I entered a house with many chambers; in each chamber were coffers of books piled up one upon another. In one chamber were Arabic books and books of poetry, in another books on law and so on, in each chamber books on one of the sciences. I read a list of books and ancient authors and asked for those I needed. I saw books whose very names are unknown to many people. I have never seen such a collection of books either before or since. I read these books, profited by them, and learned the relative importance of each man in his own science.2
Geographical literature was more highly developed than historical literature in the Samanid kingdom. Balkhi, Istakhri and Ibn Haukal produced a detailed desciption of Transoxania based on first-hand accounts. Makdisi, one of the greatest geographers of all time, also visited the country and ‘his information on the climate, products, trade, currencies, weights and measures, manners, taxes and contributions of each country belongs to the most important data for the history of Eastern Culture’.3
The earliest monographic description of Bukhara comes from the pen of Narshakhi (died 959). Some sixty years later, Idrisi produced a history of Samarkand.
At the Court of the Ghaznavid sultans lived the great Khorezmian scholar al-Biruni (died around 1048), whom Barthold does not hesitate to call ‘perhaps the greatest Muslim scholar’. His special studies were in mathematics and astronomy, but he also wrote historical works. His History of Khorezm has not come down to us, but there was some valuable information about Khorezm in Biruni’s chronological work, published in English in 1879 under the title The Chronology of Ancient Nations. His contemporary was the Persian historian Gardizi whose work includes a chapter on the Turks, one on India, the history of the Caliphs, and that of Khorassan down to the year 1041. A candid picture of court life under the Ghaznavids is presented by the memoirs of Bayhaki (died 1077), which also include a fairly detailed account of external relations. The author was himself for some time in charge of the sultan’s office of diplomatic documents.
So far as is known, there were no compositions written in the eleventh century that can properly be called historical, but some idea of the organisation of the state and general conditions of life at this time is given in The Book on the Administration of the State (Siyasat-namah) by the famous wazir Nizam al-Mulk (died 1092). It deals with the duties of various officials and gives advice on all branches of administration. It is incontestably the chief source for the study of the political structure of the Eastern Muslim states.4
The second half of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries belong on the whole to the darkest pages of Central Asian history. The testimony of sources is contradictory in the extreme and the establishment of chronology presents great difficulties. Yet the events of this period were of marked importance: the decline of the Seljuks, the invasion of the Kara-Khitai, the rise of the Khorezmshahs, and the union under their rule of the whole Eastern Muslim world; the formation of the empire of the Khorezmshahs, to all appearances powerful, but whose internal weakness was speedily revealed at the first serious confrontation with an external foe.5 The history of the Khorezmshahs occupies a considerable part of the work of Juvayni, who wrote in the thirteenth century (died 1283). For the earlier history of Khorezm great importance is attached to the enormous work (eight volumes) of al-Khorezmi (died 1172). This is in a way the only historical information we have of this period although it is supplemented to a limited extent by the accounts of travellers. After the tenth century, Arabic geographical literature was chiefly of a compilatory character. Among the few travellers was a native of Spain, al-Gharnati, who visited the Eastern countries and went as far north as the Volga and Kama Rivers.
An exception here is the work of Yakut (died 1229), author of a well-known geographical dictionary. He collected abundant material, mainly in the libraries of Merv and in his work he enumerates almost all the towns and the more important villages in the Muslim lands. He himself visited Khorezmia but not Transoxania. Yakut also compiled a ‘dictionary of learned men’ containing extracts of many treatises that have been lost.
Juvayni also has a short historical passage on the Kara-Khitai, but this is neither very clear nor accurate. A far better source for this subject is the work of Ibn al-Athir, mentioned earlier. On the other hand, Juvayni’s work deserves full credit for its part devoted to the Mongols down to the reign of Hulagu and the conquest of Baghdad. His superiority over other writers on this subject lies in the fact that he lived at a time when the Mongol Empire was still united. He also visited Turkestan, Mongolia, and Uighuria. He endeavoured to relate the history of the empire as a whole and used for this purpose some oral Mongol narratives, and possibly also some written ones. Other Muslim writers who dealt with the Mongol invasion were Ibn al-Athir, Juzjani, and Nassavi, who wrote a biography of Jalal ad-Din. Their works are far less reliable than Juvayni’s, mainly because they lack first-hand knowledge of the facts in all other parts of the empire but their own.
Among the Chinese travellers of the Mongol period there is the report of Meng Hung, who was sent in 1221, as an envoy by the Sung government, to conclude an alliance with the Mongols against the Jurchat. More interesting, however, is the diary of the Taoist hermit Ch’ang-Ch’un, written by his disciple Li Chechang in 1229 and called The Travels of an Alchemist. Ch’ang-Ch’un was invited to the Court of Chingiz-Khan and followed him as far as Afghanistan. Like the Muslims, the Chinese portray the cruel devastations of the Mongols in vivid colours; but where the Muslims, with a few exceptions, fail because of religious fanaticism to observe the features by which the nomads were favourably distinguished from the settled population, Chinese were often attracted by the simplicity of nomadic manners and, like Meng Hung, praised the unspoiled customs of antiquity that prevailed among them.
A valuable source of information on Mongol habits and traditions, in addition to the history of Chingiz-Khan’s campaigns, is the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, written in Uighur in 1240 and preserved in Chinese translation and transcript. The events are unfortunately not recorded by years and the chronology is very vague and confused. There are also many mythical elements in this history that make the whole work look more like a heroic epic. An official history of the Mongols was written in China early in the fourteenth century and after the fall of the Yuan dynasty the history of the Mongols was compiled under the title Yuan-shi.
The chief source of Mongol history in Persia is Rashid ad-Din (late thirteenth–early fourteenth centuries), who was wazir to the Mongol khan in Persia and was entrusted by him to write a history of the Mongol Empire and, further, a history of all nations that had come into contact with the Mongols. The work took the form of a vast historical encyclopaedia, such as no single people possessed in the Middle Ages, either in Asia or in Europe. The very possibility of the creation of such a work with the assistance of learned men of all nations shows what might have been the results, under more favourable conditions, of the Mongol invasion, which had connected the most distant civilised peoples with one another.6 Rashid ad-Din himself translated all his Persian works into Arabic and all Arabic into Persian, and arranged for copies of them to be made annually, but he was executed in 1318 and a part of his work was lost.
Among the European reports on the Mongol invasion, we have already mentioned John de Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck (above). Carpini, who was 65 at the time of his journey was obviously an experienced diplomat with a thorough knowledge of military affairs. The bulk of his report is in fact an attempt to produce a critical – we may even say scientific – assessment of the Mongols, their government and organisation, religion and laws, strategy and arms, and, of course, the history of their campaigns and the means of possible defence against them. Rubruck’s report is a personal account of his journey, full of interesting observations on languages, religious rites, trade etc. He was obviously well versed in geography, and as far as history is concerned, he is more critical and reliable than Carpini.
There were other contacts as well: the
two Franciscans Lawrence of Portugal and Anselm (Ascelin), who were dispatched by Pope Innocent IV to the Mongol commanders in the Caucasus and André de Longjumeau, who was sent by St Louis in 1249 to the Mongols, but only got as far as the Talas. The Russians and the Armenians had frequent contacts with them and the most valuable source here is the chronicle of the Armenian king Hethum (Haythum). A few decades later came the famous journeys of the Venetian merchants, the Polos – first that of Niccolo and Matteo to Karakorum and, after that, Marco polo’s epic journey to China.
Among the fourteenth-century sources, the work of Kazvini, written in the 1330s, consists of both geographical and historical treatises. It is an important source of information for the administrative and fiscal division of Persia and, for the linguists, it offers some very rare information on the Mongol language; in the cosmographical section the names of various animals are given in Persian, Turkish, and Mongol.
The history of Transoxania was unfortunately recorded even less than that of Persia. Political disturbances among the Chagatayids did not favour the development of science and literature. Besides, Persian culture did not even attain complete supremacy there. The Uighur alphabet was widely used as well as the Arabic. There were Uighur scribes even at the Court of the Timurids down to the last representative of that dynasty. There were definitely some Uighur writings, but there is no evidence of a single literary composition in either Arabic or Persian written at the behest of any Chagatay khan.7 So we have for the first half of the century only a traveller’s report, the narrative of Ibn Battuta, the famous sheikh of Tangier, who crossed Central Asia on his way from the Volga to India. We find in Juvayni an angry comment on the preponderance of Uighur writing over Persian in Khorassan: ‘All educated people perished, were exterminated, and nobodies who replace them know nothing but to speak and write in Uighur’.8
In 1425 a history of Timur’s campaign was written in Persia by Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi, called The Book of Victory (Zafar-namah). The same title, devised by Timur himself, had already been used by Nizam ad-Din Shami for his own book written in Timur’s lifetime (1403–4), but Sharaf ad-Din also made use of the Uighur verse-chronicle of Timur’s campaigns, which Nizam ad-Din did not. This chronicle did not survive in its original form. Nizam was a scholar from Tabriz who was in Baghdad in 1393 when the city surrendered to Timur. He was among the first to pay homage to the conqueror. He was in Aleppo during the Syrian campaign, and the following year was summoned to Timur and asked to write a history of his reign. He completed his work and presented it to Timur in the spring of 1404, before the Court returned to Samarkand.9 Sharaf was one of the scholars who received patronage at the Court of Shah Rukh. His work, based on a collection of records and eyewitness accounts, was regarded as a model of literacy and historical composition, and is one of the most useful and comprehensive court histories.
A world history called The Cream of Chronicles was composed in 1423–24 by Hafiz-i Abru, a scholar at Timur’s Court and later Shah Rukh’s court historian in Herat. Further works originated in Herat include The History of Mawarannahr and Persia by Abdar-Razzak Samarkandi and, somewhat later, a world history called The Garden of Purity by Mirkhond. All these works were of an official or semi-official character and all include, to a greater or lesser degree, flattery of patrons. Similarly tendentious are the histories of hostile scholars, especially from the countries overrun in the Syrian and Turkish campaigns of Timur. The most important hostile source is that of Ibn Arabshah, who was taken captive as a boy in Damascus and carried off to Samarkand. He later studied and travelled widely, and died in Cairo in 1450. His history is rich in evidence, especially relating to the later part of Timur’s life and events following his death. Despite its bitterness, Arabshah’s work contains much sober commentary.10
Among the travellers of this era we have already mentioned Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, whose report is by far the most important and impartial. A completely different matter is the story of Schiltberger of Bavaria. He started out as a squire on a crusade, was captured at Nicopolis, and became slave to the Ottoman sultan Bayezid. After the defeat at Angora, he became captive to Timur, survived him and lived to serve his son and grandsons. Finally he escaped and made his return to Bavaria. His story is subjective but important, written from an entirely different viewpoint to that of the court historian.11 The next traveller of importance comes only 150 years later. He is Anthony Jenkinson, an Elizabethan merchant and sailor who was probably the first Englishman to enter Bukhara (1558), after a journey from London to the White Sea, to Moscow, and down the Volga into the Caspian. We may conclude this survey by mentioning another Englishman, Alexander Burnes, who almost three centuries later arrived in Bukhara from the opposite direction, from India and Afghanistan, in 1832.12
* * *
NOTES ON CHAPTER V
Full details of abbreviations and publications are in the Bibliography
1 Barthold, Turkestan, pp.1–58.
2 Quoted by Barthold in Turkestan, pp.9–10.
3 Quoted by Barthold in Turkestan, p.11.
4 Barthold, Turkestan, p.25.
5 Barthold, Turkestan, p.31.
6 Barthold, Turkestan, p.46.
7 Barthold, Turkestan, p.51.
8 Grousset, L’Empire, p.425.
9 Hookham, Tamburlaine, p.319.
10 Hookham, Tamburlaine, p.320.
11 Hookham, Tamburlaine, p.321.
12 More information about Chinese, Tibetan and other Oriental sources can be found in Beckwith, C., The Empires of the Silk Road, Princeton, 2009.
17 Mausoleum of Pahlavan Mahmud, Khiva
18 Mosque Hazret-i Hizr, Samarkand
19 Mosque Bibi Khanum, Samarkand. Main iwan
20 Madrasa Ulug Beg, Samarkand (detail)
21 Shah-i Zinda, Samarkand
22 Mausoleum Chashma Ayub, Bukhara
23 Tash Hauli Palace, Khiva
PART II
CENTRAL ASIA
Fig. 5 Khorezm
VI
KHOREZM
Geographically, the oasis of Khorezm lies east and south of the Aral Sea, on both sides of the lower reaches of the Oxus (Amu Darya), and round its delta estuary. It also comprises the formerly inhabited areas between the Amu and the Syr Darya as well as the southern part of the arid plateau Ust-Urt, south-west of the Aral Sea.
Politically, it is now divided between Uzbekistan and its Karakalpak Region and Turkmenistan’s Region of Tashauz. The present frontier line between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan cuts the Khorezm territory in two unequal parts, leaving the monuments of Kunya Urgench on the territory of Turkmenistan. By road, the border crossing is between Urgench and Tashauz. Air connection is available from Tashauz to Ashkhabat across the Kara Kum desert.
The western, Karakalpak, part, is centred around the capital, Nukus, which has a scheduled air service to Tashkent. The same applies to Urgench, in the eastern part. A railway line runs along the Amu Darya, from Chardzhou to Khodzheili in the delta, and provides a direct link with Bukhara, Samarkand and Tashkent. In Chardzhou, where the line crosses the river, it meets the Transcaspian line to Ashkhabad and Krasnovodsk on the eastern coast of the Caspian. Recent rail links connect Khodzheili with the Volga region of Russia and Chardzhou via Mary with Mashad in Iran.
Throughout its long history Khorezm was an isolated oasis accessible only by long and hazardous caravan routes across the formidable deserts Kara Kum and Kyzyl Kum (Black and Red Sands), or across the equally dangerous, lifeless plateau Ust-Urt. This was why the course of events here frequently ran separately from the mainstream of history, and it will therefore be necessary to give it a little more attention in this chapter.
It should be emphasised here that owing to a division of labour among Soviet archaeologists, each region was the exclusive domain of one person or one school. No foreign expeditions were permitted. It is extremely difficult to check the views and interpretations of the work carried out in a particular area, For Khorezm, Professor S.P. Tolstov and his
school have thus had a virtual monopoly of access to, and of publication on everything that concerns history – ethnography, archaeology etc. – of this vast and complex sector of Central Asia.
According to Tolstov, in the fourth and third millennia BC the country just east of the Aral Sa was quite different from what it is now. The climate was probably much drier, the Amu and Syr Darya had less water and could not force their way through the hilly region of Sultan Uizdagh to reach the sea. Instead, the whole area between the lower reaches of these two rivers and the hills was probably a vast marshland, interwoven with channels and lakes and covered with reed and jungle forest. Here, on the sandy islets in the marshes and on the dry foothills of the Sultan Uizdagh were the homes of the Neolithic hunters and fishermen whose culture, probably the earliest in the area, Tolstov calls Kelteminar. These hunters and fishermen lived in large houses, some 70ft by 50ft, oval-shaped and built on a skeleton of wooden poles, with walls and roofs of reed. A whole tribal family, between 100 and 200 people, lived in such houses. Similar houses were found in Neolithic layers in southern Xinjiang and, more recently, in western Kazakhstan and in the lower Volga region.
Later, the drain to the Aral basin was established and the marshes and lakes dried up. Ever since then, the agricultural communities that subsequently settled in this area became dependent on artificial irrigation. The network of canals using the water of the Amu Darya shrank and expanded in a way curiously connected with historical events, with the wealth of the country, the growth and decline of the population, the flow of world trade, internal and external security, and other phenomena.
Treasures of the Great Silk Road Page 10