Central Asia in World History

by Golden, Peter B.

  According to Don Ruiz Gonzales de Clavijo, a Castillian ambassador who visited with him not long before his death, Temür’s father, Taraghay, was “a man of good family, allied by blood to the clan of Chaghatay, but he was a noble of small estate, having only some three or four riders to his back.”7 The traditional accounts, recorded by Clavijo and others, present the stereotypical picture of a steppe empire builder, not unlike Chinggis Khan: leadership at a relatively young age, military success, and good fortune. Clavijo recounts that, as a youth, Temür and “four or five companions” regularly stole livestock from their neighbors and, being “a man of heart and very hospitable,” Temür shared these with his friends and others at feasts. In time, his reputation as a generous-minded bandit grew and others joined him, eventually numbering “some three hundred.” Clavijo comments that he robbed anyone “who came his way” and redistributed his ill-gotten gains to his followers. “Thus, he beset all the highways taking toll of the merchants he came upon.”8

  Temür brilliantly manipulated the deadly tribal and clan rivalries of the Ulus of Chaghatay and by 1370 had become the leading political figure. As only Chinggisids could be khans, Temür never assumed that title. Instead, he enthroned puppet Chinggisids while he actually ruled, legitimating his power by marrying Chinggisid brides. He contented himself with the title Küregen (Mongol: kürgen, son-in-law). For Muslim audiences, he was simply the Great Amîr.

  Temür’s primary need was to maintain an effective army despite the instability of his powerbase in the Ulus of Chaghatay. His followers remained loyal to him as long as he kept them active. This meant constant war and plunder, which explains the ferocious energy he brought to his campaigns. Fortunately for him, his opponents were weak and divided. He justified his wars by presenting himself as acting in the name of the Chaghadaids or Ögödeids or as the champion of the Pâdishâh-i Islâm (the Emperor of Islam). His real ambition was to restore the united empire of Chinggis Khan—with himself at its head. He was a complex figure. A brilliant military commander and politician, he was also capable of extraordinary savagery. Devastation and slaughter awaited those who did not surrender promptly.

  A man of the steppe, the last of the trans-Eurasian great nomadic conquerors, Temür was no stranger to settled society. However conspicuous his professed adherence to nomadic traditions and the Chinggisid mystique, he was also a Muslim, a product of frontier Islam. Although a self-proclaimed champion of Islam, his coreligionists were high on the list of his victims. While he criticized others for becoming overly fond of cities, Samarkand was a major beneficiary of his conquests. The city grew and he named some of the new, outlying districts after cities he had subjugated.

  Clavijo describes Samarkand as densely populated, surrounded by orchards and vineyards, which, like the gardens within and outside the city, were irrigated by “many water conduits.”9 Temür built a citadel in which he placed the government offices, the mint, a prison, and two palaces, the Kök Saray (Blue Palace, so called from its blue tiles) and the Bustan Saray. The Kök Saray, according to later accounts, still told today, contained the Kök Tash (blue stone) on which the ruler, perched atop a white rug, was invested with his authority.10 The palace subsequently became infamous as the site of murderous throne struggles. Temür supported the maintenance and construction of new irrigation canals, something that would have been very alien to Chinggis. Samarkand was the showpiece of his empire, a “trophy” as one recent visitor has termed it,11 which he dressed up to display the booty taken in his wars. Despite the sumptuous buildings, Temür preferred to sleep in a tent in one of the many gardens and parks in the city. Kesh and Urgench in Khwarazm, which he had badly pillaged as well as other cities, also benefited from new construction. Central Asia was again a great center of international commerce between east and west.

  A man of contradictions, Temür liked to have learned Muslims in his entourage, but followed both the Sharî’ah (Muslim holy law) and the traditional steppe law (töre or yasa). He supported Muslim institutions while his armies enslaved Muslims (which was forbidden by Islamic law) and destroyed mosques. His soldiers left pyramids of skulls in their wake. Like many of his contemporaries among the nomad elite, he had one foot in the urban Islamic world and the other in the pagan steppe. Many of his followers were still shamanists. Although he campaigned in the steppe for strategic purposes, aside from his core Chaghatay forces he did not try to bring the nomads into his state. Nomads did not willingly become part of powerful centralized states. Keeping them off balance and divided sufficed for his purposes.

  To some degree this was a government on horseback. Temür created little in the way of governmental infrastructure. His empire grafted itself onto the already existing bureaucratic and tax-collecting agencies. In time, Temür replaced local rulers with members of his family and others whom he deemed trustworthy. The latter were few.

  Temür’s campaigns extended from India to Asia Minor, a kind of plundering “tourism” of his neighbors. These were raids for booty, not permanent conquest. Local rulers either submitted and paid ransoms or were subjected to devastating attacks. He defeated his former protégé, Toqtamïsh, repeatedly, even seizing and sacking Saray. The Great Horde never recovered.

  While “visiting” Damascus, he conducted a series of “interviews” in 1401 with Ibn Khaldûn, the North African historian and philosopher-sociologist. Temür, although illiterate, knew of the scholar, an indication of the breadth of his interests. Ibn Khaldûn came before the conqueror and kissed his outstretched hand. Temür, who was fluent in Persian in addition to his native Turkic, spoke no Arabic and used an interpreter from Khwarazm. He peppered the scholar with questions about North Africa and asked him to write a description of the region for him. Ibn Khaldûn, who spent more than a month in the conqueror’s camp, produced the requested book (which does not seem to have ever been published). He was impressed with Temür’s intelligence, knowledge, and curiosity. A consummate diplomat, the great historian flattered his host, telling him he was the greatest conqueror in human history—and did not neglect to give him gifts, an essential part of “Tatar” court etiquette.12

  Temür’s less pacific side, however, was amply on display in 1402, when he defeated and captured the Ottoman Sultan Bâyezîd at the Battle of Ankara. The Ottoman ruler died shortly thereafter in captivity and the Ottoman push to take Constantinople was set back for half a century. Returning to his capital, Samarkand, in 1404, Temür held audiences with Clavijo and somewhat dismissively with representatives of the Ming dynasty, the newly established ruling house of China. This was to be his next target. The aged conqueror set out for the east but died of natural causes the next year.

  During a siege, nomads found and exploited weaknesses in a city’s defense system—and then poured in. Cities that resisted were looted and their populations terrorized, typical of warfare in much of Eurasia. The attack on Bhatnir, to which many refugees had fled, was a preface to Tamerlane’s sacking of Delhi in 1398. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, New York

  In contrast to the dynasty’s founder, his descendants were literate. They patronized scholars, poets, architects, and artists. Some historians argue that the Timurids, with their emphasis on promoting culture and meritocracy, were like the Renaissance monarchies of Europe in which cultural displays became essential parts of governance. Shâhrukh, Temür’s son and successor, based in Herat (now in Afghanistan), and his wife, Gawhar Shâd, promoted the decorative arts, such as manuscript illumination and architecture. She built a mosque, madrasa (Muslim school of higher learning), and other pious endowments. Gawhar Shâd was also an active force in politics, which proved her undoing. She was killed in a family power struggle in 1457 at the age of eighty.

  A passion for the arts and the murder of family rivals became all-too-familiar themes of the Timurid world. Shâhrukh’s son, Ulugh Beg, his viceroy for Transoxiana and successor in 1447, was interested in science and built an astronomical observatory that still stands in Samarkan
d. It was part of a madrasa that emphasized astronomy and mathematics. The culture that Ulugh Beg and his circle fostered was bilingual, using both Persian and eastern Turkic. The latter language, developing in the Chaghadaid Ulus, is known as “Chaghatay.” Neither Shâhrukh nor Ulugh Beg were gifted military commanders. By 1447, the state was fragmenting, torn apart by grasping relatives, restless underlings, and rebellious vassals. Ulugh Beg, driven from power by his own son, ‘Abd al-Latîf, was murdered. Despite the deadly rivalries, Sultan Husayn Bayqara, the most successful of the later Timurids, held forth at a glittering court of poets and artists in Herat. The products of this Timurid cultural flowering resonated across the Turko-Iranian literary and artistic world with admirers in the Ottoman and Mamlûk capitals as well as in India. In Herat, the poet Mîr ‘Alî Shîr Navâ’î, the sultan’s close friend, composed verse in both Persian and Chaghatay Turkic. In his Muhâkamat ul-Lughâtayn (The Judgment of the Two Languages, 1499), he argued for the equal standing of Turkic with Persian. Nonetheless, Persian cultural traditions, even if expressed in Chaghatay, tended to prevail.

  Unique among the artists of this era was the still mysterious “Muhammad of the Black Pen” (Siyâh Qalam), who may have been connected with Herat. His richly colored and expressive paintings of everyday nomad life, phantasmagorical demons, and wandering Sûfîs provide extraordinary snapshots of Turkic nomads on the periphery of the Iranian sedentary world.13 The extraordinary miniaturist Kamâl al-Dîn Bihzâd, a protégé of Navâ’î in Herat, produced an array of portraits (including those of Navâ’î and Sultan Husayn Bayqara) and scenes from the court and the daily life of ordinary people.

  Built in just five years at the start of the fifteenth century, the Bibi Khanum mosque in Samarkand was intended to be the most magnificent mosque of its era. According to one legend, Temür had it built in honor of the mother of his principal wife, popularly called Bibi Khanum (Madam First Lady). Other accounts say Bibi Khanum herself had it built hurriedly as her husband was returning from his looting of Delhi. The hasty construction caused bricks to occasionally fall off, striking believers below. Yet another legend reports that the architect would only hurry the work if Bibi Khanum allowed him to kiss her. She did and Temür had her killed because of it. This photograph shows the mosque in the late nineteenth century. Library of Congress, LC-P87-8052B

  The Sûfîs, as individuals and as groups, had played a pivotal role in the Islamization of the Central Asian nomads. Now organized in tarîqas (brotherhoods), they were important factors in Timurid politics, society, economy and culture, some acquiring great wealth. The most influential of these tarîqas was the Naqshbandiyya order founded by Khwâja Bahâ ad-Dîn Naqshband, a Tajik of the Bukhara region. He continued a long tradition in which each Sûfî spiritual leader (called shaykh in Arabic or pîr in Persian) bequeathed his position and, to some extent, his charisma, to a successor. Unlike the Christian monastic orders to which they bear some superficial resemblances, the Sûfîs were not cloistered. They moved in the world and their hospices were open to it. Many Muslims, in the cities and villages, participated in their rites without becoming fulltime members of the order. The powerful Naqshbandî, Khwâja ‘Ubaydâllah Ahrâr, became an advisor to Timurid sultans. His surviving letters are an interesting mix of pieties and concrete “supplications” to assist their bearers. The Khwâja’s word carried great weight.

  Like the Chinggisids in China, the Timurids developed an effective system of tax collection and other forms of more centralized rule, which alienated the nomads. They retreated to the steppes, reformed, and returned in large, powerful confederations—ultimately to the detriment of the Timurids. In Europe, a new interest in sea power developed as a way around the turbulence of Timurid Central Asia and the increased costs of goods coming via Mamlûk Egypt from the Indian Ocean trade, the hub of much international commerce at that time. The Mamlûk sultan, Barsbay, desperate for revenue, began to heavily tax this transit trade. The Europeans, seeking to bypass this expensive middleman, developed more efficient sea power to gain entry into the Indian Ocean. Ultimately, the shift to maritime routes following Vasco Da Gama’s voyage to India in 1498, affected the economy of Central Asia. The land routes had become too dangerous and costly.

  The Timurid era witnessed the greater integration of the Turks into Transoxiana and the further Turkicization of the non-Turkic population, demographic trends that were already in motion. Some of the Turkic tribesmen began to sedentarize, perhaps under pressure from their Timurid masters. Settled subjects were easier to control. These two processes, the taking up of a settled lifestyle and the use of Turkic speech, put into place some of the major ethnic and linguistic components of the modern Uzbek people.

  Jochid fragmentation equaled that of the Timurids. In 1399, Edigei, previously a general of Toqtamïsh, defeated the latter and his ally, Vytautas (Witold) of Lithuania. Thereafter, he dominated the Golden Horde using various Jochid puppets until 1410. He actively promoted Islam among the nomads in the Qïpchaq steppe—often by force—and proclaimed his descent from Abu Bakr, the first caliph. What was novel here was the attempt to link a respected Islamic lineage with the exercise of political power in the steppe. It did not succeed. In 1419, he perished in an endless swirl of warfare, his body hacked to pieces as an object lesson to non-Chinggisid upstarts. Despite this inglorious end, Edigei’s exploits lived on in legend, becoming part of the oral folk culture of the Tatars, Bashkirs, Qara Qalpaqs, Uzbeks, and the Noghais. The latter people, a Turkicized Mongol tribe, were his core followers. They regrouped and in the fifteenth century, now known as the Noghai Horde, became the throne makers and throne breakers in the politically fragmented Chinggisid lands between western Siberia and the Volga.

  Throne struggles, drought, and plague in the 1420s exacerbated the ongoing disintegration of the Jochid Ulus. It is a murky period, and the surviving historical records are contradictory. Between 1443 and 1466 (even, perhaps, as late as 1502), three new Jochid khanates took shape in the Crimea, at Kazan on the Middle Volga, and at Astrakhan on the lower Volga. A fourth state, the Kasimov khanate, was created on the Oka River with Muscovite aid in 1452. Any Chinggisid descendent had the right to claim to one or another of these khanates. The Noghais, whose military support was critical, were only too happy to profit from the ongoing political turmoil. The Jochid realm had devolved into a series of unstable states.

  Jochid rule over the Volga-Ural region also had ethnic and religious ramifications. The Volga Bulghars blended with the Qïpchaqs and “Tatars” to form the modern Volga Tatar people. Other Bulgharic groupings remained apart from this process, mixed with local Finnic peoples, and did not convert to Islam. They became the ancestors of the modern Chuvash people, some two million today, living next to the Volga Tatars. They are the only people who have preserved the Bulgharo-Turkic language. Notions of a “Bulghar” legacy continue to play a role in defining Chuvash and Volga Tatar identities. Among the Tatars, the Bulghar legacy was associated with Islam.14The neighboring Bashkirs of the Ural region also became Islamic but, in sharp contrast to the overwhelmingly settled and relatively highly urbanized Kazan Tatars with whom they have close linguistic affinities, remained nomadic.

  East of the Volga-Ural zone, in the forest-steppe zone of western Siberia, the Jochid khanate of Sibir, the northernmost Muslim state, arose under obscure circumstances. Led by Ibaq Khan, a descendant of Jochi’s son, Shiban, it emerged as coherent political-military force, often closely associated with the Noghais and hence important in the scramble of Jochid princes seeking to rule the Volga khanates. In 1481, Ibaq Khan and the Noghais pummeled Ahmad, khan of the Golden Horde. Severely weakened and then buffeted by assaults from the Crimean khanate, the Golden Horde blinked out of existence in 1502.

  While the Golden Horde crumbled, new confederations emerged. With Noghai support, the Shibanid Abu’l-Khayr Khan became the dominant force in the western Siberian-Qïpchaq steppes by 1451. His followers, a mix of Qïpchaqs and Turkicized Mongol tribes, call
ed themselves Özbeks, taking the name of the Jochid khan who had converted to Islam. These Özbeks are better known in English by the Russian pronunciation of their name: Uzbek. Abu’l-Khayr Khan’s successful raids into Timurid Transoxiana heightened his authority. His “state” extended from the Ural and Syr Darya Rivers to Lake Balkhash and the Irtysh River. He was a harsh man and his drive for dominion produced challenges from other Jochids and subject tribes, but his undoing came from another quarter: the Oirats, a powerful western Mongolian tribal union.

  The Oirats emerged from the forest margins of the Mongolic world. Their leaders were politically powerful shamans holding the title beki, who early on had formed important marital ties with the Chinggisids. After the collapse of the Yuan dynasty in 1368, most of the Mongols of China returned to Mongolia, where they comprised two large geographical groupings, eastern and western. Organized in tümens, they remained under the control of Chinggisid Great Khans, whose authority waxed and waned in the ever-changing chessboard of Mongol politics. Various khans, including some non-Chinggisids, competed for power. The Oirats, a core element of the western tribes, which sometimes controlled much of Mongolia, eventually became dominant in western Mongolia, Xinjiang, and parts of Siberia to the Irtysh River. The Ming dynasty, hoping to control their turbulent Mongolian borderlands, incited Oirat-Eastern Mongol rivalries.