedness of Buddhism.⁹ The pearls were sent, with other choice items, to Hajjāj in Iraq, who wrote back, full of praise for Qutayba’s generosity. The rest of the silver was melted down and made into coin to pay the Muslim soldiers: in so doing much of the ancient art of Central Asia was lost for ever. There was so much new money that the Muslims were able to equip themselves with the most splendid armour and weapons, soldiers, as usual, being expected to pay for their own gear. In this case, however, captured weapons were handed out to the troops as well. After the triumph at Paykand, the army moved on to the Bukhara oasis, where some villages were attacked and obliged to make peace.

The next year, 707, Qutayba was on the march again. Once again, the objective was the Bukhara oasis. This year he was accompanied by Nayzak, who now appears as a member of his army, part soldier and part hostage. The campaign did not achieve very much. The Soghdians were now well aware of the threat the Arab armies posed and they had made alliances with the Turks and the people of distant Farghāna. The allies hovered in the steppe, waiting for an opportunity to attack. As the Arab army moved along the road towards Bukhara it was very spread out, with more than a kilometre and a half between Qutayba, who was leading, and his brother and right-hand man Abd al-Rahmān, who was in command of the rearguard. The Turks saw their chance and attacked the tail of the column. Abd al-Rahmān sent a messenger to his brother, appealing for help. By the time Qutayba, accompanied by Nayzak, had reached the rear of the army, the Muslim forces were facing defeat, but his appearance turned the tables, the Turks were seen off and disaster averted. Qutayba decided not to press on, however, but turned south, crossing the river at Tirmidh and returning via Balkh to Merv for the winter.

The next year, 709, Qutayba decided to move against Bukhara again. He may well have been aided by the death of his opponent of the previous year, Wardān-Khudā. The accounts of this campaign are quite unclear, but it seems that when the Muslims approached the city, the inhabitants appealed for help to the other Soghdians and the Turks and the main fighting was against this relieving army. The fullest narrative we have comes from the tribe of Tamīm and reads like an account from the earliest phases of the conquests, full of heroic speeches and individual deeds of valour but leaving the wider picture quite obscure. Qutayba is portrayed as sitting on a chair to command, wearing a yellow tunic over his weapons. At one point we are told the infidels entered Qutayba’s camp and rampaged through it until the women started beating them back by hitting the faces of their horses and weeping. This spurred the men into action and the attack was repelled. This is the only mention of women in Qutayba’s armies, and whereas it may be a complete fabrication, it might suggest that women did play a significant role in the campaigns and particularly in the organization of the camps.

According to the Tamīmis the real victory was achieved, unsurprisingly, by their own tribe. The Turks were on a hill on the other side of a river and the Muslim forces were very reluctant to cross and engage them. Qutayba appealed directly to tribal pride, telling them that they were like ‘a coat of mail on which swords break’, and he harked back to the traditions of the tribe in pre-Islamic times, saying that he needed them to fight today as they had fought of old.¹¹ The chief of the tribe, Wakī,^m a tough, uncouth, foul-mouthed Bedouin who was later to be Qutayba’s nemesis, took the standard and began to advance on foot towards the enemy. He urged the cavalry to go on in advance, but when the commander of the cavalry reached the river he refused to continue; when Wakī urged him to go over ‘he gave him the look of a fierce camel’ and refused to budge. Wakī, who had a well-deserved reputation for violence and brutality, started to abuse him and belabour him with his iron mace and the cavalry commander, shamed into action, led his men up the hill. At first Wakī followed with the infantry and, while the cavalry distracted the Turks by attacking them from the wings, the infantry were able to drive them from the hill.

In the aftermath of the battle, the Muslims occupied Bukhara for the first time. It seems most likely that once the relieving force had been defeated, the people of the city made their peace with the Muslims, possibly allowing a Muslim garrison in the citadel. The conquest of Bukhara lasted at least four campaigning seasons, the inhabitants being forced to submit and pay tribute each year. It was only after the fourth time this had happened that Qutayba took steps to establish a firm Muslim presence in the city.

Bukhara at this time was made up of three distinct zones. The oldest was the citadel, the Ark, on the ancient tell where the king, with the title of Bukhara-khudā (Lord of Bukhara), lived. Slightly to the east, and separated by open ground, was the walled city, the Shahristān, where the merchants and other citizens lived. Finally there were numerous fortified dwellings, called kushks in the local language, scattered in the fields and orchards of the oasis. Qutayba was determined to establish a Muslim presence in the heart of the Shahristān, by persuasion, bribery or force if necessary. He destroyed fire-temples, built mosques and enforced the laws of Islam. He obliged the inhabitants to give half of their houses and fields to the Arabs so that they could live with them and provide them with fodder for their horses and firewood. Many of the richer inhabitants chose to leave the city proper and retire to their country houses. The walled city was divided into different zones and assigned to different tribal groups to settle. Soon neighbourhood mosques were set up by the different groups, one of them on the site of a Christian church. Within a generation the walled city seems to have been predominantly inhabited by Muslims of Arab descent while Iranians lived in the suburbs and villages.¹² The Arab amirs lived in the walled city and the kings, the Bukhara-khudās, continued to live, as they had always done, in the citadel. Relations between the Arab governors and the kings were usually, but not always, friendly, and Tughshāda, the king who accepted Muslim rule over the city, called his son Qutayba, in honour of the conqueror.

In 713 Qutayba built a great mosque in the citadel on the site of a fire-temple. The new religion was now publicly established in the old centre of power and prestige. Finding a congregation to fill it was not so simple. Local people were paid 2 dirhams for coming to Friday prayers as a way of encouraging them. Since they did not know how to perform the rituals of prayer, Persian-speaking instructors were appointed who would tell them when to bow and when to prostrate themselves. The Koran was read in Persian because the people did not know Arabic. Not all the people of the city were impressed by the new religion. The poor, we are told, were attracted by the 2 dirhams on offer but many of the rich obstinately stayed in their country houses. One Friday the Muslims went out to these country houses and called on the inhabitants to come to the mosque. They were met with showers of stones. The Muslims then attacked the houses. By way of humiliating the inhabitants, they removed the doors of the houses and carried them off to be used in the new mosque. These doors had images of household gods on them, and when the doors were brought to the mosque these images were defaced, either as a result of the Islamic prohibition of images or, more simply, to humiliate the old religion and its devotees. Many years later Narshakhī, the local historian of Bukhara, noticed the erased images on the doors and made enquiries about what had happened, which is how the story has come down to us.¹³ Qutayba also laid out a place for festival prayers at the foot of the citadel in the Registan (square). When they first came to pray there, the Muslims were ordered to bring their arms, ‘because Islam was still new and the Muslims were not safe from the infidels’.¹⁴

Despite the changes in rituals, religion and ceremony, the kings of Bukhara continued to wield very considerable power in the city and the surrounding oasis, and the old line survived through the rule of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs until the coming of the Samanids at the end of the ninth century. So, as in many other areas of Transoxania, Muslim government was really a protectorate and the Arab authorities ruled with and through the local aristocracy. In the aftermath of this success, the king of Soghdia, Tarkhūn, came from his capital Samarqand seeking peace. He approached Qutayba’s camp with two men, keeping the Bukhara river between them, and opened negotiations. He agreed to pay tribute in exchange for an agreement that the Arabs would not invade.

Any sense of satisfaction Qutayba may have felt as he returned to Merv after the first conquest of Bukhara in the autumn of 709 was soon rudely interrupted. The prince Nayzak, who had been brought to Merv and had joined Qutayba’s expedition to Bukhara, now seems to have felt that if he ever wanted to regain his independence, he had to act before it was too late. ‘I am with this man,’ he is said to have told his retinue, ‘and I don’t feel safe with him. The Arab is like a dog: if you beat him he barks and if you feed him he wags his tail. If you fight against him and then give him something, he is pleased and forgets what you have done to him. Tarkhūn fought him several times and when he gave him tribute, he accepted it and was pleased. He is violent and full of himself.’ Presumably the implication of this was that Nayzak felt he could attempt a rebellion and, if it failed, could make his peace again with Qutayba. When the army reached Āmul on the west bank of the Oxus, Nayzak asked permission to return to his homeland, and this was granted.

He headed as quickly as possible to Balkh. He had clearly formulated a plan to rouse all the princes of Tukhāristan, the middle valley of the Oxus, against Arab rule. When he reached the city the first thing he did was to pray at the great Buddhist Nawbahār shrine for success in the forthcoming struggle. He was aware that Qutayba would soon regret giving him permission to depart and would order the local Arab governor to detain him so he kept on the move. He wrote to a whole list of local princes encouraging them to join him, to the Ispahbādh of Balkh, to Bādhām, king of Mervrūd, Suhrak, the king of Tāliqān, Tūsik, the king of Faryāb, and the king of Jūzjān. All responded positively and he arranged that they should come and join him in the spring of 710. He also made preparations in case things went wrong. He wrote to the shāh of distant Kabul, securely beyond the range of Arab armies, requesting his help. Nayzak sent much of his baggage to Kabul for safe keeping and was given an assurance that the shāh would give him refuge if he needed it.¹⁵ Then he expelled Qutayba’s governor and prepared to wait until his allies gathered in the spring. He had taken every precaution but had underestimated his adversary.

Qutayba was now in his winter quarters in Merv and his troops had mostly dispersed to their homes, but he immediately sent 12,000 men under the command of his brother to Balkh with orders to hold out there until spring. Very early the next year (710), before the rebels had mobilized, he assembled an army from Merv and the Arab settlements in the western parts of Khurasan and marched on Tukh-āristan. His first stop was Mervrūd, a small town on the upper Murghāb river, whose ruler had pledged his support to Nayzak. The ruler himself fled but Qutayba caught his two sons and crucified them. Next was Tāliqān, where, according to some reports, he killed and crucified a large number of people to intimidate the inhabitants of the area.¹⁶ Then the king of Faryāb humbly made his submission and he and his people were spared. The king of Jūzjān soon followed suit and Qutayba went on to receive the submission of the people of Balkh.

Nayzak could now see that his plan was in ruins. Qutayba’s swift and decisive action had wrong-footed him and almost all his princely allies had now reconciled themselves with Qutayba. There were Arab governors in all the towns of Tukhāristan. He now fled south to the Hindu Kush, hoping to reach Kabul. He left a detachment of his supporters at Khulm (modern Tashkurgan), where the road south leaves the Oxus plains and enters a narrow defile, probably in the citadel whose ruins can still be seen in the town.¹⁷ Qutayba could find no way to get round this obstacle until a local landowner approached him and offered to show him a path round behind the castle in exchange for safe conduct. Once more, divisions and rivalries among the local people allowed the Arabs to take advantage of them. Qutayba’s men fell on the garrison at night and took the fortress. Nayzak, meanwhile, had fled along the route of the modern road that leads from the Oxus valley to the Salang Pass and Kabul. He holed up in a mountain refuge at a site that cannot now be identified in Baghlān province. Qutayba was hard on his heels. He soon caught up with him and laid siege to his refuge for two months. Nayzak’s supplies began to run low but Qutayba too had his problems; winter would soon be upon them and he did not want to be trapped in the mountains.

Negotiations began. Qutayba sent an adviser of his called Sulaym, who took with him loads of food, including a dish called khabīs made of dates and clarified butter. The starving fugitives fell on the food and Nayzak could see that he had to try to make terms or perish, especially when Sulaym stressed that Qutayba was prepared to spend the winter there if necessary. Sulaym offered safe conduct. Nayzak was very suspicious: ‘My feeling is that he is going to kill me even if he gives me safe conduct but safe conduct makes my decision [to give myself up] more excusable and gives me some hope.’¹⁸

So they made their way down the steps from Nayzak’s refuge to the plain where his riding animals were, Sulaym trying to reassure him all the way. When they reached the pass, Sulaym’s escort slipped round behind Nayzak in case he changed his mind and attempted to escape back to the mountains. Nayzak took that as a bad sign. When he was brought to Qutayba, his worst fears were realized. Questioned by the governor, he said that he had been granted safe conduct by Sulaym but Qutayba retorted that he was lying. Qutayba was in a quandary as to whether to execute him or not. He was the ringleader of the rebels and a very dangerous man, who could easily try to foment another insurgency. On the other hand, safe conducts were taken very seriously and to breach one might make negotiations with other rebels and defectors much more difficult in the future. Opinion among the governor’s advisers was very divided. Finally one of them said that he had heard the governor promise God that if Nayzak fell into his hands he would kill him and that if he did not do so, he could never ask for God’s help again. The governor sat for some time thinking about this before giving his orders: the prisoner was to die. This brutal and treacherous murder was a stain on Qutayba’s reputation for ever but it terrified the rest of the princes into submission. Nayzak’s death meant the end of the insurrection and most of the princes of Tukh-āristan were, at least for the moment, firmly under Arab control.

Qutayba still faced a smaller but nonetheless significant challenge to his authority. The little kingdom of Shūmān lay on the north bank of the Oxus. Its capital was a fortified city at or near the site of Dushanbe, the modern capital of Tajikistan. The king of Shūmān had made peace with Qutayba and is said to have become a friend of the governor’s brother Sālih, another example of the ties that were developing between Arab and local elites. An Arab political agent had been installed. The king now repudiated the treaty and expelled the political agent. The ease with which this was done suggests that the kingdom had been ‘conquered’ in a very superficial way and that there was no Arab garrison there. Qutayba’s reaction was to try diplomacy. He selected a man who is described as a ‘Khurasani ascetic’, presumably a preacher of Islam, a sort of proto-dervish, and a man called Ayyāsh al-Ghanawī. When they arrived they received a hostile reception from the local people who shot arrows at them. The ascetic turned back but Ayyāsh was made of sterner stuff and called out, asking whether there were any Muslims in the city. One man replied. He came out to ask what Ayyāsh wanted, to which he replied that he wanted help in waging jihād against the people. The man accepted, and despite the fact that there were only two of them, they engaged the enemy with some success. Then the local Muslim, clearly feeling that his loyalties to his fellow citizens were stronger than his commitment to his new faith, came up behind Ayyāsh and killed him. They found sixty wounds on him and the Shūmānis immediately regretted what they had done, saying that they had killed a brave man.

But the damage was done. After the recent rebellion of Nayzak, Qutayba could not afford to let any of the local kings defy his authority and was determined to extract obedience and tribute, by force if necessary. The king, however, was in a defiant mood. He was not frightened of Qutayba because he had the strongest castle of any of the kings. ‘When I shoot at the top of it - I, the strongest of men with the bow and the strongest of them in archery - my arrow does not get even halfway up the walls of my fortress. I am not afraid of Qutayba.’¹⁹

Qutayba was likewise undeterred. He marched to Balkh, crossed the river and soon reached the fortress of Shūmān. Here he set up catapults and began to batter the walls. One of these siege engines was called ‘the Pigeon-Toed’, and it discharged stones that landed right inside the city and killed a man in the king’s court.²⁰ From that point, it all seems to have been over quite quickly. When it became clear that he could hold out no longer, the king collected all his treasure and jewels and threw them into the deepest well in the castle, from which they were never retrieved. Then he went out to meet his death fighting. Qutayba had taken the fortress by force and the defenders had to pay the price; the fighting men were all killed and the non-combatants taken prisoner. Shūmān was taken, and the king killed, but the principality seems to have survived and retained its identity, for we hear of a later prince of Shūmān fighting as an ally of the Muslims.

On his way back to Merv, Qutayba sent his brother Abd al-Rahmān to pay a visit to Tarkhūn, the king of Samarqand, just to make sure that he was not planning any mischief and to collect the tribute. He met up with Tarkhūn’s army in a meadow in the afternoon. The Soghdian soldiers dispersed into groups and began to drink wine ‘until they became silly and made mischief’, as the Arab chronicler sniffily remarks. Firm measures were taken to prevent the Muslims following their bad example. The tribute was duly collected and Abd al-Rahmān returned to his brother in Merv.

Qutayba’s heavy-handed behaviour was resented in many quarters. At Samarqand there was mounting unrest and dissatisfaction at Tarkhūn’s supine attitude; he was called an old man, eager to be humiliated, and they resented the fact that he had agreed to pay taxes. He was deposed in favour of a man called Ghūrak, said by some to have been his brother.²¹ Tarkhūn took his deposition very badly and, saying that he would rather die by his own hand than be killed by someone else, he fell on his sword until it came out of his back.²² Political suicides like this were completely unknown in the Arab world, though they were, of course, common in imperial Rome, and they also seem to have been a Central Asian custom. His death was to have dangerous consequences for Samarqand, since it allowed Qutayba to pose as Tarkhūn’s avenger when he next led his army into Soghdia, but Ghūrak proved an able and wily ruler, constantly intriguing to preserve his independence from his powerful neighbours.

The next campaigning season, 711, saw Qutayba going further south to confront the Zunbīl of Sistan, perhaps the most formidable of all the princely foes the Muslims encountered. This time, however, there was no serious fighting and the Zunbīl agreed to a peace treaty. It would be interesting to know whether Qutayba heard that in the same year, but 6,000 kilometres to the west, another Muslim military commander, Tāriq b. Ziyād, had crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and begun the conquest of Spain.²³

The next year, 712, before campaigning began, Qutayba was warned that many of his troops were exhausted after the long march from Sistan and wanted a year’s respite from military expeditions,²⁴ but an unexpected situation forced them to resume campaigning. The king of Khwārazm appealed to Qutayba for help against his overbearing brother, Khurrazādh. Khurrazādh had been in the habit of taking for himself any slaves, riding animals or fine goods he fancied; courtiers’ daughters and sisters had even been seized. The king professed himself powerless to act but he sent messengers in secret to Qutayba, inviting him to his land to arrest his brother and hand him over for judgement. As a token of his good faith he sent three golden keys to the cities of Khwārazm. It was too good an opportunity to miss and Qutayba, who had been planning another expedition to Soghdia, decided to make a detour.

The king of Khwārazm told his nobles that Qutayba was heading for Soghdia and that they would be spared military action that year, so, we are told, they began drinking and relaxing. The next thing they knew Qutayba and his army appeared at Hazārasp (the name means Thousand Horses in Persian), the city that lay on the west bank of the Oxus, at the head of the delta. The king and his court gathered at the capital, Kāth, on the other bank of the river. He persuaded his men that they should not fight Qutayba, and negotiations began: they agreed to make peace in exchange for 10,000 prisoners and some gold. During the negotiations, Qutayba’s brother and right-hand man, Abd al-Rahmān, fought and killed the king’s brother, executing many of his supporters in cold blood. It was another stage in the Muslim domination of the ancient delta kingdom, but the Afrīghid dynasty continued to rule as shāhs of Khwārazm for another two hundred years and the area retained its distinctive individual culture and identity.

The real objective of the 712 expedition, however, was Samarqand. Samarqand was the largest and most powerful city in the area, the effective capital of Soghdia. The city as it exists today was built after the Mongol sack of 1220 and beautified by Tamerlane and his family in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the blue-tiled domes and minarets that have made it famous. Later Uzbek rulers added more madrasas and completed the square known as the Registan, and, after the conquest of 1880, the Russians developed the Tsarist-period town with its elegant tree-lined streets. The early medieval town lay behind massive mud-brick ramparts between the Timurid city and the river. The site is now lonely and deserted.²⁵ It is easy to pick out the lines of the wall and the remains of the citadel behind its deep moats, overlooking the river. Among these ruins is an old palace, the walls of which are painted with processions of elegant Soghdian princes and their guests, giving a vivid picture of the world the Arabs destroyed.

Samarqand was ruled by its new king, Ghūrak, who was determined to put up a stiff resistance to the Arabs. Qutayba’s army is said to have consisted of 20,000 men, one of the largest forces the Muslims ever fielded in Transoxania. A considerable proportion of them were local recruits from Khwārazm and Bukhara, but it is not clear whether they were converts to Islam joining in the jihād, mercenaries or men pressed into fighting against their will.

At first Qutayba seems to have made an attempt to surprise the defenders by sending his brother back to Merv, giving the impression that the campaigns were over for that year, but the defenders were not deceived. The Samarqandis, meanwhile, had appealed to the king of Shāsh (Tashkent) and the Ikhshīd of Farghāna to come to their aid, persuading them to assist with the warning that if the Arabs conquered Samarqand, their turn would be next. A force of horsemen, recruited from all the aristocracy of Transoxania, set out to launch a surprise night attack on the Arab camp. Unfortunately for them, Qutayba knew of their plans: he always seems to have had very good intelligence. He sent one of his brothers, Sālih, with a small force to ambush them. The night fighting was extremely fierce. The nobility of Transoxania gave a good account of themselves, but in the end they were defeated; many were killed, few prisoners were taken and many famous families lost their sons and their horses. The Muslims acquired rich equipment and excellent riding animals and Qutayba allowed the small band of victors to keep the spoils of the night ambush, rather than dividing them up among the whole army in the customary way.

The defeat of this force seems to have discouraged the defenders. Qutayba blockaded the city for a month, setting up siege engines outside the walls, creating a breach which the defenders blocked up with sacks of millet. The Muslims pressed on into the breach, holding their shields over their faces to protect them from the showers of arrows the Soghdians shot at them. Once they had established themselves on the walls, Ghūrak sent messengers to sue for peace. Qutayba agreed.²⁶ The Samarqandis were to pay a substantial annual tribute and a large number of high-quality slaves with no old men or young boys among them. Qutayba’s domination also had a conspicuously religious aspect to it. He insisted that a mosque with a pulpit be set up and he ordered the destruction of the old fire-temples and their ‘idols’. All the sculptures of Samarqand were stripped of their silver, gold and silk adornments and piled up in a huge heap. Qutayba ordered that they be burned. Ghūrak and the Soghdians urged him not to do this, warning that anyone who destroyed them would suffer for it, but Qutayba was undaunted, and lit the fire himself. A vast sum was made from the gold and silver nails that were collected. This deliberate purging of the old religion was unusual in the Muslim conquests. Qutayba had always made it clear that his campaigns were a jihād, though he was rarely as destructive as this. It may also have been that he wanted to break the Soghdian resistance once and for all, and his triumph was emphatically apparent as he lit the bonfire of the accoutrements of the old religions.

He did not, however, destroy the previous order entirely. Ghūrak remained king of Soghdia, establishing himself at Ishtīkhān, some 40 kilometres from Samarqand, and Qutayba contented himself with leaving an Arab garrison of some four thousand men in the city under the command of his brother Abd al-Rahmān. The old walled city became a Muslim-only stronghold. Local non-Muslims were allowed within the city walls only if they had permits in the form of clay seals on their hands: if the seals had dried before they left, they were to be killed because it showed that they had been in the city too long. If any of them brought knives or weapons in they were to be killed, and none of them was allowed to spend the night inside the walls.²⁷

Qutayba responded to the situation, not by strengthening the Arab hold over Soghdia, but by leading his armies to further and even more distant conquests. In 713 he crossed the river as usual. In addition to his Arab troops, he imposed a levy (farada ^calā) of 20,000 troops on the people of Bukhara, Kish, Nasaf and Khwārazm. They marched through Soghdia without apparently encountering any resistance. The local levies were then directed north to Shāsh while Qutayba led his own men east to Farghāna. There is little reliable information about what these raids achieved - a few poems and inconsequential stories. We can be reasonably certain that they were not a disaster, but no new lands were conquered. ²⁹

The next year Qutayba was back in the Jaxartes provinces again, perhaps trying to establish control over the Silk Road. There is even some suggestion that he reached Kashgar, which was in the territory of the Tang emperors.³⁰ China was certainly featuring in the wilder hopes of the Arabs at this time. Hajjāj, in distant Kūfa, is said to have offered the governorship of Sīn (China) to whichever of his commanders in the East reached it first.³¹ Arab troops were now coming ever closer to the borders of the Chinese Empire and both the Arabs and the Soghdians began to send envoys to try to win Chinese support. In 713 an Arab delegation reached the imperial court. We know from Chinese sources that a delegation arrived and that they caused a diplomatic scandal by refusing to kowtow to the emperor in the traditional way, but that the mission was still deemed to be a success. No doubt both military and commercial matters were discussed.³² At the same time, the ruler of Shāsh, under increasing threat from Qutayba’s power, appealed to China for military support, but none was forthcoming.

These diplomatic exchanges are remembered both in Chinese sources and in an unusual narrative in the Arabic sources. As the Arabic source has come down to us, it has many fantastical elements and has been dismissed as worthless by modern commentators. The Chinese ‘king’ has no name and no geographical location is given. It is quite unclear whether the Arabs are supposed to have visited the imperial capital at Ch’ang-an or simply negotiated with a Chinese commander or governor in Sinkiang. Yet it almost certainly dates from the eighth century and tells us much about the self-image of the Arabs and their attitudes to other peoples.

The story goes that the ‘king’ of China requested Qutayba to send him some envoys so that he could find out more about the Arabs and their religion. Ten or twelve strong, good-looking men were chosen and they set off. When they arrived at the Chinese court they went to the bath house and emerged dressed in white robes and adorned with perfume. They entered the court. No one from either side spoke, and eventually they withdrew. When they had gone, the Chinese king asked his attendants what they thought, to which they replied, ‘We think that they are a people who are nothing but women, there was not one of us who on seeing them and smelling their perfume, did not have an erection.’³³ On the second day they appeared in richly embroidered robes and turbans and when they had gone the courtiers conceded that they were after all men. On the third day they went to see the king in full military gear, with their aventails and helmets - ‘they girded themselves with their swords, took up their spears, shouldered their bows and mounted their horses’, and the courtiers were duly impressed.

That evening the king interviewed the leader of the delegation. He explained that they had dressed the first day as they did among their families, the second as they did when they attended a prince’s court and the third as they did when they faced their enemies. The king then said that he was prepared to be magnanimous since he knew how needy the leader of the Muslims was and how few companions he had; if that had not been the case he would have sent someone against them to destroy them. The Muslim envoy retorted with indignation that his master’s army was so large that while its leaders were in China the rearguard was ‘in the places where the olive trees grow’, and as for being needy, he had left a whole world behind him under his control. He then said that Qutayba had sworn an oath that he would not give up until ‘he treads your lands, seals your kings [that is, puts a seal on their necks to show that they had paid the humiliating poll tax] and is given tribute’. The king of China then said that he could see a way out of this: he sent some golden dishes of soil, four young noblemen and some gifts. Qutayba was able to stand on the soil, put seals on the necks of the young men and accept the gifts as tax. Honour was satisfied all round and, once again, the Muslim leaders can be seen to be accepted as peers by old-established rulers.

The year 715 was to prove to be Qutayba’s last of campaigning. His career of conquest was brought to an end, not by Chinese military power but by internal Muslim politics. Qutayba’s conquests had been so successful because of his personal drive and because he enjoyed the unstinting support of the Umayyad authorities, Hajjāj, the governor of Iraq and all the east in his new capital at Wasit, and ultimately the caliph, al-Walīd b. Abd al-Malik. Now both these supports disappeared, Hajjāj died in the summer of 714, al-Walīd in early spring 715. The new caliph, Sulaymān, was known to be close to the Muhallabi family, whom Qutayba had ousted from Khurasan. Qutayba was wary of the new monarch, fearing that he would lose his position or worse. At first all seemed to be going well and the new caliph sent an encouraging letter to Qutayba, urging him to carry on the good work of conquest, but Qutayba remained anxious and took the precaution of moving his family from Merv to Samarqand, where it would be very difficult for his enemies to reach them. He posted a guard on the Oxus river crossing with orders not to let anyone cross from the west if they did not have a pass.³⁴ Interestingly, the man he relied on for this important security role was not an Arab at all, but a mawlā of his from Khwārazm, a new convert to Islam. It was a measure of the bitterness caused by inter-Arab feuds that he felt more secure in recently conquered Samarqand, surrounded by resentful Soghdians, than he did in the old provincial capital, where Muslim rule had been securely established for sixty-five years.

Qutayba seems to have decided that he would certainly lose his job under the new administration and he decided to reject Sulaymān’s authority, trusting in the loyalty of his men to give him military support. He may have imagined leading the battle-hardened army of Khurasan west to Iraq and eventually to Syria, installing a compliant caliph of his own choosing, much as Abū Muslim and the supporters of the Abbasids were to do thirty-five years later.

He made a speech to his troops³⁵ in which he laid out his achievements as he saw them and demanded their support. He pointed out how he had brought them from Iraq, had distributed booty among them and paid their salaries in full and without delay. They only had to compare him with previous governors to see how superior he was. Today they lived in safety and prosperity. God had given them opportunities for conquest and the roads were so safe that a woman could travel in a camel litter from Merv to Balkh without fear of molestation.³⁶

His speech was greeted with stony silence. Perhaps he had not prepared the ground or consulted enough. Everyone knew he had been a great commander but there was a strong groundswell of opinion against opening the doors of civil strife. Qutayba may have been a great leader of the Muslims against the non-Muslims, but he could not count on a strong tribal following to push his cause against fellow Muslims. He had taken considerable pains to cultivate the support of the non-Arab Muslim converts in Khurasan and incorporate them in his army, but they too were reluctant to get involved in an Arab civil war. Their leader, Hayyān al-Nabatī, told his followers that ‘those Arabs are not fighting in the cause of Islam, so let them kill one another’.³⁷

There was now no going back. Qutayba had staked everything on a public appeal to the loyalty of his troops and they had not responded. He now seems to have lost his cool completely and began abusing the Arab tribesmen with all the scorn of traditional Arab rhetoric. He called them the refuse of Kūfa and Basra; he had collected them from the desert, ‘the places where wormwood, southernwood and wild senna grow’, where they were riding cows and donkeys. They were Iraqis and had allowed the Syrian army to lie in their courtyards and under the roofs of their houses. Each major tribe was singled out: Bakr were a people of deceit, lying and, worst of all, meanness, Abd al-Qays were farters who had taken up the pollination of palm trees rather than the reins of horses, Azd had taken ship’s ropes in the place of the reins of stallions. The implication was clear; they were farmers and fishermen, not proud Arab warriors. Within a few minutes he had succeeded in alienating anyone who might have been persuaded to support him. When he retired to his house, he explained to his household what he had done, ‘When I spoke and not a single man responded, I became angry and did not know what I was saying,’ and he went on to abuse the tribes again: Bakr were like slave girls who never rejected any sexual advances, Tamīm were like mangy camels, Abd al-Qays were the backside of a wild ass and Azd were wild asses, ‘the worst God created’.

His position was now hopeless. The opposition coalesced around Wakī al-Tamīmī, the tough old Bedouin. The Arab sources give a vivid picture of this man in terms that go beyond the usual forms of abuse. Among other things, he was accused by his enemies of being a drunkard who sat around boozing with his friends until he shat in his own underclothes.³⁸ His supporters claimed that he could take charge of the business, ‘enduring its heat, shedding his blood’, for he was ‘a brave man who neither cares what he mounts or what the consequences will be’.³⁹ He was prepared to risk launching an attack on Qutayba. He made an agreement with the leader of the non-Arabs, Hayyān al-Nabatī, that they would divide up the tax revenues of Khurasan between them. Qutayba was now deserted by all but his immediate family. He called for the turban his mother had sent him, which he always wore in time of difficulty, and a well-trained horse he considered lucky in war. When the horse came, it was restless and he could not mount it. The omen convinced him that the game was over and he abandoned himself to despair, lying down on his bed, saying, ‘Let it be for this is God’s will.’⁴⁰

The mayhem continued. Qutayba sent his brother Sālih, the one who had been friends with the king of Shūmān, to try to negotiate with the rebels, but they shot arrows at him and wounded him in the head. He was carried to Qutayba’s prayer room and Qutayba came and sat with him for a while before returning to his couch (sarīr). His brother Abd al-Rahmān, who had so often led the Muslim troops in the most difficult situations, was set upon by the market people (ahl al-sq) and the rabble (ghawghā) and stoned to death. As the rebels closed in on Qutayba himself they set fire to the stables where he kept his camels and riding animals. Soon the ropes of the great tent were cut and the rebels rushed in and Qutayba was killed. As so often there were disputes about who actually killed him and about who had the honour of taking his head to Wakī. Wakī ordered the killing of all the members of his immediate family and that the bodies be crucified.

The fury and vindictiveness of the attack on the man who had led the Muslim armies in Transoxania so successfully astonished contemporaries. Persians in the Muslim army were amazed that the Arabs could have treated a man who had achieved so much so badly; ‘if he had been one of us, and died among us,’ one of them said, ‘we would have put him in a coffin [tābūt] and taken him with us on our military expeditions. No one ever achieved as much in Khurasan as Qutayba did.’⁴¹ Needless to say, numerous poems were written about the subject, many glorifying the deeds of the tribesmen who killed him. But others lamented the death of a great warrior for Islam, such as the poet⁴² who addressed his words to the new caliph in Damascus, capturing something of the sense of excitement and adventure in the unknown that many of Qutayba’s followers must have felt:

Sulaymān, many are the soldiers we rounded up for you
By our spears on our galloping horses.
Many are the strongholds that we ravaged
And many are the plains and rocky mountains
And towns which no one had raided before
Which we raided, driving our horses month after month
So that they got used to endless raids and were calm
In the face of a charging enemy
Even if the fire was lit and they were urged towards it
They charged towards the din and the blaze.
With them we have ravaged all the cities of the infidels
Until they passed beyond the place where the dawn breaks.
If Fate had allowed, they would have carried us
Beyond Alexander’s wall of rock and molten brass.

These are almost the only named Turks in the Arabic narratives of the conquest. When describing the Arab armies, and the heroic (and unheroic) deeds they performed, the protagonists are often named: preserving the identity of the individuals was a key concern of the authors. The Turks, by contrast, are very much ‘the other’, a mass of warriors without any apparent religion or morals or any motivation apart from total hostility to the Muslims and an insatiable desire for booty. The leaders, the Khagan and Kūrsūl, join the ranks of the worthy opponents of the Muslims, rather like the Byzantine emperor Heraclius and Rustam, the Sasanian general defeated at Qādisiya. They are brave and honourable, in their way, but they do not have the self-doubt and that deep inner knowledge that the Muslims are going to prevail because God is on their side which are described in the cases of the Byzantine and Sasanian generals.

The warfare of the period between the death of Qutayba in 715 and the death of Su-Lu and the collapse of the Türgesh in 739 is confusing and we will not try to follow every encounter in detail but rather give an impression of this hard-fought and bitter conflict. The Turks and the Arabs were implacable enemies, fighting for overlordship of this potentially rich area. Caught in between were the local princes, the most prominent being Ghūrak of Samarqand, who struggled to maintain their independence and their culture. They originally hoped that the Turks and Chinese would free them from the Muslim yoke but as time went on they found that the Turks too were hard and demanding masters.

Wakī, who had been the instrument of Qutayba’s downfall, had none of his predecessor’s gifts for holding the Muslims together. The armies dispersed, and governors followed each other in quick succession. In the spring of 721 the Turkish leader Kūrsūl led his men into Soghdia. It was a good moment to strike. A new governor, Sa^cīd, was known by his troops as Khudhayna, a word that might be translated as ‘the Flirt’: the name was not intended as a compliment. The poets were scathing about his lack of martial qualities:

He arrived in Khurasan without any previous first-hand knowledge of the province and immediately became embroiled in a complicated dispute about financial irregularities which led to him dismissing a number of experienced officials. The administration was in disarray when the Turkish army surrounded a little Muslim outpost called Qasr al-Bāhilī, the exact location of which is not known. There were only a hundred Muslim families in the fortress and they began to negotiate their surrender. Meanwhile the Muslim governor of Samarqand called for volunteers to raise the siege. At first 4,000 men volunteered, but as they marched towards the enemy many of them drifted away, leaving their commander Musayyabⁿ with only a thousand or so men as they approached the besieged castle. Musayyab sent two scouts on a dark night to try to make contact with the defending garrison. It was not easy, because the Turks had flooded the surrounding area. Eventually they found a sentry, who brought the commander to them. The messengers said that the relieving force was only about 12 kilometres (2 farsakhs) away and asked the defenders whether they could hold out for the night. The commander replied that they had sworn to protect their women and they were all prepared to die together the next day. When the messengers returned to Musayyab he told his men that he was going to march immediately. The Muslims fell upon the Turkish camp at dawn. There was a hard struggle and a number of prominent Muslims fell as martyrs, but eventually the Turks were put to flight. The relieving force entered the fortress and gathered up the Muslim survivors. One of the party later recalled meeting a woman who implored him in the name of God to help her. He told her to get up behind him on his horse and he grabbed her son and took him in his arms. Then they galloped off and the rescuer commented admiringly that the woman ‘was more skilful on the horse than a man’. Eventually rescuers and rescued made their way to the safety of the walls of Samarqand, but the fort was lost. When the Turks returned the next day, they found nothing but the corpses of their comrades.⁴⁵

The rescue of the defenders of Qasr al-Bāhilī was a stirring story of Muslims protecting their own, retold many times and celebrated in poetry and song, and it shows the solidarity felt by these settlers in a hostile land, but it could not disguise the fact that the Muslims were in trouble. The governor Sa^cīd led a campaign to Transoxania, but to the disgust of his more militant supporters he did not go beyond Samarqand. What was probably worse as far as they were concerned was that he allowed them to pillage the Soghdians, saying that Soghdia ‘was the garden of the caliphs’. By this he meant that Soghdia was an asset which should be taxed rather than destroyed in conflict.⁴⁶

By the spring of 722 the situation in Transoxania was described as ‘disastrous’ for the Arabs. Khudayna was replaced by a new governor, another Sa^cīd known as Sa^cīd al-Harashī. In contrast to his predecessor, he was aggressive and brutal and determined to reassert Muslim control in Soghdia. The events that followed are especially interesting because, almost uniquely in the annals of the Muslim conquests, we have a series of absolutely contemporary documents to supplement the Arabic narrative sources. In 1933 a shepherd discovered a basket of Soghdian documents on Mount Mugh in what is now Tajikistan but was then part of Soviet Central Asia. Mount Mugh was a Soghdian fortress which had been the stronghold and last refuge of the last independent Soghdian prince of Penjikent, Dīwashtīch.⁴⁷ The documents had presumably been abandoned when the fortress was taken by the Arabs in 722 and consisted of political correspondence and administrative and legal documents. Dīwashtīch was clearly an ambitious man who was challenging Ghūrak of Samarqand for leadership of the Soghdian princes, trying to assemble a coalition of local nobles to oppose the Arab advance. Unfortunately for him, many of the Soghdians had chosen to flee to the north-east, to Farghāna, to take refuge rather than join his alliance and fight. Furthermore Kūrsūl, the leader of the Türgesh Turks from whom he had hoped for support, was proving elusive and failed to come to his aid. The letters are interesting because they provide some insight into the rivalries among the local princes as they tried to work out a response to the Muslim invasions, but also because they substantially back up the version of events that we find in Madā’inī’s account of the Arab invasions as used by Tabarī.⁴⁸ It is unusual and, for the historian, comforting to have this immediate confirmation that the narratives on which we base our understanding of these events do indeed reflect a historical reality.

The Arabs conquered Penjikent in 722. The site is the most fully excavated of all Soghdian sites. The ancient city stood on a plateau overlooking the fertile lands of the upper Zarafshan valley. Looking north, across the flat plain of the river, the arid peaks of the Turkestan range are clearly visible. The city itself was built of brick and mud-brick and by 722 it had become a place of refuge and exile for many Soghdian nobles.⁴⁹ Large houses decorated with frescoes showing Soghdian lords fighting, hunting and feasting were constructed. All this magnificence came to an end with the Arab conquest and much of the town was destroyed. Some quarters were rebuilt, on a more modest scale, after 740, when Arab administration was more secure in this area and trade started to pick up again, but the town never recovered its earlier prosperity.

Despite such occasional success for Arab arms, none of the governors in this period was able to emulate Qutayba’s achievements and re-establish the Muslim position in Transoxania. The combined forces of the Soghdians and the Turks meant that the Arab hold over the lands beyond the river was as precarious as ever. By 728 the only places in the Zarafshan valley that remained in Muslim hands were the great fortress city at Samarqand and the smaller fortified towns of Dabūsiya and Kamarja, both defended by Muslim garrisons, on the main road there. Even Bukhara was effectively lost. The struggle to hold these remaining outposts was the key to the campaign in Transoxania, and the siege of Kamarja by the Turks that year is one of the most vividly described set pieces of the war. The conflict began almost by accident. The Khagan, the leader of the Turks, was marching along the main road from Samarqand heading for Bukhara. The Muslims in the small roadside city of Kamarja were unaware of what he was doing until they took their animals out to water, came over a hill and saw ‘a mountain of steel’, made up of the Turkish forces and their Iranian allies. The Arabs had to move fast if they were going to be able to take shelter behind the walls of the town. They sent some of their beasts down to the river to drink as a decoy to lure the Turks away, and then made for the fortifications as quickly as they could, with the Turks, who had now caught sight of them, hard on their heels. Because the Arabs knew the terrain better, they got there first and began to barricade themselves behind the earthworks, lighting brushwood fires to destroy the wooden bridge across the moat.

In the evening, when the Turks temporarily abandoned the assault, the defenders were approached with two offers of aid. One of them was from none other than the grandson of the last Sasanian king, Yazdgard III, who had joined the Turks, hoping to regain the empire of his ancestors. He offered to intercede on their behalf with the Khagan and acquire safe conducts for them. It would certainly have suited him to gain the friendship of a group of Arab warriors. But they were scornful, and his proposal was rejected with abuse.⁵⁰

The next offer was more plausible. It came from a man called Bāzagharī. He was a local man whom the Khagan seems to have trusted as an intermediary. He brought with him to the city walls some Arab prisoners captured earlier in the campaign. He called up to the defenders to send someone down to negotiate with him. The first man they sent did not understand any Turkish so they had to find another man, an Arab from Qutayba’s tribe of Bāhila, who did. Bāzagharī brought a financial offer from the Khagan: he would take the Arab defenders into his own army with enhanced rates of pay; those who had recived 600 dirhams would now have 1,000 and those who were on 300 would get 600. The Arab emissary greeted this with scorn. ‘It won’t work,’ he said. ‘How can the Arabs, who are wolves, work with the Turks, who are sheep? There will not be peace between you and us.’ Some of the Turks were furious and wanted to execute the ambassador there and then but Bāzagharī refused. The messenger was increasingly anxious for his own safety, so he made an offer that half the Arabs would go free and half would serve the Khagan. Then he went to the wall, held on to the rope and was pulled up. When he reached safety, his tone changed completely. He asked the people of Kamarja what they felt about going to unbelief after faith with predictable results. He egged the Muslims on: ‘They will call on you to fight with the infidels,’ to which they replied, ‘We will die together sooner than that.’

Meanwhile the Khagan ordered his men to throw green wood (which would not burn) into the moat surrounding the city while the defenders threw in dry wood (which did). When the moat was full, the Muslims set it ablaze and God supported their cause by sending a strong wind. In one hour the work that had taken the Turks six days was destroyed. The archers on the walls also did their work: many of the attackers were injured or killed, including Bāzagharī, who was wounded and died that night. Things now began to turn nasty. The Turks executed the Arab captives they had already seized, about a hundred in number, in cold blood, throwing the heads of the best known of them to the defenders. In return, the Arabs slew 200 of the sons of the infidels, ‘though they fought desperately’. The Turks now attacked the gate of the earthwork and five of them managed to reach the top of the wall before being dislodged.

Individual incidents were remembered with great clarity in the later narratives. In one of these the prince of Shāsh (Tashkent), who was an ally of the Khagan, asked permission to attack. The Khagan refused, saying that it was too difficult, but the prince responded that if he were to be rewarded with two Arab slave girls he would go ahead and permission was granted. He and his companions came across a breach in the wall beside which there was a house with a hole that opened on the breach. There was a man lying sick in the house, but despite his illness he had the strength and wit to throw a hook, which caught the prince’s chain mail. Then he called the women and boys in the house to help him pull his victim in. The prince was then felled by a stone and stabbed to death. A young Turk came up and slew the killer, taking his sword, but the defenders managed to keep hold of his body.⁵¹

In another incident, the Muslims took the wooden boards used to line irrigation ditches and set them up on top of the earthwork, making doors that could be used as a shelter and arrow slits for archers. One day they had a great chance when the Khagan himself came to inspect. One archer shot him in the face but he was wearing a Tibetan helmet that had a nose-piece (perhaps like the Norman helmets seen in the Bayeux tapestry) and no harm was done. He also suffered a superficial chest wound but escaped without serious injury.

As the siege dragged on, the Khagan became weary and irritable. He accused his allies the Soghdian princes of claiming that there were only fifty donkeys in the town and that it could be taken in five days, but two months had passed and the resistance was as strong as ever. Negotiations began. The Khagan said it was not the custom of the Turks to abandon a siege without conquering the city or the defenders leaving it, while the Muslims replied that they would not abandon their religion. So it was suggested that they should depart to Samarqand or Dabūsiya, the only towns in the area still in Muslim hands. The Muslims sent a messenger to get advice from Samarqand. He went off and met a Persian nobleman who was a friend of his (another of these inter-ethnic friendships we can see emerging in this area). He arranged for him to borrow a couple of the Khagan’s own horses, which were grazing in a meadow near by. He reached Samarqand the same day. There the people advised that the garrison of Kamarja should evacuate to Dabūsiya, which was closer. The siege had lasted for fifty-eight days and the Muslims had not watered their camels for the last thirty-five of these.

The surrender was agreed, but in the atmosphere of mutual suspicion engendered by the siege and the execution of hostages, it was not easy to arrange things. Both sides gave five hostages to the other. The Muslims refused to leave until the Khagan and the bulk of his army had departed, and even then they kept a close eye on the hostages: each Turk was wearing only a robe, with no armour, and seated behind him on his horse was an Arab with a dagger in his hand. Meanwhile the Iranians travelling with the group were frightened that the garrison of Dabūsiya, said to have been 10,000 in number, would come out and attack them. In the event the Dabūsiya garrison, seeing horsemen, standards and a large military force approaching, thought that Kamarja had fallen and that this was the Khagan’s army approaching them. They prepared for war. Then the mood changed completely when a messenger from the army told them the true story, and horsemen galloped out to help the weak and injured through the city walls. One by one the hostages were allowed to go, but only when the Arab hostages with the Turks were released. When there was only one hostage left on each side, neither side wanted to release their man first. Finally the Arab hostage⁵² with the Turks told the Turkish officer, Kūrsūl, that he was happy for the other hostage to be released first. Later Kūrsūl asked him why he had taken this risk, to which the Arab replied, ‘I trusted your view of me and that your spirit would be above treachery.’ He was generously rewarded, given a horse and armour and returned to his companions. As in so much medieval warfare, savage cruelty was mingled with individual acts of chivalry, and some Turks, at least, were recognized as honourable and worthy opponents.

Samarqand, behind its great mud-brick ramparts, thus became the major Arab stronghold beyond the Oxus and its conquest had been one of Qutayba’s most enduring achievements. It was under constant military pressure from the Soghdians and their Turkish allies and the fall of Kamarja had left it even more isolated: the Arab garrison there could not be expected to hold out for much longer. At the beginning of 730 yet another new governor, Junayd,⁵³ was appointed to Khurasan. According to court gossip in Damascus, he had got the job only because he had given the caliph’s wife a particularly valuable necklace. He was young and inexperienced, never having visited the province before. As soon as he arrived in Khurasan, he crossed the river and began campaigning.

His first objective was Tukhāristan, so he went to Balkh, which had remained in Arab hands. He had divided his army and sent detachments in different directions when a message came from Sawra b. al-Hurr, the commander at Samarqand, saying that he was under attack and had been unable to defend the outer wall. He needed help fast. The experienced staff officers warned Junayd that he should wait until he had gathered all his troops; the Turks were a formidable army and ‘no governor ought to cross the Oxus with fewer than fifty thousand men’. Junayd, however, was very conscious of the danger that faced the Muslims in Samarqand and of the damage it would do to his reputation if he failed to help them and the city fell. He announced that he would cross the river and head for Samarqand, even if he only had the few men of his own tribe who had come with him from Syria.

His first stop was Kish. Here he found that the Turks had already poisoned many of the wells and were advancing towards him. He had to defeat or bypass them if he were to relieve Samarqand. There are two routes from Kish to Samarqand. One is a circuitous route through the plains to the west, then cutting back, around the end of the mountains, to the Zarafshan valley. The other was more direct but involved going up the steep and rugged Tashtakaracha Pass. When Junayd asked his advisers which one they thought he should take, most of them were in favour of the flat route, but one of his most senior officers, the one who had advised him not to cross the river without a large army, said that it would be better to go over the pass: ‘Being killed by the sword is better than being killed by fire,’ he argued. ‘The road through the plains has trees and tall grass by it. The area has not been cultivated for years. If we meet the Khagan there, he will set fire to it all and we will be killed by fire and smoke.’

The next day the army set out to climb the pass. Morale was low: many of the troops were openly distrustful of Junayd’s military abilities and, as usual, claimed that he was favouring some tribes over others. They met the enemy some 24 kilometres (6 farsakhs) from the city. The enemy appeared while the men had stopped to eat and Junayd hurriedly arranged his battle lines between the sides of the pass, each tribal group fighting as a unit under its own commanders, gathered round its own banners. He ordered the commanders to dig earthworks in front of their positions.⁵⁴ Junayd started by commanding at the centre of the line but soon moved to the right wing, where the tribe of Azd were under fierce attack. Junayd now came and stood right by their banner to show his support. His action was not appreciated. The standard-bearer was blunt: ‘If we win, it will be for your benefit, if we perish, you will not weep over us. By my life, if we win and I survive, I will never speak another word to you!’ It was tribal solidarity around the banner which kept these units together, not loyalty to the commander, still less to the caliph in far-off Damascus. The fighting was hand to hand and very fierce; swords became blunt from too much use and slaves of the Azdis cut wooden staves to fight with. The struggle continued until both sides parted, exhausted. The standard-bearer’s resolve was not put to the test, for he was soon slain, fighting bravely, with about eighty of his fellow Azdis.

One of them concerns a very rich man⁵⁵ who had just returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca, on which he had spent the enormous sum of 180,000 dirhams, much of it presumably given in alms. He now accompanied the army with a private supply train of a hundred camels loaded with sawīq, a sort of barley porridge, for the troops. Before he set out he asked his mother to pray that God would grant him martyrdom and her prayers were answered. With him when he died were two slaves. He had ordered them to flee and save their lives but they had refused and fought with him until they were all killed, so they too became martyrs.

In another story, the hero⁵⁶ is splendidly caparisoned, on a sorrel horse in gilded armour. He charged into the enemy ranks seven times, killing a man on each occasion so that everyone in that part of the battle was impressed by him, including the enemy. An interpreter (tarjumān) shouted out that if he would come over to their side, they would abandon the worship of their idols and worship him instead! Needless to say, pious Muslim that he was, he scornfully rejected any such idea, for, he said, ‘I am fighting so that you will abandon the worship of idols and worship God alone.’ He fought on until he was slaughtered and achieved martyrdom. In yet another such story, the martyr-to-be⁵⁷ asked his wife how she would react if he were brought in from the battle on a saddle-blanket, stained with blood. Naturally the poor woman was distraught and started to tear her clothes and wail. The martyr, however, was made of sterner, if somewhat ungallant, stuff: ‘Enough from you!’ he said. ‘If any woman on earth wailed for me, I would still reject her out of longing for the black-eyed houris of paradise!’ With that he returned to the fray and was martyred.

Junayd’s position, however, remained very weak. His forces had clearly suffered significant casualties and he had failed to break through to Samarqand, stuck as he was in the inhospitable mountain pass. There is some indication that the Turks had come round to his rear and interrupted his supply lines near Kish.⁵⁸ In this dangerous situation he accepted the advice of one of his officers and sent to Sawra, the governor of Samarqand, ordering him to leave the safety of the city and come to his aid. It was not a very courageous decision. He was told by his officers that he had a choice between perishing himself or having Sawra perish, to which he replied that it was ‘easier’ for him that Sawra should die.⁵⁹ When Sawra received the order to join Junayd, he initially refused to obey and his own officers pointed out that he was walking into a death trap, but Junayd sent another abusive message, calling him the son of a foul woman and threatening to send one of his enemies to take over the governorate in his place. In the end, Sawra felt that he had no choice but to obey. Again his officers urged caution, suggesting that he went by way of the river, but Sawra replied that that would take two days; instead he would order a night march to reach Junayd in the morning. The Turks were immediately aware of his movements and intercepted him at dawn. There was some fierce fighting and the Turks set fire to the grass and prevented the Muslims reaching water. Once again Sawra asked his officers for their opinion. One pointed out that the Turks were after only animals and booty: if they slaughtered their beasts, burned their baggage and drew their swords, the Turks would leave them alone. Another suggested that they should all dismount and walk ahead with the spears held out in front of them, a sort of mobile spear wall. Sawra rejected all this advice and decided on a direct attack. Conditions were terrible, Turks and Muslims alike obscured by the smoke and dust and falling into the flames. Sawra fell, his thigh smashed. In the heat and the dust, the Muslim forces were scattered and the Turks hunted them down, picking them off one by one. Of 12,000 men who had set out from Samarqand with Sawra, only 1,000 survived.

Meanwhile Junayd took advantage of the diversion to head for Samarqand, but he was not out of trouble yet. On the advice of one of his most experienced officers⁶⁰ he pitched camp rather than pressing on to the city. It was just as well that he did, because if the Turks had caught him in open country, they would probably have annihilated him. As it was there was a fierce battle the next morning. Junayd gave the order that any slave who fought for the Muslims would receive his freedom. The regular troops were amazed by the fierceness with which the slaves fought, cutting holes in saddle-blankets and putting them over their heads as a sort of makeshift armour. Finally the Turks withdrew and Junayd was able to go on to the city, saving himself behind its massive walls. The Turkish army, denied a complete victory, now began to withdraw and the Muslim presence in Soghdia survived, but only just.

You weep because of the battle
You should be carved up as a leader
You abandoned us like pieces of a slaughtered beast
Cut up for a round-breasted girl.
Drawn swords rose
Arms were cut off at the elbows
While you were like an infant girl in the women’s tent
With no understanding what was going on.
If only you had landed in a pit on the day of the Battle
And been covered with hard, dry mud!
War and its sons play with you
Like hawks play with quails.
Your heart flew out of fear of battle
Your flying heart will not return
I hate the wide beauty of your eye
And the face in a corrupt body
Junayd, you do not come from real Arab stock
And your ancestors were ignoble
Fifty thousand were slain having gone astray
While you cried out for them like lost sheep.

After Junayd died in office in 734 open dissent broke out among the Arabs in Khurasan and the authority of the Umayyad governors was threatened by a rebel army led by one Hārith b. Surayj. Resentments over pay and the hardships of campaigning were exacerbated by the effects of famine and constant warfare. The years of Hārith’s revolt, 734-6, marked the nadir of Arab fortunes in Transoxania. It seems that all the lands beyond the river were lost except Kish. The Soghdian king, Ghūrak, seems to have been able to recover control of his ancient capital at Samarqand.⁶² It was the most significant reverse Arab conquerors had suffered in any theatre of operations, and it is noticeable that it came very shortly after the defeat of Arab armies in Europe at the battle of Poitiers in 732. But there was an important difference. In the west, Poitiers really did represent the end of the Arab advance. In the east, the reverses that followed the battle of the Tashtakaracha Pass represented a serious but only temporary setback.

Nasr, like Qutayba before him, worked with a twin-track policy. As Gibb says, ‘He had seen the futility of trying to hold the country together by mere brute force, and the equal futility of trying to dispense with force.’⁶³ Shortly after his appointment, he gave a sermon in the mosque in the provincial capital at Merv,^o which was essentially a political manifesto.⁶⁴ At first glance, it was mostly about money. He made it clear that he was the protector of the Muslims and that henceforth Muslims (not, it should be noted, Arabs) would get preferential tax status. All land would be liable for the kharāj tax but Muslims would be exempt from the jizya, by which he meant the poll tax. The implication was clear: all Muslims, whether Arab immigrants or local converts, would have the same privileged fiscal status; all infidels, whatever their class or ethnic background, would have to pay. It was said that 30,000 Muslims who had been paying the poll tax now no longer had to do so, while 80,000 infidels had to start paying up. Of course, the effect of Nasr’s decree, or rather his regulation of a previously chaotic situation, had wider implications; conversion to Islam meant that you became an equal member of the ruling community. It was a clear and attractive incentive and played a part in the creation of a ruling class in Khurasan and Transoxania which was defined by religion, Islam, rather than by ethnic identity, Arab. It was this body of Khurasani Muslims who were to rise in revolt against Nasr and the Umayyad government in 747 and install the Abbasids as rulers of the Muslim world in 750.

In the short term, Nasr’s policy seems to have been successful. The fact that we hear virtually nothing about Tukhāristan and Khwārazm at this time, and little about Soghdia, suggests that these areas were largely peaceful under Muslim rule. It is probable that by this time most of the princes in this area had converted to Islam, and this is certainly true of the ones we know about, notably the rulers of Bukhara and the Barmakids of Balkh. Contingents from Transoxania served in Nasr’s armies: when he was raiding Shāsh in 739, he had 20,000 men from Bukhara, Samarqand, Kish and even from wild and remote Ushrūsanā in his forces. A few of these may have been of Arab origin, but it is likely that most were locals who joined the Muslim armies in the hope of pay and booty.

He also set about encouraging Soghdian merchants, who had fled east to Farghāna during the wars of the 720s, to return. This was not a simple matter. The Soghdians demanded conditions. The first of these was that those who had converted to Islam and had then apostasized should not be punished. This was a difficult one; the penalty for apostasy from Islam was (and still is) death, and it was not easy to get around this. It is interesting that Nasr did not feel obliged to ask any religious scholars before making his decision. These were the days before the crystallization of Islamic law, and he simply decided on his own initiative that this concession should be made. Even half a century later, the idea that such a clear principle of Islam could be disregarded on the authority of a provincial governor would have been unthinkable, but in these rough-and-ready frontier conditions Nasr could get away with it in the wider cause of Islam. Then there was the question of the tax arrears that many of the merchants owed; these were written off. Finally there was the question of Muslim prisoners held by the Soghdians. Perhaps surprisingly, Nasr agreed that these needed to be returned only after their bona fides had been checked by a Muslim judge. Nasr received a good deal of criticism in some quarters and the caliph, Hishām, himself initially repudiated the agreement, but in the end it was agreed that the most important thing was to win over these prosperous and powerful men. The treaty was made and the merchants returned to Soghdia.⁶⁵

The only major offensive operation that Nasr launched was the 739 expedition to Shāsh and Farghāna. The accounts of these campaigns are picturesque but confused and the course of events is not entirely clear. When Nasr’s army reached distant Farghāna they besieged the city of Qubā, eventually coming to terms with the son of the ruler. Negotiations were carried out by the young prince’s mother through an interpreter; she is said to have taken the opportunity to deliver a short homily on kingship, which gives us another glimpse into the mentality of these eastern Iranian rulers.

unless he has six things: a vizier to whom he may tell his secret intentions and who will give him reliable advice; a cook who, whenever the king does not feel like food, will find something that will tempt him to eat; a wife who, if he goes in with a troubled mind to see her and he looks at her face, causes his anxieties to disappear; a fortress in which he can take refuge, a sword which will not fail him when he fights the enemy and a treasury which he can live off anywhere in the world.⁶⁶

She was also shocked to see the treatment of one of the sons of the old governor Qutayba, who occupied a fairly modest place in the governor’s camp. ‘You Arabs’, she complained, ‘don’t keep faith nor do you behave properly with one another. It was Qutayba who laid the foundations of your power, as I myself saw. This is his son, yet you make him sit below you. You should change places with him!’ This is a strong affirmation both of the reputation Qutayba still enjoyed twenty years after his ignominious death and of the importance of inherited status.

This campaign seems to have marked the end of major offensive expeditions. Nasr may have spent time pacifying Soghdia but from 745 onwards he was entirely preoccupied in Merv and Khurasan with the rebel movement that later would become the Abbasid revolution. Embassies were sent to China to regulate relations now that the Turks no longer formed a barrier between the two great powers. An embassy in 744 seems to have been intended to develop commercial contacts and contained representatives from the Soghdian cities Tukhāristan, Shāsh and even Zābulistān (in southern Afghanistan). Further embassies were sent in 745 and 747.⁶⁷

By 750 the conquest of Transoxania was essentially complete and the north-eastern frontier of the Muslim world established along lines that were to remain more or less unchanged until the coming of the Seljuk Turks three centuries later. It was also the frontier of settlement. Islamic rule was established in areas where there were ancient cities and settled villages. Further to the east, in the vast grasslands of Kazakhstan and Kirghistan, the ancient beliefs and ways of life continued largely unaltered. The conquest of Transoxania was the hardest that Muslim armies ever undertook. Their opponents were determined and resilient, and the armies of Islam endured repeated setbacks. In the end, it was only when governors like Asad b. Abd Allāh and Nasr b. Sayyār cooperated with and incorporated local elites that it was possible. Islam certainly triumphed over native religions in this area, but the princely values of Transoxanian rulers were to have a profound effect on the culture of the whole eastern Islamic world and the survival of Iranian culture within it.

There was, however, to be one final, decisive act in the struggle for Central Asia. We know virtually nothing about it from Arab sources, but the Chinese annals fill in some of the gaps.⁶⁸ In 747 and 749 the Prince of Tukhāristan appealed for Chinese help against bandits in Gilgit, near the headwaters of the Indus, an area where Muslim armies never penetrated, along a route to China sometimes used by Soghdian traders. The Chinese governor of Kucha sent a Korean officer to deal with the problem. In a series of amazing campaigns, he crossed the mountains along the precipitous route of what is now the Karakorum highway and defeated the rebels. He was then called in by the king of Farghāna to help in a local dispute with the neighbouring king of Shāsh. The Chinese forces ended up by taking Shāsh and the king fled to seek help from the Abbasid governor Abū Muslim, who had established himself at Samarqand. He sent a force under one of his lieutenants, Ziyād b. Sālih. The Chinese with their Farghāna allies and some Turks met the Muslim armies near Taraz in July 751. It was the first and last time that Arab and Chinese armies came into direct confrontation. The Arabs were victorious but sadly we have no more details of this conflict.

This encounter marked the end of an era. Arab forces were never to penetrate east of Farghāna or north-east of Shāsh, never to follow the Silk Road into Sinkiang and across the Gobi Desert. It was also the last time that Chinese armies ever reached so far west. They would probably have returned in force to avenge their defeat, but four years later, in 755, Central Asia and then China itself were torn apart by the revolt of An Lushan, and it was to be a millennium before Chinese forces once again appeared in Kashgar. Any hope the Soghdian princes may have entertained that the Chinese would support them against the Arabs were ended for ever. The battle of Taraz or Talas, like the battle of Poitiers in 732 in the west, was little reported in the contemporary Arab sources. Although Poitiers was a defeat and Talas a victory for Arab arms, both were to mark the furthest limits of Arab expansion in their areas.

The battle of Talas was also remembered in the Arab tradition for a completely different reason. It was widely believed that the artisans captured by the Arabs in the course of the campaign had brought the technology of paper-making to the Arab world. It is certainly the case that paper had been known in China before this, but it appears in Islamic society only in the second half of the eighth century, replacing both parchment and papyrus as the main writing material. Exactly what historical reality lies behind the accounts of the prisoners of Talas we cannot tell. What is likely, however, is that contacts with the Chinese in Central Asia led to the import of this new writing material. Cheap, easy to produce and use, paper was to have a major impact on the literacy and culture of the Muslim and later the European world.

THE ACHIEVEMENT OF QUTAYBA B. MUSLIM, 705-15

THE TURKISH COUNTER-STROKE, 715-37

ASAD B. ABD ALLĀH, NASR B. SAYYĀR AND THE TRIUMPH OF ISLAM, 737-51