After the reestablishment of the unity of the ʿAbbasid caliphate under the rule of al-Ma’mūn, the management of Greater Khurasan, that is, the provinces of Khurasan and Transoxania, was handed over to the Tahirid family. The Tahirids were an integral component of the Abbasid system with their bases in the East and Baghdad and they fell together, the collapse of Tahirid power coinciding with the crisis of the caliphate of Samarra from 861 to 870. Tahirid rule was replaced by the more unstable regime of the Saffarids who expanded their control from their native province of Sistan to Khurasan in the north and Kirman and Fars to the south and west. Yaʿqūb b. Layth, however, still seems to have thought in terms of controlling the caliphate and the still prosperous lands of southern Iraq, rather than establishing any sort of independent state in the Iranian East. It was his ambitions in Iraq which led to his defeat and the collapse of his imperial aspirations. His successor, his brother, ʿAmr was more conciliatory, attempting to win caliphal approval for his rule in Fars and Kirman as well as Khurasan. Like his brother, however, he was undone by his own ambitions. In 278/900, he attempted, with the apparent backing of the caliph al-Muʿtaḍid, to extend his authority over Transoxania and here he met his match in the leader of the Samanid family, Ismāʿīl b. Aḥmad.
The encounter became famous as an example of the vicissitudes of fortune: ʿAmr’s much larger army failed to fight effectively and their leader was captured by the Samanid forces. At the beginning of the day, he lamented, his kitchen was carried on four hundred camels; that evening, a dog ran off with his meagre meal in a single frying pan.
The origins of the Samanids are not entirely clear. They claimed descent from the great hero of the Sasanian period, Bahram Chubīn, stressing an aristocratic Persian past, in contrast to the Tahirids who confected a descent from a noble Arab tribe. In fact, they seem to have originally been a family of landowners from Samān, probably a small town in the neighbourhood of Samarqand, and bore the title of Saman-khudā. The first reliable historical accounts say that they accept Islam at the hands of the Umayyad governor, Asad b. ʿAbd Allah al-Qasrī, around 117/735 around the same time as the Barmakids. Unlike their contemporaries, however, the Samanid family did not join the armies of the ʿAbbasid revolution and apparently continued to live on their estates in obscurity. There is no record of them attending the court of al-Ma’mūn in Marw. After the caliph had left for Baghdad, the governor he appointed in Khurasan, one Ghassān b.ʿAbbād, advanced four sons of Asad to important offices in the provinces, Nūh as the governor of Samarqand, Aḥmad of Farghana, Yaḥyā of Shāsh and Ilyās of Herat. In time, they became the most important supporters of the Tahirids in the lands beyond the Oxus. When Tahirid rule collapsed with the loss of Nishapur in 259/873, Naṣr b. Aḥmad found himself an effectively independent ruler of Samarqand and in 261/875 the caliph al-Muʿtamid directly appointed him as the governor of Transoxania.
On Nasr’s death in 279/892, his son Ismāʿīl inherited the leadership of the family. With the defeat of ʿAmr the Saffarid in 287/900, Ismāʿīl’s triumph was complete and the caliph al-Muʿtaḍid appointed him the governor not just of Transoxania but Khurasan as well, so beginning a period of Samanid hegemony which was to last for almost a century.
The history of the Samanids embodies many contradictions and their reputation among later historians contributes to the confusion. For Niẓām al-Mulk, writing his book of political advice, the Siyāsat-Nāmeh, a century after the collapse of the dynasty, they offered the example of a state with an ordered and developed administrative system with a whole system of diwans dealing with different areas of correspondence and finance. He also describes the system of education and promotion among the Turkish military slaves who formed the backbone of the Samanid army. This impression of order and stability is supported by the testimony of the contemporary geographers, Ibn Ḥawqal in his Kitāb ṣurat al-arḍ and al-Muqaddasī in his Aḥsan al-taqāsim, both of whom comment on the sound and honest administration and the prosperity of the people. Ibn Ḥawqal’s work makes an implicit contrast with the maladministration and disorder he found in the Fertile Crescent at the same time.
This ideal picture is not reflected in the most important narrative sources. Despite their reputation as patrons of literature, the Samanids were not well served by the chroniclers of the day. There was no equivalent of the works of Miskawayh on the Buyids or Bayhaqī on the Ghaznavids to bring life and character to the events and personalities of the Samanid era. Nonetheless, the rather dry annals of Gardīzī’s Zayn al-akhbār and Ibn al-Athīr’s Kāmil fī’l-ta’rikh present a very different picture from the calm and order of the Siyāsat-nāmeh. In their accounts, Samanid rule was a period of almost continuous rebellion, insurrection and civil war as numerous different actors, members of the ruling family, local dynasts and Turkish military commanders fought each other, either to become rulers themselves or to take control of the Samanid amirs, whose personal power declined dramatically in the course of the century. Of the rulers of the dynasty, only Ismāʿīl emerges as a great figure and the doings of the amirs of the second half of the Samanid century are almost completely eclipsed by accounts of their military commanders and viziers.
The resolution of this apparent paradox may lie in the nature of warfare at the time. This seems to have consisted of battles between fairly small armies of professional soldiers, each attaching themselves to leaders who they hoped would be able to pay them and provide a modicum of prosperity. There are few examples to major sieges or the destruction of cities and irrigation systems. For Narshakhī writing his History of Bukhāra in 332/943–944, in the middle of the Samanid period, the greatest disaster which occurred in the city in time was not the result of siege or warfare but a fire accidentally started by a baker in a harīsa shop in 325/937 which destroyed the bazaars and much of the rest of the city centre. Perhaps like eleventh-century France, a condition of almost non-stop warfare could coincide with a period of economic prosperity and cultural achievement.
Another paradox in the reputation of the Samanids was their Persian identity. As already noted, they seemed to have emerged from the calls of dehqan landowners in Transoxania and they certainly sought to emphasize their Iranian identity by tracing their lineage to the Sasanian house. Later historians have emphasized their cultural achievements and the development of New Persian as a court and literary language, a legacy which survived the rule of Turkish dynasts for centuries after the passing of the dynasty. There is certainly some truth in this. Some of the earliest New Persian poets, Rudakī and Daqīqī, benefitted from Sasanian patronage and the first great New Persian prose work to have survived, the “translation” (actually more of a paraphrase) of the great Ta’rīkh of al-Ṭabarī was written at the Samanid court by Balʿamī, a bureaucrat who served the dynasty. Most importantly in the eyes of later generations, it was under Samanid patronage that the first steps were taken in the translation into New Persian and the versification of the ancient legends and Sasanian history which culminated in Firdawsī’s Shahnāmeh in the early Ghaznevid age. It was also towards the end of the Samanid period that the ancient Soghdian language (an Iranian language cognate with Persian) disappeared and was replaced by New Persian.
The Samanid century may have seen the establishment of New Persian as a major language of culture but it was also a period when the influence of Turkish speakers in politics and the military became more and more important, leading to the establishment of Turkish rulers like the Ghaznevids and the Karakhanids in the next century. The key to this was the gradual conversion of the steppe Turks and their leaders to Islam during the course of the Samanid century. Before this, these Turkish chiefs could never have entered the Muslim commonwealth and the rulers of Transoxania could gather their supporters in a jihād against these infidels. With their conversion to Islam, however, the religious motives for opposing Turkish rule evaporated and the citizens of the ancient towns and villages of Transoxania court accepted Turkish rule without any pious qualms.
The Samanid realm was not a unified political entity, more a patchwork of provinces, united, more or less, by the power of the Samanid dynasty. Local tensions were seldom far below the surface and when the dynasty faltered, they sometimes broke out into open rebellion. When Ismāʿīl was granted his right to rule by the caliph, it included all the lands from the Pass of Hulwan, that is where the plains of Iraq joined the western slopes of the Zagros Mountains, to the edge of the Muslim world in the East. In fact, much of this territory in Western Iran was never under Samanid rule and the furthest west that their rule ever extended was Rayy and that was soon lost to the Buyids. The Caspian provinces too were only controlled by the dynasty for very short periods. The core lands were around the capital Bukhara and Samarqand in ancient Soghdia, areas normally ruled by members of the Sasanian family, and Farghana to the northeast was often under the members of the dynasty rule as well. This family domination did not always lead to peace and harmony and different members of the family often used their appanages as bases for trying to take power over capital at Bukhara and with it the apparatus of the state. Along the northern banks of the Oxus, there were a number of small principalities whose origins can be traced back to before the first Muslim conquest. Ruled by long-established families like the Muhtājids of Chaghāniyān and the Farīghunids of Juzjān, they generally accepted Samanid overlordship and often played important roles in the Samanid government. The Muḥtajids, for example, served in the key role of governors of Khurasan for in the first half of the fourth/tenth century. The most important province, and the most restless, was Khurasan with its capital at Marw or Nishapur. Khurāsān was never governed by members of the local elite but by princes like the Muḥtājids or Turkish soldiers like the Simjurids. Samanid rule was often challenged and neighbouring powers like the Ziyārid princes of Ṭabaristan provinces and the Buyids of Rayy were often eager to support rebellions among the restless subjects in Khurasan.
The Samanids took the title of Amīr and projected themselves as governors for the ʿAbbasid caliphs. When Ibn Faḍlān passed through the Samanid capital of Bukhara in 309/921, he found the young Amīr Naṣr, in a court that looked very much like a smaller version of the Caliph’s court in Baghdad. No doubt tutored by his famous vizier al-Jayhānī, he enquired politely after the health of his master the caliph al-Muqtadir. While this was no doubt sincere, it was little more than a diplomatic politeness. No Samanid ruler ever visited the ʿAbbasid court, no taxation or other revenues were requested and none were sent. After the assumption of power in Iraq by the Buyids in 945, the independence of the Samanids was complete.
This led to an effective division of Iran between West and East, the boundary being great expanses of the Dashti Kavir and other salt deserts. Only at the pivotal city of Rayy and, less crucially, in Kirman to the south, did the two halves share a frontier zone. Marked differences emerged between West and East. In Western Iran, often, and rather confusingly referred to by contemporaries as Iraqi ʿAjam, or Persian Iraq, the ruling powers were the various branches of the Buyid family. The leaders were adherents of Shiʿa Islam and the language of administration was Arabic. Even though Iraq was in economic and political crisis for much of this period, Baghdad was still the centre of political culture and aspirations. In the East, things were very different. Baghdad was both remote and irrelevant. Increasingly, the language of culture administration and, perhaps most important, poetry was New Persian. Only the Islamic religious sciences continued to use Arabic as the language of common discourse.
Apart from struggles over Rayy and parts of Tabaristan, the focus of the Samanids lay to the north and east. It was a period of opening to the vast steppes of Central Asia and the Turkic nomad peoples who inhabited them. This opening up took two main forms. The first was the employment of ever larger numbers of Turkish soldiers in the Samanid armies. Of course, this was nothing new. The ʿAbbasid armies of the third/ninth centuries had after all had large numbers of Turks in their ranks. Under the Samanids, however, the Turks became by far the most important element in the armies and their leaders the key supporters of the regime. In the Samanid state, there emerged the classic division between the Persian bureaucrats (Men of the Pen) and the Turkish soldiers (Men of the Sword) which was to characterize the history of Iran for centuries to come.
The other way in which the Samanids interacted with the Turkic people of the steppe was through trade and missionary activity. In the first half-century of Samanid rule, a flourishing trade developed in the lands of the Volga basin north of the Caspian Sea, a trade whose tentacles reached as far as Scandinavia and the Western Isles of Scotland. This trade was enabled and fuelled by a vast production of silver dirhams. This was made possible by the opening up of new silver mines in the neighbourhood of Shāsh (Tashkent) and the use of this silver to strike coins in the local mint. While the Buyids of Iraq and Baghdad struggled to produce enough of their grubby and misshapen dirhams, mostly made of lead and other base metals, the Samanids mints, at least in the first half-century of their rule, turned out regular and elegant coins containing a high proportion of real silver.
We know about this trade through the remarkable travelogue of Ibn Faḍlān. Coming from Baghdad as an emissary of the caliph, he travelled north from the Samanid realm with a caravan of merchants trading with the Rus who met them on the Upper Volga River and exchanged the slaves and furs they had brought from the Slav lands of eastern Europe for Samanid dirhams. Along with commerce went missionary activity. The Rus, of course, eventually converted to Greek Orthodox Christianity by 1000 AD but Islam made more progress among the Turkish people like the Eastern Bulgars (Eastern to distinguish them from the Western Bulgars who settled the lands of modern Bulgaria and, like the Rus, converted to Christianity). Accounts of the process of conversion are very rare but Ibn Faḍlān’s narrative makes a number of important points. The initiative for the mission came not from the Caliph but from the king of the Bulghars (called here ṣaqāliba) who sent a message “people to instruct him in law and acquaint him with the rules of Islam according to the sharīʿa, and to construct a mosque and build a minbar from which he could proclaim al-Muqtadir’s name throughout his kingdom. He also beseeched him to build a fortification to protect him against the kings who opposed him (notably the Khazars who had converted to Judaism)”. The king wanted to convert to join the Muslim community. He was prepared to accept the overlordship of the distant caliph and adopt his name. He also wanted the new technology of masonry building. Conversion seems to have been top-down; the king became a Muslim and his subjects followed. All did not go well, however, because the king had also been promised a substantial sum of money to pay for the building and when this did not appear, he was furious though this does not seem to have led him to reject Islam and he accepted Ibn Faḍlān’s instructions about the call to prayer and the Muslim rules of inheritance. The details of this process of conversion may be hard to recover but it is clear that by the end of Samanid rule in 395/1005, many of the Turkish tribes of the steppe had converted to Islam, a development which laid the foundations for the Karakhanids and Seljuk Turks to take power in Eastern Iran in the first half of the fifth/eleventh century. Importantly, under Samanid influence, the Turkic tribes were converted to Sunni, rather than Shi’ite Islam, despite the fact that Ismāʿīlī missionaries were active in Iran and even for a time at the Samanid court. The identification of Turkic peoples with Sunnism persisted in Central Asia and in the Ottoman Empire and gave aspiring rulers of the Ghaznevid and Seljuq lines the opportunity to position themselves as leaders of the “orthodox” Muslims against the Shi’ite “heretics”.
The first half of the fifth/eleventh century saw Samanid power at its apogee. Despite the origins of the family in the Samarqand area, they established their capital in Bukhara and their rule saw the city becoming a major commercial and cultural centre. A powerful government collected plentiful taxes to pay an efficient army. In 280/893, the Amir Ismāʿīl led an expedition to distant Talas and returned with a vast booty of slaves. At the same time, the Amirs exerted their authority over the local princes of Transoxania and venerable lines like the Bukhārakhudās and the Afshīns of Ushrūsana, who had held power in their areas since before the coming of Islam, now disappeared. In the West, however, Samanid attempts to establish firm authority over the Zaydi rulers of the Caspian provinces area were only intermittently successful and the city of Rayy passed into Buyid hands in the second half of the fourth/tenth century.
On Ismāʿīl’s death in 301/907, he was succeeded by his son Aḥmad who attempted to assert Samanid power in the Caspian provinces to the west and Sistan to the south but his reign was cut short when he was murdered by his Turkish slaves, allegedly because he allowed himself to be dominated by the religious ʿulamā at their expense. He was succeeded by his young son Naṣr. Despite challenges from other members of the Samanid family who attempted to seize power, he was not deposed. Under the tutelege of his able vizier Abū ʿAbd Allah al-Jayhānī, he survived these attempts and his long reign 301–331/914–943 was the high point of Samanid power. It was during his reign that the Samanids were able to control Rayy in 314/925–926 when the caliph al-Muqtadir confirmed the Samanids as rulers of the city. It was also in his reign that Ismāʿīlī influence became important at the Samanid court. This was the time when the Ismāʿīlī Qarāmiṭa threatened Baghdad and the very existence of the ʿAbbasid caliphate and the Ismāʿīlī Fatimids were establishing their caliphate in North Africa. In the Samanid realms, there was, however, a vigorous reaction and the supporters of the Ismāʿīlīs were purged by the orthodox Sunnis. Ismāʿīlism survived in remote areas like Badakhshan but apart from that, Transoxania remained firmly part of the Sunni world, a position confirmed with the increasing conversion of the steppe Turks to Sunni Islam.
The Samanids emulated the ʿAbbasid in the development of a bureaucratic state in which ten diwans supervised the chancery the collection of taxes and the payment of the army. Both the contemporary historian of Bukhara, Narshakhī, and the eleventh-century statesman Nizām al-Mulk writing for the Saljuk rulers stress the orderly and complex administration maintained by the Samanids. The Samanid administration developed two main branches, the darqāh or military court, commanded by the chief ḥājib and the civilian bureaucracy headed by the wazīr. The impression of order sound government may well have been idealized by both contemporary and later commentators. Niẓām al-Mulk, for example, describes with admiration the system of promotion by which Turkish ghilmān could rise from humble servile origins to the great offices of state and even, as the example of the Ghaznevids in the next century was to demonstrate, to the throne itself. Revenue was collected from the rich agricultural lands of Transoxania and Khurasan, as well as dues collected from the import of Turkish slaves.
The state was not dependent on loyalties of clan or tribe. The Turkish soldiers, who became increasingly powerful and influential as the Samanid century progressed, served as individuals and the group loyalties were to commanders who took them into their households and raised and promoted them. The court itself seems to have been largely static, based in the capital of Bukhara. Apart from the governor of the other great city, Samarqand, who was usually a member of the ruling family, the Samanids could count on the loyalty of a number of local dynasties in Transoxania, mostly claiming ancient Iranian origins. The government of Khurasan, the lands to the west of the Oxus with its capital at Nishapur, was more problematic.
The chief problem that he, and later Samanids, faced was the government of Khurasan. While Transoxania remained the heartland of their power, the rich cities of Khurasan, especially Nishapur, now more populous and wealthy than the old capital at Marw, were also vital. The province was the focus of a three-way struggle between the Buyids, who sought, successfully in the end, to rule in Rayy, the Ziyārid rulers of Jurjān and Tabaristan and the Samanids. The Amirs themselves do not seem to have been active in Khurasan, preferring to rule from their capital in Bukhara, and they appointed military commanders to govern on their behalf. The difficulty was that successive commanders used their power to establish their own semi-independence.
The problem was finding someone who had sufficient power and influence to govern the province but who would not use his position to challenge the authority of the Amir in Bukhara. Two families came to dominate and alternate the government of the province between them, the Iranian Amirs of Chaghāniyān and the Turkish Simjurids. The Muḥtājid Muḥammad b. al-Muẓaffar was the governor of Khurasan from 321/933 until his death in 329/941 when he was succeeded by his son Abī ʿAlī Aḥmad. In 333/945, he was dismissed, apparently because he was not prepared to accept Nūḥ’s authority over his army and replaced by Ibrāhīm b. Sīmjur. Abū ʿAlī mounted a full-scale rebellion and at one point deposed Naṣr but in the end peace was made, perhaps because he was the only man who could command the allegiance of the army of Khurasan and he returned to office in 335/946. After little more than a year, he was dismissed again but made a comeback in 340–343/952–954 and governed until his death from plague in 343/954. He was the last Muḥtajid to govern Khurasan but his family seem to have continued to rule their ancestral province of Chaghāniyān.
Ibrāhim b. Sīmjūr had governed Khurāsan on two occasions before his death in 336/948 in 336/948. In 345/956, his son Abū’l-Ḥasan Muḥammad was appointed the governor and, with a brief interruption held office until 371/989, some thirty three years later, by far the longest tenure of any Samanid Amir or governor. Gardīzī gives us a rare character sketch:
Abū’l-Ḥasan took up his post and treated the subjects very benevolently, spreading his justice widely….He always used to cultivate the learned classes and turned completely away from those evil ways which he had previously followed and from which the subjects had suffered much; he now conciliated people, put aside that evil behaviour and abandoned reprehensible behaviour.
It would be nice to imagine that his conduct contributed to his long and peaceful tenure of office. Until the last decade of Samanid rule, the Sīmjūrīs, increasingly partners rather than subjects of the dynasty, represented the best solution the Samanids found to the Khurasan problem.
At the end of Naṣr’s reign, he seems to have come under the increasing influence of the Ismāʿilīs at court. This, in turn, led to a plot to have him assassinated which was forestalled when his son Nūḥ was able to persuade him to retire and occupy himself with religious devotions. On his death in 331/943, he was succeeded by his son Nūḥ. Nūḥ’s reign was marked by the beginning of financial problems. The treasury was empty and in 334/945–946 there were mutinies among the troops of the army in Khurasan which led to the brutal executions of the army commander and the vizier as Nūh tried to pacify the discontent. The other big problem of the reign was relations with Abū ʿAlī the Muḥtajid, deposed from his position as the governor of Khurasan but powerful in his native Chaghāniyān. He was put in charge of the capture and execution of a self-styled prophet (mutanabbi) who had appeared in the mountains to the East of Chaghānyān. Abū ʿAlī attempted a reconciliation with the Amīr, sending a delegation of shaykhs and leading citizens from Nishapur to Bukhārā but before they reached the capital, the Amir was dead.
The Samanid dynasty continued to rule in theory for another half-century after Nūḥ’s but the chroniclers tell us a very letter about their personalities or activities as they were increasingly side-lined by old-established military leaders like the Sīmjurids in Khuasan and from the 340s/950s a new generation of Turkish ghilmān. Nūḥ was succeeded by one of his sons, ʿAbd al-Malik, who reigned for six years, 343–350/954–961. His reign saw the eclipse of the power of the Muḥtajids with the death of Abū ʿAlī, his body being taken to his native Chaghāniyān. At the same time, it saw the rise of a new Turkish ghulām, Alptegin, who is first mentioned in 345/956–957 as Ḥājib (senior military commander in the Samanid hierarchy) when he organized the murder of the vizier Bakr b. Mālik in public at the gate of the Dār al-sulṭān in Bukhara. He disdainfully refused the governorate of Balkh as beneath his dignity and in 349/961 he had himself appointed the governor of Khurasan and went to Nishapur. Here, he worked in tandem with the vizier Abū ʿAlī Balʿamī, father of the celebrated historian, as effective rulers of the Samanid state.
This arrangement came to an end when the Amīr ʿAbd al-Malik died, apparently being thrown of his horse, playing polo while drunk. The vizier Balʿamī asked Alptegin’s advice about the member of the family who should succeed him. Alptegin made his choice but unfortunately for him the members of the Samanid family and the military leaders in Bukhārā had already chosen the dead Amīr’s brother Manṣūr. Alptegin was dismissed and forced to flee with his most loyal ghilmān, after burning his camp and equipment. They fled through the Oxus valley to remote Ghazni, then an unimportant town in what is now eastern Afghanistan, on the route to the plains of India. Here, he established himself, ostensibly as a loyal, if distant, vassal of the Samanids. Among the ghilmān who followed him was one Sebüktagin, the founder of the Ghaznevid dynasty.
The annals tell us little about the reign of the new Amīr (350–365/961–976) and such details as we do have are mostly concerned with the activities of Abū’l- Ḥasan Sīmjurī in Khurasan and the establishment of a peaceful arrangement with the Buyids, now firmly in control of Rayy. On his death, he was succeeded by his son Nūḥ who was still a child at the time. His reign of over twenty years was the second longest in the history of the dynasty but during this period, power slipped away from the Samanids into the hands of their Turkish military officers, while the Karakhanid threat loomed larger on the eastern frontiers.
He began his reign by strengthening the position of Abū’l-Ḥasan Simjūri in Khurasan, writing him a fulsome letter and bestowing a title, Nāṣir al-Dawla, the sort of honour which had previously only been bestowed by caliphs on independent rulers like the Buyids and Hamdanids. During the course of the reign, Abū’l-Ḥasan’s son Abū ʿAlī began to take over from his father, able but more ruthless than his parent, he was to be a major player in the final collapse of Samanid rule. At this time too, a new generation of Turkish officers appear on the Samanid political scene. They seem to have been slave-soldier ghulāms without any clear family or geographical origins. Fā’iq and Tāsh are found constantly manoeuvring at court and in provincial appointments, sometimes allies, more often rivals.
In 387/989, Abū’l-Ḥasan died, having sex with a slave girl with whom he was much enamoured in the garden of his palace. With his death, the dynasty lost one of its most loyal supporters. His son inherited much of his power; he did not have the same commitment to the ruling family. He had numerous troops and an ample treasury. He used these resources to take over the whole of Khurasan, collecting all the taxes for himself and “inflicted every humiliation on Nūḥ”, proclaiming himself Amīr al-Umara, though he still kept Nūḥ’s name in the khutba. The breach became open and irreparable when the Karakhanid Ilek Khan took over Bukhara, apparently without meeting any serious resistance, in 381/991–992. Nūḥ’s commanders were quick to offer their services to the invader, Fā’iq, entering his entourage and Tāsh being awarded the governorship of Balkh. Abū ʿAlī himself wrote to the Khan offering his support. Nūh who seems to have withdrawn to the Oxus crossing at Amūl wrote increasingly desperate letters to him asking for troops and money but Abū ʿAlī sent no reply.
The Samanid only survived because the Khan got sick in Bukhara and left the city to return to the healthier air of the steppe but died on the way. Nūḥ now turned to the only man who would offer him any effective support, Sebüktagin of Ghazna. He with his ambitious and able son Maḥmūd now came to take over the leadership of the Samanid forces in Khurasan. In 384/994, there was a decisive encounter between the Samanid army and the forces gathered by Abū ʿAlī Simjūrī outside Herat. Gardīzi paints a picture of the battle scene:
Contingents of ghilmān and banners came into view from every side and there were so many rampant elephants, cavalrymen and infantrymen that the actual earth’s surface could not be seen….Then there arose the sound of drums, barrel shaped drums and kettledrums trumpets with tapered tubes, cymbals. jangling ornaments and bells of elephants, deep toned trumpets and conches, together with the shouting of warriors and the noise of horses to such a pitch that the world grew dark. The wind arose, with dust and stones swirling in it (75–6).
As later Persian miniatures show, every important battle had to have an orchestral accompaniment.
It was at this point that Abū ʿAlī lost his nerve. Fearing treachery among the ranks of his supporters, he and his ghilmān abruptly fled from the field, leaving his camp with its valuables and equipment to be pillaged by Sebūktagin and his men. It was not quite the end for Abū ʿAlī. He was given shelter by the Buyid ruler of Rayy but left his place of safety “because of a love affair with a woman” in Nishapur. In the end, he was captured, and handed over to Sebüktegin who ordered that he be imprisoned in distant Gardīz in the mountains to the east of Ghazni where he was killed soon after. Only shortly after this in 387/997, both Sebüktagin and the luckless Amir Nūh died.
He was succeeded by his son Manṣūr who was still a boy. His disturbed reign only lasted two years (387–389/997–999) and he never had a chance to establish himself and he was deposed and blinded after trying to assert himself against the leaders of the Turkish military. Meanwhile, powerful neighbours were poised to move into the political vacuum. From the south, Sebüktagin’s son Mahmūd moved to take over Khurasan, while from the east, the Karakhanid Khan moved his followers into Bukhārā. In Dhū’l-Qaʿda 389/October 999, the Khan established himself in the seat of government and the last Samanid Amir, ʿAbd al-Malik, and his family were taken to Uzgend at the eastern end of the Farghāna valley where they soon perished.
The dynasty destroyed and no-one attempted to recreate Samanid power but their memory lingered on. Later generations remembered their system of government, the great and wise viziers from the Jayḥānī, Balʿamī and ʿUtbī families, and the flourishing of Persian poetry at their court. They were the most important figures in what the historian Minorsky called the “Iranian intermezzo”, the century or so between the collapse of the Arab rule of the caliphate and the rise of Turkish powers like the Karakhanids and the Ghaznavids. And they left one of the first and most exquisite Islamic buildings in the Persian world, the family mausoleum in Bukhara. Deep in an ancient cemetery, half buried among the tombs, it survived undisturbed before being resurrected by twentieth-century restorers for us to enjoy today.
Ghaznavids emerged from the collapse of the Samanid state. The first leader of the group of ghilmān, who formed the nucleus of Ghaznavid power, was Alptigīn who had fled the Samanid court for semi-exile in Ghazna, a then remote small town on the route from Kabul to the plains of northern India. Here, he maintained himself in semi-independence as the Samanid regime in Transoxania and Khurasan disintegrated. On his death, leadership of the group passed to Sebüktagīn who assumed control in 366/977. He had been a slave captured in what is now Kyrgyzstan who had been promoted by Alptigīn. As we have already seen, he answered the pleas of the Samanid amir Nūḥ b. Naṣr for military support and defeated Abū ʿAlī Simjūrī. This ex-slave was now rewarded with the overlordship of most of modern Afghanistan and the prestigious title of Nāṣir al-Dīn wa’l-Dawla, while his able and ambitious son Maḥmūd, now a leader of the forces in Khurasan, was called Sayf al-Dawla. For the first time, a ghulām had been clearly and publicly one of the leading powers in the Muslim world. When Sebüktagīn died in 987/997, he was, after a short struggle for power among his sons, succeeded by Maḥmūd. Again, it was the first time a ghulām family had established a hereditary succession.
The final collapse of the Samanids left Maḥmūd and his ghilmān in effective control of all the Samanid lands west and south of the Oxus river. He also made an agreement with the Karakhanids that they would rule Transoxania, including Bukhārā and Samarqand and by and large both sides respected this arrangement. In the west, Maḥmūd accepted Buyid control over Rayy and the increasingly feeble Buyids posed no real threat. Sistan, however, was another problem. The vast distances and scattered populations of the Helmand river basin meant that Ghaznavid control was both precarious and unprofitable.
To sustain his new position, Maḥmūd required military power and legitimacy as a Muslim ruler. The power of the Ghaznavids rested on their army. The core of this army was a comparatively small force of some 4,000 ghilmān though much larger numbers were sometimes assembled for campaigns to the plains of India as recruits joined the expeditions hoping for the rewards of jihād. In 414/1023, Maḥmūd is said to have reviewed 54,000 men and 1,500 elephants with complete outfits or armour at Ghazna but this must have been an exceptional occasion. Unlike the neighbouring Karakhanids, the Ghaznavids had no tribal following or support on which they could rely. The problem, as the contemporary Buyids and Hamdanids were finding out, was that ghilmān, even though their numbers might be quite small, were very expensive and if they were not paid, their loyalty would soon evaporate. In order to sustain this expenditure, the Ghaznavids had to tax their territories heavily and unremittingly. Whether in the great towns of Khurasan or the scattered villages of Sistan, tax collectors were, or attempted to be, ruthless. This, in turn, alienated many of their subjects. Except in Sistan, violent resistance was uncommon but the rapacity of the tax system meant that their subjects offered little or no resistance when the Ghuzz Turkomen and the Saljuq leaders appeared to offer an alternative from the 1030s onwards.
The question of legitimacy within the Muslim commonwealth was of crucial importance to the Ghaznavids. Despite their slave ghulām origins, they had to find a discourse which explained why they should rule over the community of Muslims in their area. They tried to achieve this in three ways. The first was securing the support of the ʿAbbasid caliphs in Baghdad. During the second half of the fourth/tenth century, the caliphs were powerless figureheads under the control of the Shi’ite Buyids. With the accession of the caliph al-Qādir (381–422/991–1031), this began to change as Buyid power in Baghdad and Iraq declined, so the caliph was able to assert some independence and develop his claim to be the leader of a Sunni community. Assailed by the Fatimids and their Ismāʿīlī followers from Egypt and the West, al-Qādir was able to look to the Ghaznavids whose adherence to Sunni Islam was without doubt. Maḥmūd wrote to the caliph stressing his allegiance and arguing that he had only replaced the Samanids because of their disloyalty. In return, the caliph invested him with the governorship of Khurasan, a robe of honour, a crown and the titles of Yamīn al-Dawla and Amīn al-Milla (right hand of the dynasty and trustworthy supporter of the faith). He enthroned himself in the ancient city of Balkh, wearing robe and crown and holding public audience for high and low. Maḥmūd and his successor Masʿūd never claimed the title of caliph as the Fatimids and Umayyads of al-Andalus had done. Instead, they ruled with the title of Amīr (prince or governor) and the informal designation of sulṭān, a word which changes at this time from meaning authority or the state to being the title of an independent ruler.
His second role was as a champion of the emerging Sunni orthodoxy against the Ismāʿīlī heretics. Since the failure of their attempt to convert the Samanid court, the scattered groups of Ismāʿīlīs can hardly have represented a major threat but their secrecy meant that conspiracies could easily be imagined. The attachment to Sunni orthodoxy was also useful as an ideological weapon against the Shi’ite Buyids of Rayy. Maḥmūd was not only the appointed representative of caliphal power; he was also the defender of orthodox Islam.
The third pillar of Ghaznavid authority was their role in leading a jihād in the plains of northern India. There had been previous Muslim raids on Sind from Umayyad times but they had always come by sea or the long and arduous march through Baluchistan and Makran. Maḥmūd’s expeditions were the first to use the northern route to the heart of the Punjab. These raids served a dual purpose. They provided a role for Maḥmūd as the great ghāzī, the leader of the Muslims against the infidels. The Hindus of the area were certainly not People of the Book and their towns and even more their temples were legitimate targets. The caliph himself wrote to congratulate Maḥmūd’s triumphs for the faith. It was not just religious prestige which spurred Maḥmūd; it was also a question of money, the rich booty which was taken from the conquered. These helped to give Maḥmūd the resources to sustain his expensive court and military establishment.
Under the firm, even brutal, leadership of Maḥmūd, the system worked. The Ghaznavids maintained what was almost certainly the largest standing army in the eastern Islamic world at the time. It was a world of rich feasts and opulent palaces. Maḥmūd and his administration attracted the admiration of the most influential political commentators, Niẓām Al-Mulk, writing for the Seljuqs who by 442/1050 had taken over almost all the Ghaznavid lands apart from small principality based on Ghazna itself. It was also a fragile system. It could not sustain long and unprofitable wars against fellow Muslims in Khurasan and Khwarazm and the plains of India were no longer providing easy pickings in the way they had done before. Under the rule of Maḥmūd’s son Masʿūd, the strains became more apparent until they led to the catastrophic defeat by the Ghuzz Turks at Dandānqān in 1040.
Maḥmūd was a man of enormous and ferocious energy, travelling long distances on campaigns almost every year. He was also a master of tactics, whether of amphibious warfare on the rivers of India or employing miners and siege engines to destroy the walls of cities and fortresses. After the establishment of his power in Khurasan in 389/999 and the death of the last Samanid pretender, al-Muntaṣir in 395/1005, Maḥmūd fought on two main fronts, Khurasan and India.
In Khurasan, his campaigns were focussed on retaining control of what he had against and asserting his power over Khwarazm. At first the main threat came from the Qarakhanids who had taken over the Transoxanian part of the Samanid domains but as time went on, they became less of a problem and the peace negotiations of 415/1024 seem to have achieved a lasting non-aggression arrangement with the Oxus as the frontier. Much more difficult to contain were the increasing depredations of the Ghuzz Turkmen of the steppes around the Jaxartes (Syr Darya) river. In 418/1028, people from small towns on the edge of the Qarakum desert came to Maḥmūd’s court to complain about the attacks of the nomads. He sent his right-hand man in Khurasan, Arslān Jādhib, the amir of Tus, renowned for his ferocity and his devotion to his sovereign, to repel them but he was unable to make much progress against these swift and mobile predators. The next year, Maḥmūd himself came to Tus and he and Arslān were able to disperse the Turkmen, slaughtering many of them, while the rest fled to the mountains. The threat was ended for the moment but it was to be the undoing of his son and successor, Masʿūd.
Another area of concern to Maḥmūd was the ancient kingdom of Khwarazm. At the beginning of his reign, it was ruled by an old-established dynasty of Iranian origin who held the hereditary title of Khwarazmshāh. They had converted to Islam in the aftermath of the Arab Muslim conquests of the early second/eighth century but Khwarazm seems to have retained a very separate identity. Ibn Faḍlān found them speaking their own very distinctive language, “like the chattering of starlings” and the Khwarazmshāh holding court as a semi-independent vassal of the Samanids. The Ghaznavids began to put pressure on the rulers and in 406/1015–1016, the then Shāh Abū’l-ʿAbbās-al-Ma’mūn wrote to Maḥmūd asking for the hand of his daughter in marriage. Not everyone in Khwarazm was pleased about this and a faction whom Gardīzī dismisses as “intriguers and dregs of the population” but who were probably just people who did not want to see their native land dragged into the Ghaznavid orbit rose in rebellion and assassinated the Shāh. This of course gave Maḥmūd the excuse for military intervention and he himself came to take command. Despite stiff resistance, the Ghaznavid army prevailed in a battle in 408/1017 and the leaders of the opposition were taken prisoners and punished. Maḥmūd did not abolish the ancient title of Khwarazmshāh but instead appointed one of his chief military commanders, Ḥājib Altuntash, to the office. He remained a faithful servant of Maḥmūd but his son Masʿūd was to find Altuntash less obedient.
It is India, however, which absorbed most of Maḥmūd’s military energies. Much of Sind as far north as Multan had been conquered by Muslim armies in the Umayyad period. Since then, however, the Muslims had not made major advances and the Hindu kingdoms of the northern Punjab and the Ganges basin had been untroubled by Muslim raids. The southern part of Sind was under nominal control of the ʿAbbasid caliphate, while Multan was ruled by a local dynasty which had adopted Ismāʿīlī beliefs.
Almost as soon as he became the ruler, Maḥmūd launched his first attack on the plains of the Punjab. Ghazna was in the mountains but with quick if not easy access to the plains. No previous Muslim rulers of Ghazna or other parts Afghanistan had done this but the advantages in terms of both financial gain and religious prestige were obvious. The first target was the kingdom of the Hindūshahids based on the old city of Wayhind. In 393/1002–1003, he took Wayhind and the king Jaypāl and many from his family were taken prisoners and sold as slaves in Khurasan. As was often to be his custom in the years to come, Maḥmūd wintered in the plains before returning to Ghazna laden with treasurers and captives in the spring. In 393/1004 he led a more ambitious campaign which peneyrated deep into the plains of the Punjab where he took Bhatinda. Again, his armies were victorious, much treasure was taken, many captives slaughtered, while the king Bājī Rāy committed suicide with his own dagger.
The pattern of raids continued for most years of his reign. In 401/1010–1011, he took Multan on the pretext that most of the people were heretics and all the “Qarāmiṭa” were executed. Attempts to penetrate the mountains of Kashmir were less successful. He led campaigns in 404/1013 and 406/1015–1016 but the fortresses were too strong and the winters too cold to allow him to make much progress. New campaigns in the Ganges basin followed to Qanawj in 409/winter 1018–1019 and further south to Gwalior in 413/1022–1023. The most spectacular and best remembered of his campaigns was the raid on the great temple of Somnath on the shore of the Arabian Sea in what is now the Gujarat province of India. Apparently, he had heard stories about the immense wealth of the temple and city and was determined to loot and destroy it even though it was far away in hostile territory. In 417/1026, his army ransacked the temple, destroyed the statues and took away a vast treasure. The way back was not so easy. He chose a roundabout route through the Indus valley but his troops were mauled by the indigenous Jhat people and many of them lost their lives and many of the beasts of burden they were using to carry their loot died. In 418/1027, he launched his twelfth and last expedition to India to punish the Jhats, fighting an amphibious campaign among the islands in the Indus. He may have taken his revenge but the fighting was hard and the booty was meagre.
Maḥmūd’s campaigns were a new chapter in the history of Muslim penetration into the sub-continent. The victories and the loot, proudly displayed to his admiring subjects at the palace in Ghazna, were impressive but there was no permanent settlement or annexation of territory.
Maḥmūd died in 421/April 1030 after a prolonged illness. His death set off a vicious power struggle between two of his sons Muḥammad and Masʿūḍ and when Masʿūd finally triumphed in 421/October 1030, he inaugurated a purge not only of those who had supported his defeated brother but also of those military and civilian leaders who had been closest to his father. It set a pattern of suspicion and treachery which drove away many potential supporters.
Masʿūd’s reign marked the end of the Ghaznavids as a major power in the eastern Islamic world. This decline is the focus of the surviving parts of Bayhaqī’s Ta’rīkhī Masʿūdī, perhaps the most impressive of Persian chronicles and one of the greatest works writing anywhere in the Medieval world. It has the added advantage that we now have a superb English translation with notes and commentary by C. E. Bosworth which means that it is widely accessible. He chronicles in fascinating detail the court intrigues, and the jealousies and the fearsome cruelty which characterized Masūd’s court along with details of the display and performance of monarchy which can be found nowhere else. As a dissection of autocratic power, it bears comparison with the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon which tells us so much about the court of Louis XIV of France.
From the beginning, Masʿūd’s exercise of power was dogged by the increasingly bold raids of the Turkmen from the steppes, now led by the Seljuk family. Ghaznevid taxation lay heavily on the populations of towns and villages and the army which was paid from this revenue was large but slow and ineffective against these nomads. The elephants which were the pride of the army were virtually useless in the steppes and mountains where the Turkmen hung out. Even more of a problem was that the populations of the towns often preferred to make agreements with the Turkmen rather than fortify themselves and await the Ghaznavid army to repel the attackers. Masʿūd continued his father’s policy of raiding India. Twice, he led winter raids in 424/1033–1034 and 427/1036–1037 but the fighting was hard and the wealth acquired seems to have been meagre compared with the loot his father had collected. Worse still he faced rebellions among his troops in India and had to use Indian troops to suppress them.
It was, however, the Turkmen who proved his downfall. Led by the Seljuk Dāwūd Chaghri Beg, they penetrated further into Ghaznavid territory, even threatening the winter capital at Balkh. Exasperated by his inability to counter them, he launched a major campaign which he himself led, into the steppes of the Qarakum desert. In Bayhaqī’s account, he slows that almost everyone in the Ghaznavid court knew that this was a mistake, but none dared contradict the Amir. As the army march out towards the little caravan town of Dandānqān on the road to Marw, he describes soldiers sitting beside the road weeping because they knew they were doomed. And so it proved to be. In Ramadan 431/May 1040, the Ghaznavid army was decisively defeated. The Amir himself is said to have fought bravely but many of his troops abandoned the field or even went over to the enemy. In the end, he withdrew ignominiously to Ghazna. Here, he set about punishing commanders who he believed had been treacherous or cowardly. This was not enough to restore the position so he loaded his treasures onto pack animals and withdrew to the plains of India. Misfortune followed him. Seeing his weakness, sections of his army pillaged his caravan and he himself was captured by a group of his own soldiers in Jamādā 432/ January 1041 and executed.
The defeat at Dandānqān was one of the most decisive battles of the age. It destroyed the Ghaznavids and left the way open for the Seljuqs and their Ghuzz followers to invade and dominate first Iran and then the wider Middle East.
The Karakhanids (the name does not appear in the older sources but is used by modern scholars to denote the dynasty because of the prevalence of the word “Kara”, meaning black but also strong or magnificent in their titulature) were a dynasty and extended which ruled, more or less effectively, over Transoxania and Central Asia as far East as Kashgar and Khotan in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and survived as vassals of the Kara-Khitay until the coming of the Mongols. Most of their history lies beyond the scope of this volume, but their appearance as a major power on the far northeast of the Muslim world in the half-century 1000 to 1050 is nonetheless interesting.
The reconstruction of the history of the dynasty is made problematic because of the almost complete lack of sources. There are no surviving historical narratives from within the Karakhanid realms and outsiders like Gardīzī and Ibn al-Athīr who we rely on for Samanid history, and provide patchy and sometimes confusing details. Numismatic evidence attests the names and sometimes the chronology of the rulers but little more and archaeological evidence is very patchy.
Turkish tribes had been constant neighbours and often enemies of the Muslims in Transoxania since the first Muslim conquests. They lived nomad lives in the steppes which stretched from the edges of the fertile lands as far as China. They are always represented in the Muslim sources, whether Arabic or Persian, as the other, seldom given either names or speaking parts in the historical narrative. ʿAbbasid governors and Samanids alike could project themselves as defenders of Islam and use the rhetoric of Holy War to unite their subjects against the hostile alien forces. In around 344/955, however, this paradigm began to change when the then leader of the Qarakhanid family, Satoq Bughrā Khān, converted to Islam and seems to have brought with him the vast majority of his followers. This fundamentally changed the dynamics of the Turkish involvement in Central Asia. They were now fellow Muslims and could be accepted as rulers by Muslim populations. When the last Samanids attempted to rouse the people of Bukhārā to resist a Karakhanid takeover of the city, the ʿulamā rejected their calls because the newcomers were as good Muslims as the existing dynasty.
The details of this conversion process are very obscure. There is no indication that any violence was involved. It is likely that Muslims from Transoxania, like Ibn Faḍlān and his party, acted as both merchants and missionaries but they were preaching to people who were interested in anticipating in the wider world which conversion would open up for them. From Iceland and Scandinavia in the West to Central Asia in the East, the fourth/tenth century was a time when pagan peoples adopted the monotheism of their southern neighbours. In almost all cases, the new religion brought with it written texts and masonry architecture. The conversion and acculturation of the Karakhanids can be seen as part of a global process.
The new converts did not just become Muslims but they became Sunni Muslims and adhered to the Ḥanafī School of Islamic, as did almost all the Turkish dynasties which followed, right down to the Ottomans. In fourth- and fifth/tenth- and eleventh-century terms, this meant that they became a powerful counterweight to the Ismāʿīli Fatimids and other Shi’ite groups to the West.
The conversion of the Karakhanids was the largest expansion of Muslim-ruled territory since the mid-eighth century. The new territories included most of the southern parts of modern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and the ancient trading cities of Kashgar and Khotan in the western parts of the Chinese province of Xinjiang. The limits of Muslim religion and culture established by the Karakhanids in these areas have, essentially, remained its limits down to the present day.
The emergence of Karakanids also brought the Turks into the wider mosaic of Muslim-ruled lands as full participants in the umma. They and their realms were Turkish in the sense that the rulers and probably most of their subjects spoke Turkic dialects as their main language. Many of them also shared the Turkish nomadic traditions of dwelling in round felt yurts and raising horses and camels. It was under Karakhanid patronage that the first grammar-encyclopaedia of Turkish culture, the Diwān Lughāt al-Turk, was composed by Maḥmūd Kāshgharī in the second half of the fifth/eleventh century, championing, for the first time, Turkish as a literary language. Having said that, Arabic was used for religious discourse and Persian for many court purposes. At least two of the later Khans wrote Persian poetry but written poetry in Turkish had to wait for another two centuries.
The dynasty also began the first large-scale building patronized by Turkish speakers. Although they came from nomad backgrounds, the Karakhanid period saw the foundation and development of the first cities in these areas, notably the old settlement at Kashgar and the new city of Balāsāghun whose ruins now lie in Kyrgyzstan. The minarets they commissioned to demonstrate their commitment to Islam still survive in Bukhara and Balāsāghun, while the recently discovered remnants of a painted hall in their palace in the citadel of old Samarqand point to a developed secular architecture.
The Karakhanids had first intervened in Transoxania in 382/992 when they temporarily occupied Bukhara and permanent occupation followed in 398/999 at the same time as the Ghaznavid Maḥmūd b. Sebükatigīn took over Khurasan, the lands to the west and south of the Oxus, thus carving up the old Samanid realm. For the next forty years, the Oxus remained the frontier between the Karakanids and the Ghaznavids. Shortly afterwards, in the year 396–397/1006, the eastern Karakhanids finally established their control over Khotan.
The Karakhanid territory was divided, at least from c. 1040 into an Eastern and Western khanate. The Eastern, with two capitals at Balāsāghun and Kashghār, was the senior and its ruler bore the prestigious title of Arslān (Lion), while the Western Khan, ruling from Samarqand, was called Bughrā or male camel. In practice, the empire was considered the common patrimony of the ruling dynasty. Under the overall leadership of the Khāqān, there were lesser princes bearing princely titles like tigīn below them. These princes frequently changed their titles and their territories as they moved up or down the pecking order, making the dynastic politics very difficult to understand.
The Qarakhanid rulers continued a semi-nomadic life style. It seems that they spent the winter in towns like Bukhārā and Samarqand where they built palaces but in the spring and summer, they would roam the steppe with their nomad followers. In this way, they maintained contact with the Turkish tribes on whom the military support depended. They never seem to have recruited an army of ghilmān slave soldiers. This was in marked contrast to the Ghaznavids on the other side of the Oxus whose ghilmān were the mainstay of their power. An important consequence of this was that they did not demand the heavy taxes which were required to pay for this professional army and there is some evidence that the cities and villages they controlled were ruled with a lighter touch. Certainly, old-established Persian-speaking civilian elites and religious scholars continued to flourish and urban patriciates seem to have co-existed with semi-nomadic rulers. This style of government also meant that there was no need for an elaborate bureaucracy, which, in turn, may account for the dearth of written records and narratives compared with their Ghaznavid neighbours.
The normally dry narrative of Gardīzī takes a break from names and dates to describe a meeting of these two new Central Asian powers. In 415/1024, news reached the Khaqan of the Karakhanids, Yūsuf Qadīr Khan (r. 417–424/1026–1032) in Kashghar that Maḥmūd of Ghazna had crossed the Oxus in an apparent challenge to the agreement between the two powers. His pretext was that the people of Transoxania were complaining about the oppression of their masters. Maḥmūd constructed a bridge of boats which is elaborately described. It is the fullest description of the construction of such a bridge from this period and suggests that the author may have been an eye-witness. The Khaqan hastened to Samarqand and then on to meet Maḥmūd. Neither party seems to have wanted a conflict but both were keen to show their power and prestige and outdo the other in generosity and gift-giving. They camped a few kilometres apart and arranged a meeting place.
Here, we see two great princes, both of Turkish extraction, meeting together to decide the future of the eastern Islamic world. Their festival of food and music, set in a garden surrounded by fragrant plants, is a forerunner of all those princely parties portrayed so vividly in Persian-illuminated manuscripts from the fourteenth century onwards. Maḥmūd brings the riches of the Islamic world from as far away as the Maghrib, Qadīr Khan the furs of Siberia and the fine silks of China. Competitive display and gift-giving are seen as central to the princely culture.
“When Qadir Khan arrived, Maḥmūd ordered trays of food to be set as splendidly as possible and the two monarchs sat down and ate at the same table. When they had finished the feast, they moved on to the place where music and other festive entertainments had been prepared. This had been magnificently decorated with rare and unusual sweet-smelling plants, luscious fruits and precious jewels. The hall had goblets of gold and crystal, remarkable mirrors and various rare objects so Qadir Khan remained in the midst of all this dazzled. They remained seated for a good length of time. Qadir Khan did not drink wine for it was not customary for the monarchs of Transoxania, and especially the Turkish ones, to drink wine. They listened to music and singing for a while and then they arose.
Amir Maḥmūd then ordered a display of presents on a scale worthy of the occasion to be brought in: gold and silver drinking vessels, costly jewels, unusual specialities imported from Baghdad, fine clothes, expensive arms, valuable horses with gold accoutrement with goads studded with jewels, ten female elephants with gold trappings and goads set with jewels, mules from Bardhaʿa (a town in Azerbayjan) with golden bells, litters with mules with girths, moon-like ornaments of gold and silver with bells for their necks, litters covered with embroidered brocade and woven patterns, valuable carpets including those from Armenia with raised patters and particoloured rugs, pieces of woven and embroidered cloth. Lengths of rose coloured cloth from Ṭabaristan with designs on the, Indian swords, aloes wood from Khmer, yellow tinged sandalwood, grey-flecked amber. There were she asses, skins of Barbary panthers, hunting dogs, eagles trained to a high pitch for hunting down cranes, gazelles and other game animals. He sent Qadir Khan back homewards with great honour and magnificence, heaping favours on him.
When Qadir Khan got back to his encampment and the saw the immense amount of precious objects, furnishings and carpets, weapons and wealth. He was filled with astonishment and did not know how he could requite Maḥmūd for them. He ordered the treasurer to open up the treasury door. He took out of it a great amount of wealth and sent it to Amīr Maḥmūd, together with various items which were specialities of Turkistan, including fine horses with precious trappings and accoutrements of gold, Turkish slave boys with golden belts and quivers, falcons and hawks, pelts of sable, grey squirrel, ermine and fox, vessels made from leather skins, narwhal or walrus horn, delicate cloth and Chinese brocade, Chinese dārkhāshāk and such like. The two monarchs parted from each other completely satisfied and in peace and benevolence”.