A History of the Muslim World to 1405

by Vernon O Egger

  The early Il-khans were hostile to Islam. They had come out of a shamanistic background, but several of the leaders found Buddhism attractive. Many Buddhist monks came with Hulagu’s expedition, and others arrived soon after he set up his capital. Buddhism remained strong among the male Mongol ruling elite, but many of the rulers, from Hulagu on, had Nestorian wives or concubines. For the first several decades of Il-khanid rule, the rulers clearly were more sympathetic to Buddhism and Christianity than to Islam. During this period, the Nestorian and Jacobite churches thrived across Iran as never before.

  From the accession of Ghazan in 1295, those policies were reversed, and Christianity and Buddhism went into irreversible decline in the Il-khanid realm. Ghazan (1295–1304) was the greatest of the Il-khans after Hulagu. A Buddhist, he proclaimed his conversion to Islam in the first year of his rule and ordered the destruction of churches, synagogues, and Buddhist temples throughout the realm. He initiated many reforms in order to build up his regime’s wealth and prestige. He began the restoration of irrigation systems, reduced taxes and exchange rates, and reformed the system of weights and measures. The agricultural economy began a slow recovery, and for over two decades, tax revenues showed a steady increase.

  In contrast to the agricultural decline throughout the thirteenth century, the Il-khanid regime boasted a sparkling urban life in certain areas. Hostile relations with the Mamlukes had interrupted the historic long-distance trade with Syria and Egypt, but trade with China intensified. The Il-khans were also as eager to please Italian and other European merchants as were their cousins in the Horde. Tabriz thrived on the new commercial life. Its location placed it on excellent trade routes. Iranian and Iraqi scholars and artists who had not fled to other lands in the face of the Mongol conquests made their way to Tabriz to enhance their careers. Hulagu’s astronomical observatory at Maragha became famous for thousands of miles. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, who had joined Hulagu’s retinue at the siege of Alamut, was its first director, and it attracted astronomers and mathematicians from as far away as Andalus and China. It surpassed anything that Europe would offer until the career of Tycho Brahe in the late sixteenth century.

  An illuminated manuscript from the Il-khanid period, revealing Chinese influences.

  Under Uljaytu (1304–1316), Il-khanid literature, history, architecture, and painting blossomed. He constructed a new capital at Sultaniya, for which he commissioned magnificent tombs, mosques, bazaars, and schools. Because of close trading relations with the Great Khan in China, Chinese styles and techniques began to influence the plastic arts of the Il-khanate. The Chinese influence is particularly striking in the manufacture of porcelains and in the emergence of Persian miniature painting.

  Just as it appeared that the Il-khans had established a regime that would enable them to create a stable administration and a thriving economy, family feuds broke out into the open. Uljaytu’s son Abu Sa‘id (1316–1335) was a devout Muslim, fluent in Arabic and Persian, musically talented, and determined to continue the rehabilitation of his empire’s economy. In 1335, however, he was poisoned, and anarchy broke out as ambitious chieftains struggled for supremacy. By midcentury, Iran and Iraq had been carved up by numerous successor states headed by Mongol, Turkic, Iranian, or Arab families. The populace once again sank into poverty and despair, and then, as we shall see, the northern arc of Iran was devastated by Timur Lang. Not for two centuries did the area begin to recover economically.

  The Chaghatay Khanate

  The Chaghatay khanate was separated from the Il-khanid realm by the Amu Darya River and by a line of fortresses east of Herat. In the west, only the grazing areas of some Mongol and Turkic pastoralists separated it from the territory of the Horde. In the east, its territory extended into modern Xinjiang province in China, which encompasses the remarkable Tarim Basin.

  The Tarim Basin consists largely of an absolutely barren desert the size of the state of Texas. The desert is surrounded by a series of oases that served not only as fertile crop-producing areas, but also as rest areas for the southern Silk Road. The oases exploit the fertile alluvial soil that has been washed down over the ages from the mountains ringing the basin on three sides. These are some of the most formidable mountain ranges in the world. To the west are the Pamir Mountains; to the north are the Tien Shan Mountains; and to the south are the Kunlun Mountains. All three ranges are covered perpetually in snow and are laced with numerous glaciers. Their average altitude is over 20,000 feet, and all have peaks that exceed 24,000 feet. The Pamirs have subranges that run east and west and others that run north and south; merchants on the southern Silk Road often experienced dizziness and nausea while crossing it. The Tien Shan are formidable barriers to transit between the Tarim and Mongolia, but predatory bands found ways to get through. The Kunlun, on the other hand, constitute an impenetrable barrier to Tibet in the south.

  The Chaghatay khanate thus extended over vast steppe land, some of the world’s most inaccessible mountains, and the sophisticated urban oases of Transoxiana. The khans themselves retained the original features of the Mongol traditions more than did their cousins in the Horde, Il-khanate, or Yuan dynasty. Whereas the Yuan and Il-khan dynasties became urbanized quickly and the Horde fostered the development of mercantile interests in their capital of New Saray, the Chaghatays remained nomadic in lifestyle and outlook. The ruling family did not settle down into one of the great cities. The closest to a capital that it had was an encampment between Lake Balkhash and the Tien Shan. The ruling family never lost its contempt for urban life, and they treated cities as fields to be harvested. The khans plundered and looted their own cities more than once. The fate of Bukhara is representative. Within twenty years of its destruction in 1220 by Chinggis Khan, it had largely recovered its prosperity. By the early 1270s, Marco Polo, passing through Khorasan, heard that it and Samarqand were the most splendid cities in Iran. However, in 1273, and again in 1316, the Chaghatay rulers sacked, burned, and depopulated Bukhara.

  Kebek (1318–1326) was the first Chaghatay to prefer urban life to a nomadic existence, and under him Samarqand and Bukhara enjoyed a revival. Despite his efforts at rebuilding those cities, however, as early as 1334 the great Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta found many of the mosques, colleges, and bazaars of Bukhara in ruins again. Because of the antipathy of most of the Chaghatays to urban life, we have little evidence to indicate that any of the rulers other than Kebek patronized literature and the arts. On the other hand, it is clear that long-distance trade continued to be conducted through Transoxiana throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth century. The repeated rebuilding of the cities of Transoxiana, and the pronounced Chinese influence on Il-khanid arts, speak eloquently of a well-established commercial life linking China and southwestern Asia which refused to die even in a hostile cultural environment.

  The ruling elite of the Chaghatay khanate was a loose coalition of Mongols, Turks, and Uighurs (a Turkic-speaking people who inhabited the oases of the Tarim), in addition to a few Muslim Iranians who were appointed governors of Transoxiana. As in the Horde, Turkish culture soon became predominant. Shamanist religious practices remained strong among the nomadic population, although Buddhism made inroads, particularly among the nomads of the Tarim. The Uighurs, on the other hand, gradually Islamized, as did the Turkic nomads who settled down in Transoxiana.

  In 1326, a new khan, Tarmashirin (1326–1334) came to the throne. He had been a Buddhist (“Tarma” in his name derives from “dharma”), but he became the first Chaghatay ruler to convert to Islam. When he converted, he required all the important leaders in the khanate to follow suit. The order antagonized his chieftains in the east, and they became restive. When Tarmashirin was unsuccessful in his attack on Delhi in 1327, these chieftains seized the opportunity to revolt. After seven years of civil war, the khanate split in 1334. The Tarim basin and the area north of the Tien Shan Mountains were paired in an unlikely entity that became known as Moghulistan. It remained a regional political actor for two more centurie
s, and members of the House of Chagatay exercised at least nominal authority in the area into the twentieth century. Ironically, the more wealthy Transoxiana was bereft of a central government. A handful of tribes dominated the area, and the towns and cities became prey to the raids of nomads and seminomads. The merchants and ulama of Samarqand and Bukhara could only hope for a leader to arise who would restore to their cities the vitality and glory of their fabled past. By the last quarter of the century, they would find him in Timur Lang.

  Thus, all four of the Mongol empires collapsed quite suddenly within a period of just over thirty years. The Chaghatay khanate splintered in 1334, leaving only a minor principality behind; the Il-khans disappeared in 1335; the Horde collapsed in 1359; and in Beijing the Chinese overthrew the Yuan dynasty of the Great Khan in 1368. The only descendant of Chinggis Khan who still exercised authority was in isolated Mogulistan, and the only other Mongol with a powerful state was Toqtamish, who seized power in Saray in 1377. Despite the short period of formal Mongol rule, the Mongol legacy would continue to exercise a powerful effect on the imagination of the peoples of Central Asia.

  New Centers of Islamic Culture

  For six hundred years, the most influential forces shaping the legacy of the Qur’an and the Hadith into an Islamic civilization had been the creative communities of Iraq and Iran. Their decline had begun even before the Mongol threat, but the invasions of Chinggis Khan and Hulagu, followed by decades of Mongol misrule, were devastating in their effect. Now, as Iran and Iraq suffered, Muslim military power and cultural vibrancy shifted to the geographical fringes of the historic heartland. The Mamluke Empire, the Delhi Sultanate, and the Ottoman Sultanate assumed the dominant roles for the Islamic world in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. All three of them left permanent legacies for Islamic history.

  The Mamluke Empire

  The irruption of the Mongols into western Asia profoundly altered the geopolitics of the eastern Mediterranean. Egypt under the Mamlukes now rose to a position of influence that it had not enjoyed since Hellenistic times. By virtue of their triumph over Hulagu’s army at Ayn Jalut in 1260, the Mamlukes of Egypt gained the respect and gratitude of Muslims everywhere. The regime continued to enhance its reputation for military prowess by repelling an Il-khan invasion of Syria in 1281, eradicating the last of the Crusader strongholds from the Syrian mainland by 1291, and by preventing further Il-khan attempts to annex Syria during the period 1299–1303. As a result, they expanded the control over Syria that rulers in Cairo had aimed for since early Fatimid times, and they occupied the Holy Cities of the Hijaz.

  The Mamlukes constituted one of the most formidable military forces in the world from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. Although that fact alone would merit their place in history, they attract attention primarily because of their unusual recruitment policy. Muslim governments had relied upon slave soldiers since the early ninth century, but the Mamluke regime is distinguished by the fact that the rulers themselves were of slave origin. The staffing of the highest positions in the state relied upon a well-organized system of slave importation and training. Slave merchants combed foreign markets—primarily in the Qipchaq steppe—for young boys ten to twelve years of age. They sold the boys to the sultan and to the several dozen amirs who were the most powerful men in the empire other than the sultan himself. These included the vizier, other chief court officials, provincial governors, and military officers. Each official then provided several years of training for the boys.

  The “curriculum” included instruction in the basic rituals of Islam and rigorous drilling in the cavalry arts of the bow and the lance. The sultan, of course, was able to provide the most elaborate program. His slaves lived together in barracks, were drilled in the arts of cavalry warfare, and were taught basic literacy. They learned that their survival depended on loyalty to their master and to their fellow recruits. Upon completion of the training, their master granted them their freedom and gave them their military equipment and an estate to supply the revenue to maintain the expenses of their horses, arms, and armor.

  The graduates of the sultan’s school became members of the “royal mamluks,” who numbered 5000–6000 during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Enjoying the highest status of all the troops, they demanded to be stationed in or around Cairo rather than at posts remote from the center of power. The mamluks of the amirs were stationed in the provinces and at the homes of their masters. The Mamluke army, then, was characterized by an organization not unlike a feudal army of contemporary western Europe. At its core were the sultan’s troops, who were loyal to him; supplementing them were the dozens of regiments that were loyal to their respective amirs, who in turn were loyal to the sultan. When the corps of the mamluks were supplemented by cavalry of the auxiliary units (freeborn troops who included local Egyptians, Syrians, and foreign soldiers of fortune), the regime could mobilize 40,000–50,000 cavalrymen, in addition to infantry.

  Regardless of who their master was, the mamluks were intensely loyal to him and to their brothers in arms. This loyalty, by virtue of which the master was viewed as the mamluks’ father and they called each other brothers, also meant that it was almost impossible for a mamluk who was transferred from one amir to another to be accepted by the new group. The sense of exclusivity also meant that the mamluks always felt a social distance between them and the society they ruled. They passed laws prohibiting civilians (Muslim as well as non-Muslim) from riding horses. They also adhered to a policy of marrying slave women (usually from the areas where they themselves came), and even their concubines were not of local origin. Some exceptions occurred, but local marriages were rare. Because the mamluks’ sons by such wives and concubines were not slaves, they did not receive the training of the slave boys and found themselves overlooked in the competition for the best positions. They could serve in the lower status auxiliary units, but with the exception of several of the sultans’ sons and brothers, they did not advance to the highest ranks. Thus, the perpetuation of the regime required the continual purchase of new slaves.

  The Mamluke system was remarkable for its combination of power and latent anarchy. On the one hand, it fostered an esprit de corps among its soldiers that, combined with the high level of training, resulted in a formidable military force. On the other hand, the system of purchasing and manumitting slave troops created a system of cliques and factions that was a constant threat to peace and security. The system was most vulnerable during the process of succession to the leadership of the state. Each sultan wished to pass his office to his son, but the amirs demanded the right to ratify the choice of the next sultan. The amirs were not being presumptuous: They were adhering to the traditions of their common Turkish background, and they were well aware that the new sultan’s “family” of troops would expect to displace the existing bureaucratic and military officials. Those who were threatened with the loss of their positions sought out allies among the other amirs, and those already in office did the same. Such a transition of power almost always led to fighting and scores of deaths.

  The dynamics of this process were in evidence from the early years of the empire. Baybars, a talented and ruthless sultan, ruled for seventeen years (1260–1277). He named his son to succeed him, but his son was overthrown by Baybars’ own troops. In 1293, another sultan was overthrown by a conspiracy of amirs, and his ten-year-old brother, al-Nasir Muhammad, was installed on the throne by yet another faction. He was deposed a year later, then reinstalled in 1299, only to be deposed again in 1309. By this time in his mid-twenties, the young ex-sultan seized the throne himself in 1310 and enjoyed the longest and most successful rule in Mamluke history (1310–1341). The nature of the Mamluke system guaranteed political instability, and its entire history was punctuated by frequent violence among the mamluks themselves. Fortunately, although the Egyptian and Syrian citizens whom the mamluks ruled were occasionally harassed and often exploited by them, they were not frequent victims of the political viol
ence, which was largely restricted to the ruling elite themselves.

  The mamluks who seized control of Egypt and Syria in 1250 from their “masters” in the Ayyubid dynasty were Qipchaq Turks. Their homeland was the Qipchaq steppe, which, as we have seen, had become the domain of the Horde a few years before the coup d’état in Cairo. The Mamluke regime needed a constant supply of slave soldiers, but the traditional supply route for them by 1260 lay through hostile Il-khanid territory. Baybars began a two-pronged diplomatic effort to develop a new supply route. In a fortuitous development for him, the Byzantines now reappeared in diplomatic affairs for the first time in several decades. The Byzantine royal family had been living in exile in Nicaea ever since the Venetians conquered Constantinople in the so-called Fourth Crusade of 1204. After decades of Byzantine frustration, the emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus (1259–1282) recaptured Constantinople from the Venetians in 1261. Threatened by the Venetians to the west and Turkish raiders to the east, the emperor needed to be on good terms with both Berke of the Horde and Baybars of the Mamlukes. He agreed to facilitate the mamluk trade between the Horde and Egypt, and he refurbished an Umayyad-era mosque in Constantinople as a gesture of good will to Baybars. He even made a promise to give Egypt military aid if needed.

  Baybars also cultivated diplomatic relations with the Horde. The alliance became progressively easier to maintain because both regimes were Muslim, the Horde was continually assimilating to the Qipchaq culture into which the mamluks were born, and the two empires had no reason to quarrel over territory. On the other hand, both empires had hostile relations with the Il-khans, with the result that the natural trade routes through Iran and Iraq were never accessible. The two Muslim allies therefore maintained good relations with the Christian Byzantines in order to keep the shipping route open between Egypt and the Black Sea. The trade route opened up opportunities for merchants to purchase boys who were of Greek, Georgian, and Slavic origin as well, some of whom became mamluks. Beginning in the late thirteenth century, however, the largest number of non-Turkish mamluks were Circassians, members of an ethnic group whose origin was the area of the Caucasus on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea.